What Military Ice Diving taught me about leadership.
You’re trapped under a foot thick sheet of ice and you put yourself here on purpose. Your lifeline and communications are gone. You look left — you see ice…you look right — you see ice…you see air bubble “mirages” that mimic the opening of the exit hole, but it’s not there…everything looks the same…you panic, you breathe faster, you lose more air…and come to grips with your fate…
This is the worst case scenario and why we’re here. To prevent this.
It’s -10°F on a snowy, ice covered lake on a mountain in British Columbia, Canada. The sun is shining bright and the 4,000' altitude air is crisp to breathe. We’ve just cut a 6x6' triangle in the foot-thick ice and the large blocks of ice we removed are off to the side of the triangle opening, showing off their green, icy hue. We’re training to dive and survive worst-case scenarios in these icy waters, as the polar regions are becoming a national priority for mostly all major countries.
Gear is meticulously prepped to ensure all gages are within the specified ranges, all communications are working, and nothing is frozen over. Lifelines are secured to the ice using ice screws to ensure no one is lost under the ice, the absolute worst-case scenario. Becoming lost under the ice with no lifeline and no access to the surface is something straight out of a scary movie, and all care is taken to ensure this doesn’t happen. The divers put on their all-encapsulating dry suits, to keep the 28°F hypothermia-inducing water away from their bodies. Underneath the dry suits are multiple layers, each with different properties to stave off the cold. After all divers are ready, more gear checks are done.
“ON THE SIDE, Chief Foucha has the side!” — The motivated team of Divers repeat the call back, echoing the phrase in unison, ensuring all within an earshot is aware of the command. As the diver trainees sit near the edge of the ice entry point, a large triangle hole separating the frigid underwater abyss from the ice-covered surface, each piece of gear is checked in a calculated, military manner that all members of the armed forces can appreciate. When you check things in the same way, every time, when something isn’t right it sticks out like a sore thumb. Repetition and rehearsal are key, and this keep the team safe.
Once checks are complete and the Diving Supervisor is satisfied that all is safe to commence, the call is given: “ON THE SIDE, Divers moving to the water’s edge!” The teams shouts in unison once again. In-water checks are performed. “Leak checks SAT, comms checks SAT, in-water checks COMPLETE, no leaks either Diver”, calls a diver over the full facemask communications.
The final call is given: “ON THE SIDE, Divers leaving surface!” The divers give the hand signal (a number 2 hand signal like the emoji: ✌)️to the supervisor and slip beneath the icy surface, disappearing into the dark green, frigid depths. The divers are now on their own, the feeling every supervisor feels when they no longer are directly in control.
You must trust that you have done everything you can up to this point, to ensure that your personnel have been trained, instructed, and empowered to the best of your ability and will make the right calls and do the right thing. If you don’t have that “warm-and-fuzzy” and understanding, you should have not put your people in harm’s way/in a position to be vulnerable. If you’re thinking to yourself, ‘I should have trained them on this’ or ‘I should have taught them that’, it’s too late — you have set your people up for failure to succeed.
Failure to succeed, I said. Failure is not always black and white, win or lose, right or wrong. Most times its being at the finish line and letting someone else come in first. Being at the point of closing the deal when you drop the ball and someone else closes. Sometimes it is life and death, such as in military ice diving, but for most, failure to lead your team most often results in failure to succeed.
Routines Are Not Always Bad- Sometimes, doing the same things over and over will show you when something is not right. No, we’re not robots who don’t think creatively and always strictly follow checklists 100% of the time, but we do follow routines that keep us safer had we not followed a checklist or routine. Many times in my career, I’ve been the leader in a risk assessment, and through experience and routine, was able to identify risk by identifying the things that are different. If we do X all the time and I’m used to Y — when Z has a potential for happening, you can notice “hmm that seems odd — we don’t usually deal with Z”. Now my job is to mitigate the effects of Z to the best of my ability. Risk assessment is not about reducing ALL risk (otherwise don’t leave your house and pray an asteroid doesn’t land on you) — but by mitigating the ones you can by recognizing the potential risks. Look for the outliers and things that are different.
Teamwork is Everything- In military diving, almost nothing happens without the team. It is a symphony where everyone has their unique piece to play and without the members of the team playing in unison, the sound is not harmonic. Just as in Dalton’s law (a famous gas law of partial pressures that every military diver is forced, I mean motivated, to learn) ‘The sum of the parts is equal to the whole’….without the team, the individuals cannot accomplish the mission. This holds true in every organization. Rarely are there ‘warriors of one’ operating solo with zero support. Be a team player and get your people to be team players, working toward a common goal for the team and organization.
Communication is Key- the one thing I tell every new member of my team is this: “You can easily UNDER-communicate, but almost never OVER-communicate.” At first, they almost never get it. Then over time, as I ultimately get blind-sided by some information that I should have known, or could have helped their situation by having some prior knowledge — they come to me and say “…I get it now”. I, too, learned this the hard way when my boss came to me and was like “how come I didn’t know about this?” — definitely more than once. Yes it took many years for me to learn but it was a valuable lesson to learn. The topic of communicating up and down the chain could easily be an entire post by itself but to sum it up: Communicate clearly and communicate often.
SWAG/80% Solution- There is no such thing as having ALL of the information before making a decision. If you have all of the information, the time has passed and it’s already too late to be effective. We often have to make a SWAG — Scientific Wild A** Guess. A SWAG is not a shot in the dark, it’s a decision based on your experience, judgment, and knowledge of the situation in order to bring you to an 80% solution. If you can get to 80% solved, you can figure the rest out. Even Jeff Bezos admits to making decisions like this, so if he can do it, you can learn how. There is a such thing as “losing the initiative” in combat, where if you wait to long to move/react/decide, you will lose the upper hand and be on the defensive side of the situation. It’s far better to be pro-active and control what you can, than to be reactive to a situation and be forced to play catch-up. When in doubt, take a SWAG at it and start moving toward the goal.
By: Robert Foucha, MBA-IT
A retiring Chief Diver in the US Coast Guard, Robert has a passion for team leadership, personal growth, and information technology. He currently holds a MBA in IT Management, a BS in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance, and IT certifications including CCNA, SSCP, Security+, ECIH, ECES, and others. https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertfoucha/
