Leaders anywhere and anytime can draw upon two types of power, namely, positional and personal. Positional power, as the name implies, comes with the title or rank and the position. Position affords at least a degree of legitimacy and access to various rewards and punishments as well as information. Vassals bow before kings because the king sits upon a throne, literally and figuratively. A dethroned monarch often lacks both a throne and as a head. Followers defer to a country’s president or company’s CEO because of the positions they hold.

Personal power, on the other hand, flows from one’s expertise and appeal. Over time, all leaders benefit from developing and drawing on personal power as often as possible, especially in routine tasks. They benefit because, day to day, followers prefer it; they find the exercise of such power less irritating. Whitewater makes personal power more important in part because positions change rapidly. Temporary, ad hoc team members frequently offer a leader far less positional power than ocean liner crews provide their designated leaders.

Even a leader vested with positional power should seek to migrate to personal power as rapidly as possible. Chaotic environments make this all the more important. The story of Wagner Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, recounted powerfully in Michael Useem’s The Leadership Moment, tragically illustrates the dangers of a leader trying to exercise positional power in the absence of personal power.^[1] Wagner Dodge led an ad hoc team of fire fighters into the wilderness. Dodge had positional power. He also had a wealth of experience, a potential source of personal power. A man of few words, he chose not to spend time sharing this experience with his men, many of whom he met for the first time as they set out. He had time before boarding the transport plane, on the plane, or on the ground after arrival to connect with his temporary, young, and inexperienced charges. He chose not to discover their expertise or to disclose his own. He failed to demonstrate his experience to these followers, and so failed to build the positional power that later he might have used to good effect.

Reality quickly overpowered planning. Things fell apart. The men found themselves in a futile race to outrun the fire that they had come to fight. In full flight, Wagner Dodge invented a new technique, an escape fire, a brilliant innovation that saved his own life. It could have saved his entire crew but they wouldn’t follow him into it. He lit a fire and jumped in the midst of the ground it cleared. They had never seen or heard of this technique before because Dodge had just invented it, and they didn’t trust him. They thought him crazy. One declared, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here!” Thirteen of the fifteen team members who rushed by their leader burned to death. Dodge and two others survived. Rank and position can mean little when making split-second, life and death decisions. In the crisis, Dodge didn’t have the personal power he needed.

Permanent whitewater more often throws more crises at individuals and teams than do more stable environments. Hence, developing personal power takes on even greater importance. The leader of the team decides when to start, where to stop for lunch, where to take out, where to camp, and how to pace the journey if it is a multiday trip. The handling of these tasks provides the opportunity to move beyond limited positional power to personal power, the power needed in an emergency.

Leaders can gain personal power by building skills in all the areas discussed in the preceding chapters of the book, including creativity and optimism. The stark reality for leaders in permanent whitewater boils down to the following: A leader of a temporary group facing whitewater needs to develop personal power to lead effectively. Recall the tale in Chapter 6, “Scouting and Portaging: Set Your Own Course,” of Lewis and Clark at the juncture of the Maria and Missouri rivers. Lewis and Clark had positional power, albeit somewhat limited by their circumstance. Their commitment to developing and using personal power prior to as well as in that moment helped both them and their followers to navigate a fundamental disagreement about—literally, which way to go.

The tale of a new commander at a fire base in the middle of nowhere during the Vietnam War offers a poignant example of what can happen if leaders facing prolonged demanding times do not go beyond positional power. In the midst of North Vietnamese troops, the base faced constant threat, held at bay only by a defensible location, the vigilance of its occupants, and the protection of American air and artillery. Two problems persisted: snipers and water. Regarding the snipers, the troopers kept their own on watch to dissuade enemy snipers. Soldiers demurred from saluting officers to avoid disclosing such prime targets. As for water, no location proves perfect, and this location, while defensible, offered limited fresh water. Hence, the defenders journeyed to the river as needed, but anyone making that trip became much more vulnerable to attack.

Accordingly, the American troops took actions to limit consumption of water. They shaved every few days rather than every day. They wore sandals rather than combat boots and cut off the trousers of their fatigues to allow easier inspection for jungle rot and thereby less bathing. Consuming less water meant less risk for base occupants, however “irregular” they appeared.

A new commander arrived and promptly used positional power to enforce Army rules and regulations. Troops were to shave daily and only wear official Army clothing, no more sandals and no more field capris. Soldiers attempted for a week to educate the colonel about the error of his ways. They failed to convince him. They then went by the book and only by the book, including saluting their CO unfailingly, in plain sight of the snipers. In fact, soldiers went out of their way to find him and salute. Another week or so passed and a terrorized and twitching colonel boarded a helicopter never to return. He had positional power and tried to assert it in the absence of personal power. Surrounded by a truly hostile environment, rife with snipers, he quickly learned the liability of relying so heavily on positional power.

Leaders need to build trust quickly. Greg recalls a scene on a dory trip down the Grand Canyon where one of the junior members of the expedition staff capsized a raft in a major rapid. Other voyagers watched from dories up- and downriver. All strained to determine the state of the former occupants of the raft and what needed doing next. Was the dot pinned next to the boulder human or flotsam? Above the roar of the river, people “dialogued.” Actually, they shouted at one another. It takes a certain level of trust to engage in such heated argument, especially for people who, as absolute strangers, had met but a few days before. Now, they debated what they saw and what to do—heatedly. They needed to do so, and the people in the river needed them to get it right and fast.

In more stable times, such trust flowed more easily. At the Henry Ford museum, regular demonstrations of the early days of baseball (pre-1900) reveal how much our whitewater world differs from the more genteel world of more than a century ago. The old game had only one umpire in contrast to four today. This meant that even the sharpest umpire would miss a lot, so umpires had to trust players. On a close play, the umpire would ask the player, “Sir, on your honor as a gentleman were you out or safe?” All present expected an honest report, whether the gentleman in question benefited from the honesty or not. Our permanent whitewater world changes too quickly for position and formality to cover all or even most exigencies. Relationships need to carry the day. Relationships turn on trust, and in whitewater, trust needs to form quickly.

We live in a paradoxical time. People increasingly depend more on ever more transitory team relationships. We assemble temporarily and work intensely, but for a short period of time. Like paddlers on a river, we depend on each other for safe transit even though we might have only recently met. As the authors of Primal Leadership write, “In an era when more and more work is done long distance—by e-mail or by phone—relationship building, paradoxically, becomes more crucial than ever.”^[2] Trust is more important, but it takes more effort and attention to build it. Building trust is one of the central tasks of leaders in creating and leading teams.

A person might lead for a trip, a task, a day, or a moment. Regardless, a new river and a new team may well present different challenges and require still different adaptation. Given these fluid roles, leaders develop finely tuned signals to enable followers to step up or to line up as appropriate to the task at hand. Enabling followers can turn on a leader’s technique. For example, a leader can ask for input from the youngest, most junior person in the room to encourage participation, participation not constrained by hearing one’s senior speak first. Similarly, leaders can signal that they want a flatter, blunter communication by their language. For example, a military leader might signal this openness by using a soldier’s first name. The officer then signals a return to a hierarchical relationship by thanking the soldier for the comments. If the soldier doesn’t take the cue, then the officer may thank the soldier again but more formally, reverting to calling the soldier by formal rank, such as “Thank you, Corporal Smith.” Finally, if necessary, the officer will state, “We are done here, Corporal.”

Any such technique requires at least two ingredients. First, the leader must succeed in conveying the personal legitimacy of the request. Restated, the follower must feel a certain humility from the leader, the humility that lends credibility to the request. The follower must feel that the leader believes that the follower can lead him or her to a better understanding or course of action. Second, the formal leader must honor the bluntness.

Role of the Trip Leader

Among the roles of trip leaders on whitewater trips are:

• Identifying the right people and drawing them together for the run. Do the members have the right skills for the level of challenge in the environment? Is there a good mix of different experience levels and skills?

• Organizing the trip, deciding where to put in and take out, and the plan of travel, recognizing that this plan will change.

• Ensuring the safety of the party. The trip leader has responsibility for the safety of the group. This means understanding the potential hazards, providing rescue equipment, and ensuring that members who are new to this river know what is coming ahead.

• Defining the line. The trip leader will often define a clear passage through a rapid that others can follow (or sometimes designate someone else to lead the way). This doesn’t mean that every member of the party will follow this exact line, and their experiences along the way can differ significantly. One may have a smooth passage while the next one following the same line may navigate the entire rapid upside down.

Similarly, in organizations, team leaders need to determine the composition of the team, organize the tasks and deadlines, and look out for the party along the way to protect them from organizational demands that might undermine the team. Leaders need to work without adequate formal authority, defining the line but not dictating it.

People in our culture often virulently resist the tag of “follower” because they see it as a passive role. During a discussion of followership with a senior management team, a CFO interrupted forcefully to declare, “We are not sheep.” He saw followers as sheep. As a people, we subscribe to the philosophy that the view only changes for the lead sled dog. Or, in the words of fictional race car driver Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights, “If you’re not first, you’re last.” Followers in permanent whitewater are not sheep—far from it. Indeed, they cannot afford to be. They are simultaneously followers and adventurers, partners in the journey, and essential team members, struggling together through a wilderness. Followers in permanent whitewater make a conscious choice to follow. Organizations change, but individuals also make their own career changes that take them out of a particular organization or away from a particular leader.

The leader therefore needs to keep at least three points firmly in mind. First, do not try to lead without followers. If so tempted, however, think of the colonel at the fire base surrounded by snipers. If your followers do not protect your position as leader by watching your back, then you won’t last long. Second, recognize that skilled followers literally run the place. Without Radar, the medical camp in M*A*S*H would have fallen apart. Third, the line separating follower from leader often blurs, especially in turbulent environments. The best followers can and do rise to the challenge of leadership, and the best leaders demonstrate the capacity to follow.

An able leader in permanent whitewater builds adaptability into a team. An adaptable team contains a number of people capable of leading if called on to do so. Kenneth Chenault, CEO of American Express said, “Anyone at any level can be a leader...can define reality and give hope.”^[3] We lead ourselves or we lead no one, and kayaking requires large quantities of individual self-leadership. Who follows and who leads may well need to shift depending on the situation at the moment.

A whitewater river often demands that followers lead not just themselves but others. Perhaps the group separates or the leader must concentrate on a rescue. In such times, sheep don’t cut it. You want people who can step forward and lead. Frank Wild was a dedicated and dependable second in command to Ernest Shackleton on the Endurance expedition. But when Shackleton took a handful of expedition members off for months in search of rescue he left most of the party on Elephant Island in Wild’s hands. Wild led them through months of isolated, cold, and hungry waiting.

When Shackleton selected men to join his expedition, he started with a core—aides to trust such as Wild. Wild, a longtime protégé, confidante, and eventual alter ego, then handled hiring for the expedition. He separated the applications into three stacks: mad, hopeless, and possible. The “possibles” met with Sir Ernest and experienced his intense, unique, and easily off-putting interviews, but only after Wild, Shackleton’s trusted lieutenant, forwarded them. Shackleton then looked for hardiness and optimism, but he followed Wild’s lead in whom to consider.

Famed polar explorer Roald Amundsen similarly depended on Oscar Wisting. Over 16 years the two journeyed together, literally to the ends of the earth. (The two men shared the unique distinction of reaching both the North and South Poles.) Wisting repeatedly proved an indispensible team member, in part because of his ability to step forward into a wide variety of roles, including dentist, dog sledder, and ship’s captain. When Amundsen abandoned his multiyear Arctic expedition on the Maud midway through to pursue aviation, he left Wisting in charge of completing the mission. Wisting proved more than up to the task. Wild and Wisting were dedicated followers, but when the moment called for it, they stepped forward to lead ably.

Leading starts with selecting the group for the run. Often, the issue does not come down to finding the willing, but rather sorting through the willing to find the able and, frankly, the desirable. Few of us would choose to spend time continually rescuing someone or wincing whenever one or more fellow travelers came into view. Hence, staffing this ad hoc, temporary group influences heavily the success and nature of the trip for you and for others. What combination of strengths and weaknesses should the group possess to make likely a successful, safe, and, yes, fun run?

Leading means finding that right combination of people for the task at hand and pushing back, even refusing to travel if the group seems unfit. Otherwise, the work will suffer. Well being will also suffer—yours and others’. Finally, your reputation will suffer, and in an ad hoc, network-based world, your reputation amounts, as noted earlier, to your lifeline.

As discussed in Chapter 8, “Building Flocks: Teaming for Today’s Run,” choosing the right team depends on what game you are playing. Playing successful baseball depends especially highly on the quality of the individual players. In fact, in baseball one can predict 80 percent of a team’s performance by knowing individual performance statistics versus about 20 percent for a basketball team. For a leader, this means a special emphasis on procuring the right individuals. The general manager has much more to do with the success of a baseball team, therefore, than does the field manager, and the leader of a whitewater expedition needs to pay especially close attention to the work of a general manager—that is, procuring and retaining top individual performers.

Baseball Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver said that the manager’s job does not center on great game plans, but on picking the right team members. “Everybody knows all the strategies. Nothing’s changed in a hundred years.” Rather, “a manager’s job...is to select the best players for what he wants done.” Weaver, the positional leader on the field, helped the general manager (his boss) to pick the right players, and in baseball, the right players count the most. As he said, “People say I’ve never had to manage a bad team...Well, that’s the point.”^[4] Kayaking and life in the permanent whitewater of today put special emphasis on never having to manage a bad team. Musical scores and playbooks matter and so do team dynamics, but not so much. This is a recital. It’s not orchestra. It’s not jazz. It’s baseball. Take the time to get the staffing right. The leader has no more important job.

The leader’s job does not end with selecting the right players. About a half century ago, the Ohio State studies, one of the first large-scale formal studies of leadership, identified the crucial role that leaders need to play in getting the structure of their teams right. Setting up the right players to play the wrong game or assigning them to the wrong positions can waste their skills. On the other hand, as one of Earl Weaver’s players said of him, “The man’s a genius at finding situations where an average player—like me—can look like a star because a lot of subtle factors are working in your favor.”

Deciding the right size for the team exemplifies one such ongoing choice for a leader. Situational demands may require splitting a larger group into smaller groups of six to ten people. Perhaps the river makes even loose, baseball coordination of the large group too difficult, or perhaps junior members have demonstrated sufficient skill to warrant expanded responsibilities, or the leader needs to free him- or herself of the group to scout ahead. The leader may need to change the game, for the river may require tighter, more coordinated decision making for the sake of safety. The leader needs to set the size of the basic group right for the situation. Leaders may need to split the group into smaller subgroups along the way. Splitting a group on the river parallels splitting a group in organizational whitewater—split along the right lines or pay the price.

On the river, decision rules include the right mix of experienced and inexperienced paddlers to protect expedition members, to disseminate skills, or to honor personal style such as different paddling speeds. One group might like to take long, luxurious runs while another prefers to barrel down to the next takeout point. Separating kayakers based on preference ensures that they don’t unnecessarily irritate one another from dawn to dusk. Assembling and reassembling teams requires attention to the river and to team members.