It's Scarier From the Bottom

Elevation Gain | Post 2 of 6

There's a castle above Riva del Garda, and a tiny church above the castle, and from the bottom of the trail they look like a dare.

I don't mind climbs. I mind heights. More precisely, I mind feeling scared, and standing at the trailhead looking up at buildings stacked on a cliff face, this hike looked like it was going to deliver scared in bulk.

I went anyway.

Switchbacks. That's it. That's the reveal.

Not flat. My legs had opinions. But the vertical wall I'd assessed from the bottom turned out to be a path that folds back on itself, over and over, so that no single stretch asks very much of you. The mountain hadn't changed. My vantage point had.

From below, you see the whole climb at once and your brain renders it as one impossible move. On the trail, you never climb the whole thing at once. Nobody does. You climb the fifty meters to the next turn.

Every leader who just stepped into a senior role is standing where I stood, looking up at the whole job at once.

The board. The budget. The physician who has run the place informally for eleven years. The direct reports who were peers last month. From the bottom, it renders as one impossible move, and the organization tends to agree, because the organization also only sees it from the bottom. "She'll grow into it." Which is a lovely thing to say about a person you've left at the trailhead alone.

Here is what I know from watching a lot of people make this climb. Around month four, the new leader starts to wonder if she was the wrong hire. Around month five, somebody above her quietly wonders the same thing. Both of them are looking at the wall.

Somewhere we absorbed the idea that difficulty is diagnostic. If it's this hard, it must be wrong. Wrong hire, wrong role, wrong time.

Sometimes that's true. Mostly, hard is just what the right climb feels like from the inside, and the actual problem is that she's climbing it without a single person whose job is to walk beside her and say "next turn is fifty meters, and it's not as steep as it looks."

Montana won't let an electrician work alone until she's logged 8,000 supervised hours. It's in statute. Nobody argues about it. Then we promote a director, hand her every problem in the building, and call the absence of support "trust."

Not to descend. To look.

Halfway up, I stopped on a switchback and looked back at the lake. The trailhead where I'd stood doing my risk assessment was very far away and very small. I'd climbed most of the terrifying part without noticing, one turn at a time.

The leader six months into the role has done the same. She has a hundred turns behind her. Nobody has pointed at them, because nobody's been walking with her.

If you promoted her, be the one who points.