Chris Hare
speaker
922 appearances
17 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Chris Hare’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think what was meant by this is that you define, your performance is not defined by your best players, it's defined by your weakest players. And in business, this can be a little bit of a trope because our attitude often in the business world is to give people chances and to make sure they perform. But the expedition world, there are no such, there's no such forgiveness.
So I can think of one expedition that I was on, for example. where the expedition leader, who wasn't me, was himself an accomplished explorer, but was not very good at understanding that distinction between your top players and your, I wouldn't say bottom players, but your weaker links.
As an expedition leader, you need to make sure that your top players are humbled and understand that they're only as strongest as their weakest player. And so as an expedition leader, you have really two choices. You can either get rid of your weakest link or you can rein in your top performers. That's really what happens. And by the way,
To be quite honest, by the time that an expedition actually takes place, it's really too late to be making these decisions. They should be made well before you do the expedition itself. And this particular person didn't really understand this concept very well.
And the result was that small discrepancies in the abilities between team members were not managed properly, led to huge discrepancies in morale and expedition success. And on this particular expedition, I think over 70% of the participants ended up dropping out. And they dropped out for health reasons. There were some very close calls. And when I say close call, I mean near death, okay?
This doesn't happen in the business world, but in the expedition world, it definitely does. And just due to low morale, we lost some really great team players. So... There's a sort of like a motto in the startup world, fire fast, hire slow kind of thing. With expeditions, it's very much like this.
If there's an issue, you almost immediately have to try and address it, but you have to address it in a way where you're not just benchmarking everyone against your most capable person. And moreover, what I'll add is I've been on plenty of expeditions where I've You have to be extremely wary of the type of person who is extremely physically confident, mentally competent.
Often these people end up being quite weak in the expedition environments where you operate absolutely as a team. So I guess what I'm saying is that a business is a watered down, in my opinion, a watered down version of an expedition. An expedition is a hyperbolic version of a business. And especially when it comes to thinking about team dynamics. Who's your weakest? Who's your strongest?
How do you get those two? How do you bridge that gap between the two? And because I experienced a few failures in expeditions very early in my life, I think I was able to see the crisis of building a team and how that can win or lose a goal in a sort of high stakes way.
boiler environment and translate that to work i think more recently yeah so in summary when i think about the successes i've had all failures in the world of software it basically comes down to the team
And the realization that, yes, I'm supposed to be really good at what I do, whatever it is that I do in that particular company, but I'm never supposed to be better than any individual who works with me. And as an expedition leader or as a business leader, I'm effectively the secretary for the team.
My job is to check in on everyone, make sure that they're aligned and get rid of any obstacles in their way so that they can do the best jobs possible. which I think is a very different attitude to the sort of gung-ho, lead from the front attitude. Don't get me wrong. I think that's important.
I think leaders demonstrating their commitment to a particular cause, to a business venture, to an expedition, whatever it is, through self-sacrifice, that's key there. It's not necessarily competitive. Although I think competition has a lot of good, a lot of benefits for both business and expeditions, at least in the lead up to them.
It's about being a servant for a team that where each team member in their respective domains is a much better performer than you are and enabling them by guiding the direction of the whole.
Look, I have ego and I failed more than I've succeeded. So I think it's a goal. I don't know if I'm a good leader, but I'm trying to be and introspective about it. I don't think the factor of being a leader is being a servant. There are many cases where you as a leader have to build a kind of myth around yourself. You have to be something that people aspire to be toward or to be like.
You have to demonstrate qualities, the best qualities that maybe they see in themselves. You have to exemplify that. But those qualities don't necessarily mean obviously beating everyone else at their own game. Those qualities could be patience, wisdom, experience, humility, strength, ruthlessness. This is an underrated one, I think.
Every one of your team members trusts you not to make the best decisions for each of them individually, but to make the best decision for the expedition as a whole, right? This is a typical lesson you learn as an expedition leader. You're not there to make everybody individually happy. You're not an adventure tour guide, let alone just a regular tour guide.
You're there to achieve a particular goal. That's what expeditions, that's what sets expeditions apart from tourist holidays, right? They have specific goals, typically scientific goals.
or attainment goals, you try to do something for the first time, and everybody should walk into this experience understanding that they're walking into the unknown, and that ultimately, they're going to have to trust one person who will make decisions, perhaps against your own interests, maybe with you, but incidentally, but overall, contributing to the final goal.
And I think this analogy is particularly important when it comes to low performers in the business world, by the way. Which is that too often I've seen great leaders in every other sense who go this particular person's maybe dragging their feet a bit or is lagging a bit. But you know what?
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