The Hiker and the Guide
Two teams looked equally strong until a crisis exposed what their leaders had built in the quiet months.
Daniel and Elena are fictional. Names and incident details are invented; the leadership pattern reflects situations Teofil has observed.
The setup
I have worked with leaders who built their careers by using other people, and I have seen what happens to their teams when the pressure comes. The names and details here are fictional. The pattern is not.
Two teams in the same company: similar size, the same targets, the same department head. Daniel led the first. Strong results, polished presentations, a promotion rumor almost every quarter. Elena led the second. Results just as good, with less noise around them.
From the outside, you could not tell them apart. Both delivered. Both were praised. Quiet months hide leadership: in peacetime, a hiker and a guide can produce the same dashboard.
What the first team learned, week after week
Nothing Daniel did was dramatic, which is why nobody named it. When a release went well, he presented it. When it went badly, an engineer's name appeared in the postmortem. Decisions arrived as announcements; nobody knew why priorities changed on Wednesday, only that they had changed.
A developer who raised a risk was told to come back with a solution next time. Soon, nobody raised risks. Daniel did not really know what his team did. He knew what they reported.
The team was not disloyal. It was learning the culture from decisions, not from presentations.
The first crisis
In the eighth month, a failed release took down a client reporting system for two days, right before the contract renewal. Daniel spent the day on calls with senior management. What reached the team came in fragments.
People started protecting themselves: screenshots of old messages, emails beginning with 'as I mentioned before,' and a quiet refusal to decide anything without written approval. The client did not renew.
Within a month, two of the strongest engineers were interviewing elsewhere. A few months later, Daniel accepted a bigger title at another company and left in the middle of the recovery plan. The team found out in a meeting. Nobody was surprised.
The second crisis
Five months later, Elena's team had a similar incident with a different client. Elena was away that week. By the time she checked her phone, the first update was already there, as information rather than a request for permission.
The team knew it was a Battleship week: coordinate quickly, make clear decisions, pause feature work. They knew who decided what. They also knew what a good week looked like because they had written it down before: inform the client within the hour, prevent a second outage, give an honest timeline.
The client stayed, with a shorter contract and a list of conditions. Not a victory. But the team was still there to meet those conditions. They had all seen what happened to the first team. The difference was months of small decisions that showed them what kind of leader they had.
What Elena had deposited
None of this was improvised during the incident. Elena built it during the quiet months through five habits. Later, I gave each of them a name from Compass.
- Reality Check: every quarter, the team listed what it had actually done over the previous four to six weeks and mapped the work to vessels. One list showed that most energy went into keeping existing systems running, the work of a Cargo Vessel, while the department judged them by new-feature speed, a Fishing Vessel measure.
- Perception Gap: Elena told her department head, 'We work like a Cargo Vessel, but we are judged like a Fishing Vessel.' It was not an excuse. It moved the conversation from 'why are you slow?' to 'what do we protect?' The team heard her say it, and the problem moved from people to context.
- Direction Kill List: she wrote down the directions the team would not pursue that season and why. When a side project arrived, she showed the list. Her boss was unhappy. The team saw her absorb the pressure instead of passing it down.
- Definition of a good period: Elena and the team completed the sentence 'This period is good if ___' before the period started. During the incident, decisions did not have to wait for her.
- End of Period Review: after the incident, her first question was not 'who?' but 'what did our system allow?' The engineer who made the change presented the timeline. The review looked for lessons, not culprits.
The absence test
Elena kept one test for herself: what happens to this team if I disappear for two weeks? If the honest answer is 'it stops,' you are not leading a team. You are the only road in and out.
The hiker and the guide
John C. Maxwell makes a distinction between leading people and merely taking a walk ahead of them. Daniel reached the top; his team was not with him.
Nestle CEO Philipp Navratil has described resilient teams as people working toward a shared purpose, built through transparency and trust before a crisis. Elena could not manufacture that trust in the week of the incident. She had already built it.
A crisis is not a test of the leader. It is an audit of the deposits.
Start this month
You do not need a bigger title to start. You need one deposit this week.
- Week 1: run a Reality Check. List the work your team really did, map it to vessels, and name the dominant one.
- Week 2: write your Perception Gap sentence and say it to the person who judges your team.
- Week 3: write a Direction Kill List with three items and show it to the team.
- Week 4: define the next period together ('This period is good if ___') and close the current one with a review without culprits.
Which deposit will you make first?