Welcome to Anatomy 101! Let’s build the perfect ski industry leader. It’s not as hard as it sounds, we can use the human body as our template.


Skeleton
The skeleton is a great place to start designing our leader. It provides the internal framework that supports our organs, muscle and tissues. A leader at any level requires a powerful internal framework to support her organization.

A leader’s internal framework is made up of her integrity and personal code of ethics. Quality leaders use their established ethics, values and integrity as a beacon for behavior and decision making. And they encourage others to look inward as well.

In most organizations we have fancy plaques or posters with well-written statements about the company’s values. If you ask, I’m certain you’ll find those statements or values are very close to what the senior-most leader holds true.

A simple way to hone your own ethics, values and integrity is to jot down what’s important to you at work. Next, decide what, if anything, on that list would cause you to quit your job on the spot if it were absent or breeched. For instance, my list includes honesty, mutual respect, trust, accountability and fun. If one of those ingredients is missing, I walk.


Brains
Your brain weighs less than 3 pounds, yet manages unconscious bodily processes like breathing and heart rate, and coordinates most voluntary movement. It's also the motherboard of your consciousness, thought and creativity, otherwise known as intelligence.

The smartest thing a great leader does is surround himself with others who are a lot smarter than he is. This isn’t necessarily about education; a leader must be able to accurately evaluate his own skill set and properly value someone with greater skills than his own.

Think about the leader who is a great decision maker but an extremely poor communicator. It may be difficult for the organization to embrace his decisions when it isn’t delivered in a user-friendly, palatable manner. The leader would be wise to ensure that at least one of his staff members (preferably one with a large direct report group of their own) has a primary skill set that includes positive, accurate and clear communications. The willingness and ability to acknowledge your weaknesses, while employing others with strengths that offset them, affords you the opportunity to learn and still contribute your unique value.


Blood
The river of life; we can’t exist without it. When our blood is sick our entire system will fail. Blood touches all of our cells, transporting oxygen and nutrients, warmth and life.

A leader’s communication skills are the lifeblood of an organization. Great communication can breathe warmth and life into an organizational culture. Poor or lackluster communication breeds a culture of rumor, uncertainty and dysfunction.

The only thing I can guarantee about leadership communication is that I’ve yet to meet an organization that is completely satisfied with the amount, style and accuracy of communication. It really is hard to please everyone, so I don’t recommend trying. What I’ll suggest instead is that you examine your leadership communication in the following areas:

Type: The major categories of good communication are listening, body language, speaking, and writing—in that order of importance.

Clarity: Your job is to ensure this—always!

Context: Choice of communication type depends on your circumstances—communication should be situational.

Congruent: Your words should match your body language; the message and type of communication should match the situation. Otherwise, a misunderstanding is inevitable.

Concise: The most concise communicators are great listeners.

Consistent: Your communication should be predictable, so that the organization feels informed, warm and full of life.

Like blood, once the leader delivers his intended message throughout the organization, he carries the waste back to the heart to be revitalized for re-distribution. Which brings us to . . .


Heart
Your heart is a powerful, never-ceasing pump. From the moment you become a life until the moment you expire, it will beat about 100,000 times a day. A heart’s job is to move blood through the body so it can be cleansed of waste products, oxygenated and re-circulated. Our leader is incomplete without a warm heart.

A leader’s heart is the seat of his most glorious asset; his passion. Passion consists of enthusiasm and excitement that translates into energy. Having a passion for leadership is about expecting the best from others and helping them get there. A leader with true passion will inspire those around them—it’s contagious.

Passion is what keeps leaders strong when hit by adversity. Find the bright side of a rained out ski day. Be a role model for staff: wear your passion on your sleeve! Show that you’ve got heart.


Hands
Our hands are the easily the most useful structure of our entire body. They are our primary source of tactile sensations due to the density of 48 nerve endings in each of our finger tips. Our hands say a lot about us; they are expressive and charismatic, often calloused and rough, sometimes graceful and creative. We use our hands to manipulate an environment in both a rough-motor (swinging a hammer) and fine-motor (threading a needle) manner. Our hands create.

Leaders seek to build relationships, trust, and teamwork with every individual and group they’re exposed to. Leaders achieve these outcomes through supporting and acknowledging the efforts and achievements of others, demonstrating diplomacy and tact, building bridges between departments/functions, and demonstrating unfailing commitment to the organization and individuals within it.

In order to initiate, create and maintain any relationship, feelings will have to come into play. Leaders use feelings to connect with others in meaningful and lasting ways. The best leaders are those who are seen as genuine and caring for their staff members. You can see why so many successful leaders are said to “hold their heart in their hands.”


Skin
Skin is the largest organ in the human body: waterproof, colorful, wrinkled and flawed. It’s said in business that a leader needs a thick skin; good thing we have three layers of it. The coolest part about our skin is that it regenerates; in fact, we shed around 2.5 billion cells per day, and sport a completely new skin every month!

How does regeneration relate to leadership? Succession planning and self-development are often overlooked, and sometimes somewhat uncomfortable, components of leadership. We give a tremendous amount of lip service to succession planning and development in the resort industry. Much has been said and written on the topic, but not much has actually been done. In fact, it’s likely the first area of budget cuts to go—if it even makes it to the budget draft.

A powerful way leaders can achieve future business success is to assist others in recognizing, developing and better utilizing their unique strengths, talents, attributes and potential. Leadership activities in this realm include:

• projecting future leadership needs

• identifying potential in-house leaders

• investing in employee development.

There are many best practices available at a minimal expense. Two examples: targeted rotations and deliberate exposure to multiple operations, and educational and developmental opportunities (classes, mentoring, team or task force membership and community involvement).

Think of self-development and succession planning as you do, say, putting sunscreen on your skin. It’s an investment in your future.


Muscle
The very purpose of muscle is to cause motion. Muscles direct both our voluntary movement and our unintentional, reflexive and regulatory movement, like heart beats. Our muscle tone is visibly defined under our skin. In our society, muscular strength is valued and even desirable.

The embodiment of muscle in leadership is crisis management. Like our muscle tone, you can easily see a leader’s crisis management skills. Crisis management for leaders comes in two forms: voluntary and unintentional.

Voluntary crisis management entails initiative, accountability and reactionary control for all facets of business performance. This isn’t limited to recognizing when something has gone wrong and jumping in and making it right. It’s more about doing the job effectively even when crises are unavoidable. Skill sets you might recognize here are:

• organizing and prioritizing work effectively

• assuming accountability for achieving goals, outcomes and deadlines

• demonstrating logical thought and attention to detail

• arriving on time and ready to work to meetings and appointments.

Unintentional crisis management has to do with a leader’s unique self-management skills, such as:

• having a positive demeanor during stressful periods

• modeling the attitudes and behaviors expected in others

• being open to feedback on his own performance

• being open to differences in opinion.

When I visit your resorts and meet the leaders, their muscles are usually what I’m looking for and at!

By now the good men and women of mountain operations are annoyed that I’ve completely ignored the most important part of the body…


Testicles
For our purpose, testicles shouldn’t be associated with gender. In fact, some of the biggest sets in this industry belong to women. Don’t be coy, you know exactly what I’m talking about: the resolve to stay the course or break out and do something daring, to take risks and live on the edge. Courage is the seed of future life in our industry, and to really succeed, it takes a leader who is not afraid to fail.

As in the case of the human body, there are many other important parts missing from this list, like cells, connective tissue and of course, hair. But you get the picture. Just like a body, a great leader is working hard, learning, growing, teaching and caring. And similarly, every leader is imperfect, because perfection would be boring. After all, we’re only human.