180, Different Direction For Leadership

This first blog entry is going to concentrate on l leadership styles and the adventure paradigm. Further ore how as situations change, leadership styles can change. Lewin (1939) identified the three key leadership styles that we still use today, Laissez- faire, democratic and autocratic. These styles go up in scale of group member participation. According to the adventure experience paradigm (Priest 1986) learning will take place in the exploration and experimentation stage or in the adventure stage. Sometimes learning can take place in peak adventure.

During a walk in Snowdonia I was given the role of leading the group up from Idwal Cottage, to Australia lake and then on up Y Gribin onto the Glyders. At the beginning of the walk I adopted a fairly laissez faire approach; allowing the group to make decisions and to pick out a route safely in the experimentation and exploration stage with risk minimal in comparison with competency. At the beginning of the scramble judging the risk I modified my style to autocratic, making all the decisions with no input from the group. Seeing how competently the group handled the early bits of scrambling I then relaxed my leadership style and instigated a democratic style. Letting one of the more confident members of the party pick out the route up Y Gribin only inputting when the route chosen was unsuitable or too difficult for the rest of the group. As Priest (1986) states using the adventure experience paradigm diagram if the competency of the group is high enough then what may be peak adventure for a novice group, may only be adventure for the more competent group.

When we reached the top of the ridge the weather had deteriorated; with high winds, and minimal visibility. At this point the group had slipped; with a couple group members suffering with the cold; into misadventure. Where the risk greatly outweighed the competency of the group.  At this point, I, as group leader should have immediately taken control autocratically and made getting off the mountain in the safest way possible my priority. In reality I stopped in an exposed position at the top of the ridge to take a bearing (a must in these conditions) but saw that the morale and wellbeing of the group was deteriorating and decided against it, determining that the priority was to keep moving.

Eventually despite going 180 degrees in the wrong direction the group and I made it off the hill safely. With the gift of hindsight I can look back on the day and identify one key moment where I could have changed what I did. I should have ensured that I had taken a bearing and done this before hitting the top of the ridge. This would have allowed me to relax my leadership, giving the group more input (democratic) and brought the group back into peak adventure instead of misadventure.  The benefit of writing this blog allows me to self-evaluate and improve for next time.

Image from www.wilderdom.com/philosophy/PriestAdventureExperienceParadigm.html