I just finished whitewater rafting on the Upper Yough with my integrator, Timothy.
Once a quarter, he and I block off an entire day for what we call a Do Life Together Day. It’s one of the ways we live out our core value of Together. We believe it’s not enough to just be together, you have to actually do life together. We want to be involved in each other’s lives outside of work. To get to know each other one on one. To be vulnerable with each other. To share. To learn from each other. To talk about things that have nothing to do with work. Do Life Together Days are one of the ways we get to fully know each other, fully love each other, and fully challenge each other.
We do this because we believe our relationship is the most important relationship in the company. As the visionary and the integrator, Timothy and I sit at the top of how this firm runs. The visionary sees around corners. The integrator makes the corners turnable. When the two of us are healthy and aligned, the whole company moves. When we’re strained, even by a little, every person on the team feels it whether they can name it or not.
But I’d argue the relationship matters in three places, not one.
It matters for our clients. Our clients are trusting us with generational decisions. Their retirement. Their kids’ future. The business they spent forty years building. They don’t just need a smart plan. They need a firm that’s stable, aligned, and going to be here in twenty years to keep the plan on track. A fractured leadership team can’t deliver that, no matter how good the planning work is. Our clients can feel alignment, and they can feel its absence. So Timothy and I owe it to them to keep our relationship strong on purpose, not by accident.
It matters for our families. Timothy and I both have wives and kids who feel the temperature of our work lives. When the visionary and integrator are out of sync, the work gets harder, the days get longer, and the version of us that walks in the door at night is a worse one. When we’re aligned, our families get a better husband and a better dad. That’s not a side benefit. That’s a primary one.
It matters for our community. Beratung is a Pittsburgh firm with Pittsburgh roots, and we want to have an impact so great that our community would weep if we closed our doors. That’s the bar. To get there, we have to be the kind of business that strengthens this region for the long haul. Employing people well. Paying them well. Giving generously. Showing up. A leadership team that operates from trust and unity has the capacity to do that. A leadership team running on friction burns its energy internally and has nothing left for the people on the outside.
So Timothy and I don’t treat this relationship as a thing that just happens. We invest in it. We go do something hard, side by side, and we figure out what it teaches us.
This quarter it was whitewater rafting on the Upper Yough with Precision Rafting. After we were done, Timothy and I spent time discussing the leadership lessons we’d learned out there. Here’s what we walked away with.
Trust starts with the guide, and it isn’t optional
Trust is our team’s theme for the year. The river forced us to live it before the day was over.
You can’t run a class five rapid by committee. From the moment you step on the boat, you have one guide. Not the guide in the boat next to you. Not the voice yelling from the bank. Your guide. The one who has run this river for twenty years, who knows the safety protocols cold, who has your best interest at heart.
When he says row twice, you row twice. When he says row backwards into what looks like a rock, you row backwards into what looks like a rock. You don’t have the luxury of a half second of hesitation, because that half second is what flips the boat.
I see this in business constantly. Team members who don’t disagree out loud, they just hesitate. They slow walk the directive. They wait to see if leadership really meant it. That hesitation is the failure of trust, and it’s just as dangerous in a company as it is in whitewater. If you can’t follow your leader, you either need a different leader or you need to ask yourself a hard question about why you can’t follow.
And the trust runs both directions. Our guide had just met us. He was trusting his life to three guys he didn’t know, betting we’d actually do what he told us to do. Leaders forget that part. Trust is not a thing you demand from your team. It’s a thing you extend to them and earn from them at the same time.
Trust is not a thing you demand from your team. It’s a thing you extend to them and earn from them at the same time.
Leadership is responsibility, not credentials
He didn’t just trust the three of us. He appointed one of us to lead.
The moment we loaded the boat, the guide pointed at me and said the front left is the leader. It wasn’t because of my title. It wasn’t because he’d looked me up. It wasn’t because I had whitewater experience, because I didn’t. I happened to be standing in the front left. He had to trust me with the job before he had any reason to. And I had to trust that he wouldn’t have put me there if he didn’t believe I could do it.
For the rest of the day, the guide made eye contact with me when he called commands. Everyone else watched me to set the pace of the rowing. If I didn’t listen well, we all flipped. The pressure was real, and it had nothing to do with whether I deserved the seat.
The best teams I’ve ever seen work like this. Anybody on the team is equipped to step up and lead in the moment the role calls for it. Think about how the military trains a platoon. If the leader goes down, the next person is ready. Not eventually. Right now. Because if only one person on your team can lead, you don’t actually have a team. You have a single point of failure with witnesses.
Leadership isn’t a position you earn through tenure. It’s a responsibility you’re equipped to carry the second you’re handed it. And it runs on trust extended before it’s earned.
If only one person on your team can lead, you don’t actually have a team. You have a single point of failure with witnesses.
The sticky note culture is a trust failure
The same trust that the guide extended to me, I had to extend to the rest of the boat. I couldn’t be the front left leader and spend my attention worrying about whether the guy behind me was actually rowing. The second I started doing that, I’d stop rowing myself, and we’d flip.
This applies to companies as well. We must trust each other to do our part. When we spend our time worrying about what others are doing, trust has been eroded. We have all experienced this. Someone puts the passive aggressive sticky tab on the microwave about cleaning it out. They are so focused on what others are doing instead of showing up themselves.
That’s not accountability. That’s the absence of trust dressed up in office supplies.
That’s not accountability. That’s the absence of trust dressed up in office supplies.
A highly effective team is one where each person does their job and assumes the next person is doing theirs. Not because they’re naive, but because the standards are clear, the training is real, and the trust has been built on purpose. The minute you’re spending energy worrying about whether the guy next to you is rowing, you’ve stopped rowing yourself. The boat is already in trouble.
Safety isn’t a briefing, it’s a way of life
So how do you build trust like that? It doesn’t happen by accident. It gets built the same way our guides built it with us.
It started with the safety briefing on the riverbank, and the safety briefing wasn’t a checkbox. They didn’t just tell us don’t do this and don’t do that. They told us the why behind every single rule. Why you pull a swimmer in by the life vest, not the arm. Why you put your feet up if you go in the water. Why your helmet sits the way it does on your head. The why is what makes a rule stick. Without it, you’re just hoping people remember a list.
The next thing they did was prove they actually lived it themselves. The guides weren’t standing there in flip flops with their helmets dangling, telling us to be careful. They were following the same safety protocols. Helmets on right. Life jackets on right. Every piece of gear where it was supposed to be. They were showing us what right looked like before they asked us to copy it.
Then they made the safety everyone’s job, not just theirs. They instructed us to check each other’s gear before we got in the boat. To call each other out if something wasn’t right. The message was clear. Everyone’s safety is a priority for everyone. Not just the guide’s responsibility. Yours, mine, and the guy you just met thirty minutes ago.
And then, this is the part most companies miss, the safety didn’t stop at the safety briefing. The guides were constantly reminding us. Between every rapid. All day long. Before we lined up for a difficult stretch, they’d walk us through the safety protocols again. After we came through, they’d remind us of the next one coming. The standards didn’t get spoken once and then assumed. They got lived out loud, over and over.
Most leadership teams don’t do that. They treat safety, or values, or standards the way bad companies treat the new hire orientation. One big download on day one and then silence. The poster goes up on the wall. The values get printed in the handbook. And then leadership goes quiet and somehow expects the team to keep carrying it.
The guides on that river were modeling something completely different. The standards weren’t on a poster. They were the way the day was run. And because the guides lived them, demonstrated them, reinforced them, and held each other to them, we lived them too.
If you want your team to take something seriously, you don’t tell them once. You explain the why. You live it in front of them. You ask them to hold each other to it. And you keep reinforcing it, between every rapid, every day, until they can’t help but live it too.
The standards weren’t on a poster. They were the way the day was run.
The team isn’t built on strength, it’s built on direction
That kind of trained, trusting team can be made up of almost anybody. That surprised me more than anything else that day.
There were three of us in that raft alongside the guide. Different ages. Different sizes. Different physical strength levels. Different weights. One guy in our boat, Andy, we’d never met before that morning, and now we were going to be relying on him to keep us upright through class five water. By any normal measure we had no business operating well together. We weren’t matched. We weren’t trained as a unit. We hadn’t earned each other’s trust over months and years.
And within minutes we were operating like a team that had been training together for years.
The reason wasn’t that we were all strong. The reason was that we were all rowing in the same direction, on the same command, at the same time. That’s the whole game. We weren’t picked for the boat because of how much we could deadlift. We were equipped to row in sync, and the second we did, the physical differences stopped mattering. The strongest guy and the weakest guy contribute the exact same thing to a raft when both of them are rowing the same direction on the same beat. A raft full of strong people rowing different directions flips. A raft full of average people rowing in sync runs the river.
And the stakes of that alignment depend on the river you’re on. On a non-technical river in a big raft with eight or ten people, one person can slack off and the boat still gets down the water. The margin is wide enough to absorb someone not pulling their weight. We weren’t on that river. We were on a very technical river in a very small raft. Four people, including the guide, on water that gives you no room for error. If one person isn’t rowing, you’re not just slower. You’re flipping. Everyone has to row. There’s no carry, no coast, no hiding.
That’s the difference between businesses too. Some companies are running on calm water with enough margin to absorb a few people who aren’t fully bought in. Most of the businesses I work with aren’t. They’re on technical water. Tight margins. High stakes. Real consequences for missed calls. On that water, you need everyone rowing. Anyone who isn’t pulling becomes a risk to the whole boat, no matter how strong the rest of the team is.
I think about this every time someone tells me their team’s problem is a talent problem. Sometimes it is. More often, the talent is fine. What’s missing is alignment. The people on the team are all pulling hard, but they’re pulling in slightly different directions, on slightly different beats, toward slightly different versions of the same goal. And the boat doesn’t move the way it should.
Are you all rowing the same direction, on the same command, at the same time? Because if you are, you don’t need the strongest team in the industry. You need a team that’s actually rowing together.
A raft full of strong people rowing different directions flips. A raft full of average people rowing in sync runs the river.
Calm is contagious. So is panic.
All of that, the trust, the leadership, the alignment, gets put to the test the moment something goes wrong. And eventually something does.
The most striking moment of the day wasn’t ours. It was watching our guide work.
We had been appointed the safety boat. That meant after we cleared each rapid, we’d park, oars ready, and watch the other boats come through. If something went sideways on another raft, we were the ones going in to help. It’s not a role you ask for. It’s a role they assign to you because they trust you and your guide to handle it.
On one of the class five rapids, two people from another boat went into the water. Forty degree water on a fifty degree day. They were getting pulled under, smacking rocks, the kind of situation everyone trains for and nobody wants to see. People have died doing this. People continue to die doing this. It’s serious.
Our guide never raised his voice. Not once. He took action immediately, swift and decisive, but you wouldn’t have known the stakes from his tone. He gave clear commands, fast, low key, like he was ordering lunch.
And here’s what struck me. The three of us, two relative strangers and a friend of a few months, executed like a team that had been training together for years. We immediately grabbed our oars. We listened to the guide. We rowed into the chop to get to the swimmer. As we got close, he told the two of us in the front to throw our oars out so the swimmer could grab on. We pulled him in by his life vest, not by his arms, not by his head, the way we’d been trained, the way most people’s instinct would tell them to do it wrong.
The whole time, the guide’s calm was doing more work than any single command. You couldn’t panic if you wanted to. His steadiness was contagious. Nothing was going to stop him from doing his duty, and somehow that turned into nothing was going to stop us either.
That swimmer came into our boat shaking, in shock, heart pounding. He’d just been immersed in 40 degree water, dragged through a class five, bouncing off rocks. He had every right to be panicked. And within a minute he was laughing with us. Joking with us. Genuinely thanking us. Because the room he had just walked into wasn’t panicked. It was calm. Our guide’s calm had already become our calm, and now it became his too.
That’s the part most leaders don’t fully grasp. Leaders set the emotional temperature of the room, and the room sets the emotional temperature of everyone who walks into it. Your team is reading you constantly, especially when the water gets rough. If you panic, they panic. If they panic, the next person they touch panics. If you go quiet and steady and competent, that’s what fills the room. And then it fills the next room. And the next person who joins you on the boat catches it, whether they meant to or not.
You can’t fake this. You can’t say be calm. You have to actually be calm. And that’s something you build long before the rapid hits.
Leaders set the emotional temperature of the room, and the room sets the emotional temperature of everyone who walks into it.
Great guides study the river
The calm didn’t come from nowhere. Our guide had been running this river for twenty years. He knew it cold. Every rock. Every line through every rapid. Where the eddies were. Which strokes worked and which ones flipped the boat. When he told us to row twice, he wasn’t guessing the number. He knew exactly what two strokes from our particular boat with our particular weight distribution would do in that particular spot in the water.
That’s why we could trust him in a half second. He’d earned that trust over two decades, and we didn’t even know it. We didn’t have to know his resume to feel it. It came through in how he ran the briefing. How he positioned the boat. How he debriefed us between rapids. How he calmly took action when the swimmers went in. The mastery showed up everywhere, even when nobody was asking him to prove it.
That’s what a master of the craft looks like. They take the responsibility so seriously that they put the work in long before anyone watches them work. They know their river. They know their equipment. They know their team’s capabilities. They’ve thought through what they’d do if things went sideways before things went sideways.
I think most leaders skip this part. They want the authority of the front-left seat or the guide seat without doing the twenty years of study to deserve it. They want to be trusted in the half second without putting in the work that earns that trust. It doesn’t work that way on the river, and it doesn’t work that way in a business either.
If you’re the leader, you have a responsibility to know your river. To study your industry. To know your clients. To know your team’s strengths and limits. To know what the right call is in the moment, because you’ve already thought through what the wrong call would cost. The team you’re leading is trusting you with their time, their careers, their families’ financial security, in some cases. That trust deserves a leader who has done the work to earn it.
Part of mastering the craft is mastering the plan. Before every rapid, the lead guides talked. Which line are we taking. Where’s the safety boat sitting. Who’s watching whom. They had thought through the approach before they got to the water, and they communicated it across boats so everyone was on the same page.
But here’s what our guide told us straight up. He said sometimes the plan has to be made up on the fly, because once you’re in the rapid, everything changes. The water shifts. A rock you weren’t expecting. Another boat in the wrong spot. The plan you walked in with isn’t always the plan you finish with. Two strokes from our boat might mean something different than two strokes from another boat depending on the weight, the angle, how hard each person is digging. Sometimes a command that didn’t make sense from where I was sitting made total sense from where the guide was sitting, because he was reading the water in real time and adjusting.
A great leader plans like the plan matters and adapts like the plan was always going to change. Both are true at the same time. You do the work to walk in with a strategy, contingencies, an understanding of what could go wrong. And then you stay flexible enough to throw the plan out the second the river tells you to. The team that’s been trained well, that trusts the leader, can absorb those mid-rapid pivots without flipping. The team that hasn’t been trained, or doesn’t trust, hesitates in the half second it takes to ask why. And in that half second the boat is already in trouble.
A great leader plans like the plan matters and adapts like the plan was always going to change.
Become a perfecter of your craft. Then the calm, the trust, the alignment, all of it gets a foundation strong enough to hold weight.
And underneath all of it, the guides had something you can’t manufacture. They had a deep passion for the craft and for the river. This wasn’t a job for them. It was something they actually loved.
When we got back at the end of the day, I talked with our guide. He was the manager. He was the one in charge of the schedule, the one who decides which guides get assigned to which trips. And I asked him how he managed his own time on the water. He told me he tries to never miss a day on the river. Sometimes he has to, because someone needs to pull a guide off the schedule and put someone else out there. But if it’s at all possible, he wants to be on the river. That’s why he does what he does.
You can’t fake that. Passion either shows up in the work or its absence shows up in the work. And the people you’re leading can feel the difference. A guide who’s just running the trip to clock the hours doesn’t carry the same calm. Doesn’t bring the same focus to the safety briefing. Doesn’t keep studying the river after the season ends.
To be a great leader you have to actually love what you’re doing. If you don’t, it shows up. It shows up in your tone. It shows up in your preparation. It shows up in the half second hesitation when the rapid hits and you haven’t really thought it through because you didn’t really care to. The team feels it before you ever notice it yourself.
If you’ve lost the passion for what you’re leading, the most honest thing you can do is name it and figure out why. Either find your way back to it or find your way to something else. Your team deserves a leader who actually wants to be on the river.
Passion either shows up in the work or its absence shows up in the work. And the people you’re leading can feel the difference.
You’re not in one boat. You’re in a fleet.
Part of mastering the craft, for our guide, was knowing he wasn’t alone out there. The rescue worked for another reason too. Our boat wasn’t operating alone.
Our guide wasn’t just leading the three of us. He was coordinating with five other guides up and down the river. They worked as a fleet, not as six separate boats that happened to be on the same water that day.
A boat that thinks it’s alone on the river isn’t safe. It’s just lucky for a while.
A boat that thinks it’s alone on the river isn’t safe. It’s just lucky for a while.
This is the part business owners forget the most. Your team is not just the people in your boat. It’s your vendors, your strategic partners, your peers, the other leaders in your industry. The communication and coordination across boats is what kept the swimmers alive when things went sideways. You don’t get to opt out of the fleet just because your boat is doing fine.
You can question the leader. You can’t refuse to follow.
Inside our own boat, the coordination kept going between rapids too. And it included questions.
After every rapid, our guide debriefed us. What we did well, what we didn’t, what we’d adjust next time. And we asked him questions. Why did you call it that way? Should we approach the next one differently? Have you thought about doing it this other way?
That’s healthy. That’s how a team gets better.
Questioning a leader to understand them, to sharpen the plan, to bring a perspective they don’t have, is one of the most valuable things a teammate can do. Questioning a leader because you don’t actually trust them, and using the questions as a delay tactic for following the directive, is something else entirely. That’s not curiosity. That’s resistance with a smile on it.
That’s not curiosity. That’s resistance with a smile on it.
If you’ve got that going on inside your team, name it. It’s not going to resolve itself.
Celebrate the river together
And when the river is run, you celebrate it together. That part matters more than I expected it to.
When we pulled the boats out, we high fived. We grabbed a beer together. The three of us in the raft, plus the guide. There was a real sense of accomplishment in the air, and it was bigger because it was shared.
You can run a river alone. You’d survive it, probably. But there’s nobody to celebrate with at the takeout. Nobody who knows what that one rapid actually felt like from the inside. Nobody who saw the rescue go right.
We’re designed for this. As humans, we are made to rely on other humans. Going through the river alone and going through life alone aren’t really survival strategies. They’re missing the whole point of how we were built. The reward of trusting someone, being vulnerable with them, putting your safety in their hands and having them deliver, is bigger than the reward of doing the same thing alone. Every time.
This is exactly why one of the ways we live out our core value of Together at Beratung is to celebrate the wins together. Not solo high-fives at your desk. Not a quiet email from the founder. Actually together, in the same room, acknowledging what we just pulled off as a team. Because if we did the hard thing together, we should be in the same room when the credit gets handed out. The celebration matters as much as the win does, and the team that knows that gets stronger every time they win.
If we did the hard thing together, we should be in the same room when the credit gets handed out.
What Timothy and I are taking back to our team
I believe two of the best things a leader can do are run a marathon and run a river. Both will teach you things a conference room never will. Both put you in front of your team in a way that matters. Your team is always watching how you handle hard things, and the things you do in front of them shape the culture more than any speech you give in a meeting room. So go do hard things in front of the people you lead.
Your team is always watching how you handle hard things, and the things you do in front of them shape the culture more than any speech you give in a meeting room.
Here’s what Timothy and I are bringing back from this one. We’re going to keep equipping our team to lead by example. We’re going to keep extending real trust, and we’re going to part ways with team members who can’t return it. We’re going to study our river the way our guide studies his, becoming perfecters of our craft. We’re going to keep building the kind of team where anyone in the boat can be appointed to the front left and rise to the moment.
And most of all, we’re going to lead with calm. Especially in rough water. Especially when the swimmer goes in.
That’s the kind of leadership our team deserves. It’s the kind our clients deserve too.
Live Intentional.