I Promise to Not Be the Crew Leader

The day before our crew left base camp at Philmont, every adult advisor stood in a room and made a promise out loud. "I promise to not be the crew leader." Simple words. Eleven days on the trail would prove just how hard they are to keep.

During our trek I spoke with several rangers about it. Four young men and women, each of them watching crew after crew move through the backcountry all summer, season after season. I asked them the question that had been sitting with me since that room at base camp: what's the difference between a great crew and one that isn't?

Three of the four answered before I finished the sentence. "The adults."

I asked them to explain. The crews with the best chance of being great, they said, were the ones where the adults sat back and let the crew figure it out. The crews that struggled were the ones where the adults stepped in and did it for them.

I'll be honest, I stepped in a couple of times myself as Lead Adult Advisor. But when I look back at those moments now, I think the rangers weren't talking about mine at all.

There's a difference between stepping in because a mistake has become dangerous, and stepping in because a mistake has become inconvenient. Two times on our trek, I didn't hesitate. On our approach to Baldy, a wrong turn taken too early would have cost us the time we needed for a safe ascent. There wasn't room to let that one play out. Later, one of our crew started showing signs of altitude sickness, and we needed to get to camp fast. Neither of those was a close call. Both were about keeping kids safe, not about making sure nothing went wrong.

What the rangers were describing was something else entirely. The adult who corrects the knot before it's even been tried. The adult who says "I know better," or "let me just do it," or "here, do it this way." Not because anyone's safety is on the line, but because the adult can't stand to watch it be done imperfectly. That's not protecting a crew. That's protecting an outcome, at the expense of the very thing the crew came to Philmont to get.

We had a third moment on that trip that I think about more than the other two. Somewhere on the trail, our navigator made a wrong turn, and nobody caught it in time. By the time we realized, we'd already lost too much elevation to just turn around. It cost us five miles and five hundred feet of climbing back, on a trip where every mile and every foot matters.

Nobody chose to let that lesson happen. It just happened, the way mistakes do, faster than anyone could step in. But the crew learned something from it that no adult could have taught them in a briefing. From that point on, they started asking for clarification at every turn, every fork in the trail. Nobody told them to. The mountain taught them, and it charged full price for the lesson.

I told our crew before we ever left base camp that Philmont wasn't about being the fastest, or having a trip with no mistakes on it. It was about learning from the mistakes we made. Those five miles are one of the stories our crew will tell for years. Not despite the wrong turn. Because of it.

Resilience isn't something you can hand a kid, no matter how much you want to. It's not a badge you pin on somebody. It's the one they earn the hard way, on their own two feet, walking five miles and five hundred feet in the wrong direction before they figure out how to stop doing that. My job as Lead Adult Advisor was to keep my crew safe. It was never to protect them from the mistakes that were theirs to make.

I've watched this same pattern plenty of places besides a mountain in New Mexico. In 4-H rings, on work teams, in volunteer organizations I've been part of for years. Somebody wins the prize this time because an adult, or a manager, or a mentor quietly did the hard part for them. Sure, they won. But what happens next time, when that help isn't there?

My continual struggle, as a parent, a volunteer, a leader, and a consultant, is knowing exactly where that line sits between genuinely helping and quietly taking over. I don't think I'm alone in that. I suspect most of us who lead anybody, at home or at work, are still working out where that line is too.

Stop helping. Start watching. That's the promise.

Zoom out far enough, and you'll see it: is this the mountain teaching, or is this you needing to be needed?