I am from Canada and I spent eight seasons planting trees in Northern British Columbia.

Those gruelling, intense, rewarding summers were one of the best training grounds of my life. I have learned more leadership, soft and hard skills in that environment than in any formal school setting. 

Let me share one leadership lesson. One flawed assumption I had about being a leader that very nearly derailed a full season for my crew. An assumption I hadn’t even realised I held.

Before I dive into my leadership mistake, let me rewind to my first two seasons of planting. My leader at that time was an exceptionally capable foreman. His upbringing in rural Canada gave him a wealth of skills that translated directly into the treeplanting environment. He grew up driving beefy trucks on ragged logging roads. He had had his own (mini) chainsaw before the age of ten. He was not Tarzan, living in the trees, but the forest was close and exploration was easy. You get the picture.

As a rookie planter, I was the recipient of these skills. He would deliver us trees to plant in the most far reaching places of the block. I can still clearly picture him on the quad bike, spattered in mud, boxes of trees stacked all around him and piled into the quad trailer, manoeuvring through the treacheries of the access roads. He zipped around, teaching us how to plant, checking the quality of our trees were up to standard, and making sure we had all the equipment and sustenance we needed to get through a back-bending day of planting. 

I never saw him need support. I never saw him ask for help.

Fast forward to my time leading a crew of twelve planters. The idea I had of a leader was based on this foreman - insanely capable, able to get my planters anything they needed at any time. Never asking for help. 

I remember the first day of the season very clearly. It was early May, large pockets of snow still dotted the landscape. The access road was a bog, a slog, with puddles - lakes - that went above the tires on the quad bike.

My job that day was to ease everyone into the planting season, remind the veterans what good quality trees look like and teach the rookies the ins and outs of planting. Get everyone off to a good start. Instead, I could barely get the trees to where they needed to go. I grew up in Vancouver and Toronto. I loved the outdoors, but I was a city boy with limited quad bike expertise. My competence lay in putting good trees in the ground and teaching others how to do it. 

So, I ran around, trying to both teach and get boxes of trees to where they needed to be. I believed that a leader should be able to do it all. I did neither well. My assistant manager offered to get on the quad bike and run trees for the crew. I declined, thinking a leader doesn’t need help or support. 

Well, the result was dismal. The quality of my crew’s trees were so poor from that first day that we had to replant them the next day - the biggest sign of failure in treeplanting. After that, my team was extra cautious with their trees and it took us forever to get into a comfortable and competent swing of things.

A setback easily avoided. In hindsight, I 100% should have accepted the help from my assistant manager, but my idea of what a leader should be got in the way.

Lesson learned - a leader does not need to know everything or be able to do everything themselves. A leader can be vulnerable, asking for help and support when needed.