Onward and upward together

Instead of going to the library for our next Town Council retreat, perhaps we could go to Africa and climb Mt. Kilimanjaro together.

Business leaders talk about the benefits mountain climbing can have for team building; mountain climbers talk about the necessity of having a strong-functioning team before you set off up the trail. One climber and business expert described the group dynamic of a mountain-climbing expedition thusly: “You’re coming together with people you don’t know in a high-risk environment. You want to achieve this extraordinary thing, and you have to work together to do it.”

If that doesn’t describe Town Council working to select a new town manager, I don’t know what does.

Team building is very different from “liking” one another. The team’s goal is to find the best resolution to a problem. Effective teams are able to work together to come up with and evaluate solutions regardless of what their BFF thinks or whether they ultimately side with “the opposition.”

In mountain climbing, and town counciling, you have to rely on your teammates for your group to be successful. It requires a balance of leadership and teamwork. Many of us on council like to think of ourselves as leaders, but council will fail if we don’t also learn to become good teammates.

Mountain climbers I know say you have to climb three times to get all the way to the summit. Your body has to get acclimatized to the thin air and produce more red blood cells to compensate for the lower oxygen at greater heights. First, you go part way up and back to basecamp, then farther up on the second trip, and finally all the way to the top on the third time.

That is not meant to be an analogy for selecting a new town manager. (We’ve narrowed the field to three outstanding candidates.) Our goal is to be able to make an announcement at our last council meeting, on June 27. We’re near enough to the summit that I think we’ll make it.

Although that mountain will be behind us by the time we plan our next retreat, more challenges lay ahead. Working with a new manager, we hope to make some changes in the way we do things, such as finding a way to shorten our lengthy weekly meetings. And realistically, we have to brace for some staff changes as people who may have turned down other opportunities in order to continue working with our current manager look at what else is out there.

There’s no question change involves angst and readjustment. An entire field called “change management” has sprung up because, universally, change is hard.

Climbers say if you keep climbing, the mountains get bigger. The need for strong-functioning teams becomes more imperative. And the views and the accomplishments get better and better.
— Nancy Oates