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The Great Escape
Copyright © All rights reserved
By Ken Chapman, Ph.D.
Ken Chapman & Associates, Inc.
They
called it the great escape. It was not named great because it had never been
done: prisoners of war had previously escaped from enemy camps. It was not
called great because of the outcome since the results were terrible for most
of the escapees. It was great because the scale of it made the task seem
impossible.
Stalag III, a Nazi prisoner of war camp one hundred miles
southeast of Berlin was a huge compound that once held as many as ten thousand
allied POW’s. But in the camp in 1944 was a core group of prisoners
determined to escape. In fact, their goal was to facilitate the escape of no
fewer than two hundred, fifty men in one night, something that would require
utmost cooperation among the prisoners. An escape so daunting had never been
tried before.
Getting men out of a German prison camp was a very complex task.
Of course, there was the challenge of digging and hiding the tunnels that
would provide the means of escape. Together, prisoners engineered the
tunnels, dug them, shored them up with wooden slates taken from prisoners’
beds, and disposed of the dirt in an amazingly creative way. They pumped air
into the tunnels with homemade bellows. They created tracks and trolleys used
by the men to move through the tunnels. They even wired the narrow passages
with electric lights. The list of supplies needed for the job was
unbelievable — 4,000 bed slates, 10,370 battens, 1,699 blankets, 52 long
tables, 1,219 knives, 30 shovels, 600 feet of rope, 1,000 feet of electric
wire, and more. It took an army of prisoners just to find and steal all the
materials for the tunnels.
However difficult building the tunnel was, creating a means of
escape was only part of the whole project. Every man who would attempt escape
needed a host of supplies and equipment — civilian clothes, German papers,
identity cards, maps, homemade compasses, emergency rations, and other items.
Several prisoners continually scrounged for anything that might aid the team.
Others worked systematically and relentlessly at bribing and blackmailing the
guards. Each person had a job. There were tailors, blacksmiths, pickpockets,
and forgers who worked secretly month after month. The prisoners even
developed teams of men who specialized in distraction and camouflage, keeping
the German soldiers off guard. Perhaps the most challenging job was that of
“security.” Since the Germans employed many guards who specialized in escape
detection called “terrants” by the prisoners, the security team kept a log of
every movement of every guard who came through the compound. And they used an
elaborate, yet inconspicuous set of signals to warn other security men,
lookouts, and working team members when a guard posed a threat to their
efforts.
On the night of March 24, 1944, after more than a year of work,
two hundred and twenty men prepared to creep through the tunnel and into the
woods outside the prison camp. The plan was to send out one man per minute
until all had made their escape. German speaking prisoners would board trains
and pose as foreign workers. The rest would lie low during the day and travel
at night, hoping to avoid German patrols.
When the first prisoner popped up out of the tunnel though, he
discovered that its exit was short of the woods. Rather than getting out a
man per minute, they were only able to get out a dozen per hour. In all,
eighty-six men escaped before the tunnel was discovered. It created chaos for
the Nazis, who ordered a national alert to deal with it. Eighty-three of the
prisoners were captured and forty-one of them were executed by order of Adolph
Hitler. Only three made it to freedom.
John Sturgis, the man who directed the 1963 movie, The Great
Escape, based on the real event, said of the prisoners’ effort, “It demanded
the concentrated devotion and vigilance of more than six hundred men, every
single one of them, every minute, every hour, every day and every night for
more than a year. Never has the human capacity been stretched to such
incredible lengths or shown so much determination and courage.”
Great challenges require great team work and the quality most
needed among teammates amid the pressure of a difficult challenge is
collaboration. Notice that I did not say cooperation because collaboration is
more than that. Cooperation is working together agreeably. Collaboration is
working together agreeably and creatively. Collaborative teammates do more
than just work with one another. Each person brings something to the table
that adds value to the relationship and synergy of the team. The sum of truly
collaborative teamwork is always greater than its parts.
Becoming a collaborative team player requires a change in focus in
four areas —
(1) Perception. Teammates as collaborators, not competitors.
Look at any team and you can see the potential for competition. Siblings
fight for their parents’ attention, co-workers compete for raises and
promotions, ball players go head to head to see who will be the starter and
who will sit on the bench. Because all people have hopes, goals, and dreams,
they want to achieve. Collaborative team members completing one another are
more important than competing with one another. They perceive themselves as a
unit working together, and they never allow competition between teammates to
get to the point where it hurts the team.
(2) Attitude. Be supportive, not suspicious of teammates. Some
people are so preoccupied with looking out for their own interests, that they
are naturally suspicious of just about every one, including their teammates.
But adopting the mindset when you complete rather than compete with teammates
is possible only if you suspend your suspicions and become a supportive team
player. It is a matter of attitude. That means assuming that other people’s
motives are good unless proven otherwise. If you trust people, you will treat
them better. And if you treat them better, you and they will be more likely to
create collaborative relationships.
(3) Focus. Concentrate on them, not on yourself. As a person on
the team, you are usually asked one of two questions when anything happens —
what is in it for me or what does this do for the team? Where you focus your
attention says a lot about whether you compete with others or complete them.
Focus, in any field, is a relay race and not a single event. If you focus on
the team and not just on yourself, you will be able to pass the baton when
necessary instead of trying to complete the race by yourself.
(4) Results. Create victories through multiplication. When you
work together with your teammates, you can do remarkable things. If you work
alone, you leave a lot of victories on the table. Collaboration has a
multiplying effect on everything you do because it releases and harnesses not
only your skills, but also the skills of everyone on the team. We have to be
willing to ask ourselves if we are collaborative team members. Do we work
against the team, or do we work for the team? Do we bring cooperation and
added value to our team, even to the people we do not enjoy being with? Do we
help to multiple the efforts of others or does the team become slower and less
effective because we are involved? If we are not sure, we should talk with
our teammates about our impact and try to get some information about how we
impact the results of the performance of the team. Our goal always should be
to complete the team, not to compete with the team!
For more information about Ken
Chapman and Associates’ Leadership Development Programs, contact Ken Chapman
at 205.366.0265 or email Ken at
kchapman@leaderscode.com.
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