Article Added: A Team Is More Than A Group of People
When John Amatt led the 1982 Canadian team on a successful Mount Everest Expedition, only three people reached the summit. Many climbers who were part of the team, whose lifetime ambition was to stand on top of Everest, made the conscious choice to stay in the base camp. Why? Because they knew the effort was likely to fail if everyone tried to make it. They chose to forego their individual dreams in favor of helping the team succeed.
This wasn’t John Amatt’s first time to plan an Everest expedition. Ten years earlier, with one of him friends from Norway, he had gathered a team of world- class climbers from many different countries, for the challenge. But at the last minute, he backed out. Officially, it was to get married. “But that was just an excuse,” he said later. “I knew that, despite having the best climbers in the world, this expedition would not succeed. Everyone wanted to reach the top for their own glory or that of their country. No one seemed willing to make decisions for the good of the team.”
His fears proved founded. Not only did the team not cooperate to make it to the top, at one point these sophisticated expert climbers even indulged in a rock-throwing fight.
