Nandini Vaidyanathan uses the analogy of a mountain trek to draw comparisons with the corporate world
We just did a very arduous 15 km day trek in Uttarakhand. Every trek teaches you unbelievable lessons. So did this one. What surprises me is that each trek teaches you new lessons along with reiterating old ones.
We have been hiking since December last year in this region with a company called Trailhikers, founded by a young entrepreneur called Raman. This is our third trek with this company in the last six months and we have had Manish as our guide all the time.
We started our trek at 8.30 am from Char Dukan in Landour which is at 3000 meters. It was called Kolti Village trek. The idea was to trek down to Kolti Village for 9 kms to climb down to 1000 meters and then trek up to Jabarkhet for another 6 kms to 2000 meters, where the trek would end. We were told it was about 10-12 km in total and that it was easy to moderate in difficulty, and it would take about 7 hours to complete.
I have been hiking since 2011. And one thing I have realised is, most distances, difficulty levels and time taken on mountain trails are highly suspect. By and large, it is only a guesstimation. The fact also is 10 kms on a mountain trail is a far cry from an urban road and everything is amplified to make the journey sigma challenging.
What made this a murderous trail? Imagine this.
• The first 9 kms going downhill to Village Kolti was acutely steep and it was on a scree slope. This is a trek term to indicate a trail covered with small loose gravel stones which have been pried out of their mud because of rain, wind, and vegetation. This is extremely dangerous because even with the best hiking shoes, it is very easy to lose your foothold and get tossed into the valley below.
• The next 6 kms going up to Jabarkhet was narrow, slushy and steep and maintaining grip on the decaying leaves exhausted us.
• Add to this incessant rain throughout the hike, making the slopes even more slippery.
• The decaying vegetation bred millions of leeches. Every step we took was an open invitation to them to invade our bodies and suck our blood.
• Because of the leeches, we could not stop anywhere on the trail even to catch our breaths! So much so, we wore ourselves out and took longer to complete the trek.
• And then, because we took longer, we were seriously worried about how we were going to complete the trek as it became nightfall!
So what were our lessons from this trek? And how can we migrate them to the corporate world?
1. Understand implication: We all knew we were trekking during monsoons. We even went prepared for the rains by carrying raincoats. What none of us factored and no one flagged was, that, during monsoons, firstly, we should also expect leeches, and secondly that this region is known as ‘leech country’! We learned of both in hindsight after we were covered with over a hundred leeches and were a bloody mess! Had we known this, we would have carried suitable gear to protect our limbs from becoming leech-fodder!
Corporate leaders are smart enough to read the portent signs but it is not enough unless they deduce the significance of all the implications of these signs, especially looking for all things that could derail the organisation!
2. Ask, ask, ask: We should have asked for facts about what made this trail treacherous before we started the trek. If we had known all the challenges that we were likely to face beforehand, we would have been physically, gear-wise and emotionally better prepared.
Corporate leaders are excellent in planning for googlies based on available information from experts. It all happens at a 30,000 ft worldview. Minute details at the ground level are neither given nor asked for! It therefore turns expensive for the organisation when decisions are based on such worldviews. Use the famed Socratean method to prepare yourself!
3. Pray the guy is carrying salt: What saved the day for us, notwithstanding the murderous trail, rain, and leeches was that our guide Manish, carried in his backpack, both salt and Dettol. The salt was necessary to remove the leeches embedded in your skin. Dettol was needed to douse the leeches after removing to kill them. For Manish, his SoPs were clear. Trek in monsoon means leech, leech means salt and Dettol in backpack!
Your guys on the street, like Manish, should be process oriented.
Corporate leaders should focus on not only hiring smart feet-on-street but on making them internalise that not only following SoPs is their only ticket to success, but breaching them is not an option at all! Most teams on the ground have such low self-esteem that they don’t consider their jobs significant enough to make or break an organisation. They need to be shown how invaluable they are.
4. Don’t let your past bias you: Most of us on the trek were South Indians and where we come from; the leeches are huge and look like overgrown caterpillars.The leeches here looked like earthworms. So till they had gotten into our blood stream none of us realised that we were covered with leeches!
The biggest challenge of a corporate leader is to overcome both personal and professional bias and make a decision about people and situations objectively. The ability to shed bias of all kinds is what makes the difference between a good leader and bad.
I started trekking in the December of my life. I feel bad at times that I missed out on these phenomenal lessons during my corporate career
The columnist is co-founder of bakery and restaurant business (www.concoctions.fr) with her French Michelin-star chef life partner. Email: nandini@carmaconnect.in
