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Lessons From
Everest
By Joe Greenburg
There’s
an old story about a reporter interviewing a respected, high-ranking bank
president who asks the question, “What is the secret to your success?”
The
president responds, “Two words. Right decisions.”
“I see.
How did you learn how to make these right decisions?” inquires the reporter.
“The
banker replies, “One word. Experience.”
“Okay. And how did you get experience?”
“Two
words.” says the bank president. “Wrong decisions.”
Like many principals, I have read my share
of “How To” Leadership books in my day. Although not
billed as such, it has been Jon Krakauer’s Into
Thin Air, and his epic story of a fatal Everest expedition, that epitomizes
the precarious balance and uncertainty of leadership better than almost any
self-proclaimed book on the subject. As the parable at the start of this essay
suggests, experience is the best teacher, and the sad truth is we often learn
more from our bad decisions than we do from the good ones. It’s what one does
with these lessons that makes him or her successful or
not.
What I appreciated about Krakuaer’s Everest story is that it touches on so many key
factors pertaining to leadership and followership. Issues that come to mind
are: Who to trust and not to trust; how to work together cooperatively and the
perils of not; and how to respond in the face of crisis and adversity. It’s
easy to be a leader when things are running smoothly and all is well. What
separates and distinguishes a true leader are those moments of precarious
uncertainty and the responses to these situations.
Into Thin Air captures many of
the issues all leaders face--when to act or not, how to operate in a hostile
environment, making your words stick, etc. Krakauer
shares his feeling that there are times when a leader should carry the entire
authority and accountability for directing and commanding people in specific
situations. In the case of ascending Everest and the ensuing disaster, Krakauer states that someone needed to be at the leadership
helm to keep members of the team working together, rather than each climber’s individual goal of reaching the peak of
the mountain. The goal needed to be that everyone
got back down alive. If the boundaries between teamwork and individualism had
been more firmly established in the beginning, perhaps the outcome of events
would have been different.
Krakauer suggests that
perhaps the lead guide of the expedition, Rob Hall, may have been too laid-back
and lenient on the mountain and that he should have been more autocratic at
times than he was. The fact is he acquired his position as a leader because he
possessed expertise that his clients needed to make the journey up and down
Everest. It was this knowledge and skill that gave him the credibility
necessary to have instilled confidence in his capacity to be a leader. Part of
Hall’s job was to see to it that everyone on the climbing team also had
confidence in each of their partner’s abilities and contributions to the cause,
despite being strangers prior to the trek. Although each member was accountable
for his or her actions, Hall himself stated that "one climber’s actions
can affect the welfare of the entire team." It was Hall who was ultimately
responsible for asserting his position as captain of the crew. The fact that he
didn’t led to a disastrous outcome.
In the purest transformational sense of
what it means to lead, Hall strove to motivate his charges to accomplish
something even they might not have fully believed was possible. He wanted to
help ordinary people do extraordinary things. On one hand, that is at the heart
of leadership. On the other, he had the responsibility to heed an established
role of a leader—to define reality, even if it is a disappointing or unpopular
stance. In this case, Hall had a responsibility to think of the greater good,
the safety of his clients/team, more than
his reputation or business interests.
The fact is that effective leadership needs
to be responsive and responsible and one approach might not always work in
every situation—this certainly holds true in school leadership. As Krakauer unveils in his book, the results of not knowing
when and how to read when to transition from one form to another can indeed
have irreversible outcomes.
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