Summit Fever describes the elated, disoriented and sometimes dangerous mental state that climbers can find themselves.
Summit fever not only develops in mountain adventurers but in boardrooms too. Mountaineers and leaders share many of the same traits. Both are experts in the field and aware of the risks and the consequences of failure. Well, at least they are supposed to be.
You know that feeling where you have set aside your whole life for something, working night and day, living and breathing its entirety. You have placed every ounce of energy and strength into achieving a single goal.
You become so hyper focused, important features may not be met like ethical behaviour and company reputation. Among other things like:
- Too narrow, which leads to neglect of other important qualities of performance
- Too unrealistic, leads to taking unacceptable risks and engaging in unethical behaviours
- Too short- term, which leads to neglect of longer term aspects of performance
It’s important to think about what are you willing to give up for you to reach this goal and would giving up everything be worth it? What if there was no one there to share it with or it meant losing your health or emotional stability?
Famous Everest mountaineer and explorer Sir Edmund Hillary said “I personally have found it equally important to get back down the mountain alive.”
To keep the project alive, it's important to remember you need to be able to see it through to the very end- intact with no casualties. This might mean you have to stop and take stock. I know you can struggle with turning around, making you feel down right awful, like you have failed, you weren’t strong enough, or you made poor planning decisions. It’s important to remember successful people are smart enough to pin point the right time to regroup.
You need to understand success.
If you were running a marathon where you pushed yourself so hard you were never able to run again but you won the race. Who really wins?
If you simply define success by making it to the summit of your mountain, then you won’t need to pack extra oxygen tanks for the trek back down. It’s critical to empathise the balance required for you to find success. Climbing your own ‘mountain’ you want to avoid the urge to reach your goal at any expense to yourself and others.
Have a think about these five factors and consider how you might define success for your mountain:
Professional
Personal
Financial
Physical
Spiritual
Your definition will continue to be dynamic and change as you evolve and grow. Once you have defined your success it’s important that you remain open-minded. What works today may not work tomorrow. When you’re able to merge these different factors and types of information, you can begin to shape a route that will work best for you.
Great leaders can also sense when target fixation is sweeping over the team and intervene with a different angle. This can be managed by implementing regular process meetings devoted to evaluating the project, and physical and emotional health of the group.
Never feel the need to justify reevaluation.
Sometimes organisations and teams can be gripped by summit fever as they get closer and closer to their desired objective and lose sight of their core purpose and focus. The project is literally pushed to its death.
Evaluate your situation using past experiences, judgement and common sense. No need to make excuses. As a leader it’s your job to ensure that other members of the group are equipped with the right knowledge and the team’s frame of mind is in check. Leaders need to be aware of this threat and build insurances to guarantee that they maintain a sense of perspective and recognise when it’s time reassess.
Summit fever is impacted by greed, desire and need. Managing this psychological state is vital for a leader to keep a clear mind, a strong team and maintain rational over projects.
Emma Read, Pop Media Consulting
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