High climbers

Click here to listen to an audio interview with Michael Useem (Real Player, which can be downloaded here, required).

Take heart: even the person of the lowest rung on the corporate ladder can be a leader. So says Michael Useem in his new book, “Leading Up”. Rather than focus solely on the highest-ranking executives, he tells stories of subordinates—a Marine general forced to answer to six separate commanders, or Charlene Barshefsky negotiating a trade deal with China on behalf of her boss, Bill Clinton. Leading your boss, as Mr Useem puts it, involves equal parts diplomacy, intuition, honesty, and stubbornness—traits that also prove valuable once in charge.

Mr Useem, who heads the Centre for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School, also emphasises a fourth trait: humility. “Nobody is so smart that they’ve got all the strategic thinking wrapped up in their own head,” he says. “They need to be humble enough to learn from others.” In addition to inspirational stories about those who successfully managed to “lead up”, his book is full of dire warnings of the failure to do so. Among the stories are that of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, two guides who both had years of experience leading amateur teams to the top of Mount Everest. Despite their training, and their extensive discussions of the risks with their team members, both Hall and Fischer perished during a storm on Mount Everest in May 1996, along with several of their clients.

A tragic story, certainly, and possibly not one that would make a comfortable read just before setting out for the Himalayas. But one of Wharton’s most popular, and most publicised, “leadership ventures” is an annual three-week journey to the area around Mount Everest, reaching a high point of more than 18,000 feet above sea level. Mr Useem, co-leader of the annual Everest Trek, requires all the participants to read “Into Thin Air,” a harrowing account of the ill-fated 1996 expeditions, before flying to Kathmandu.

Wharton offers several other leadership ventures to their alumni and students: to Ecuador; to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia; even to the site of a disastrous 1949 fire in Montana and the collapse of the Donner Party, a group of settlers stranded in the Sierra Mountains during the winter of 1846-47. (Students must be enrolled in its MBA programme, or have completed one of its executive-education seminars, to sign up.) But the Everest programme seems the most extreme, not to mention time-consuming and expensive. Can wandering around the mountains for three weeks really lead to a better understanding of what it takes to be a leader?

Mr Useem thinks so. In general, he says, leadership training in a classroom, while useful, doesn’t make as much of an impression with students as field experiences. During the Everest trek, pairs of students take turns setting the itinerary, and taking responsibility for the group, for one day. Make a mistake, lead the group down the wrong path, and the student is certain to receive a lesson in humility. Mr Useem’s democratic approach to leadership means that even spouses and relatives of Wharton alumni, regardless of their own backgrounds, take turns as leaders.

The course is popular enough: the group for the next Everest trek, beginning in late April, has already begun the required reading, and students are signed up for the 2003 and 2004 jaunts. Mr Useem insists the results are tangible. During one Everest trek, he remembers, his students ran into Sandy Hill Pittman, an amateur mountain-climber who was part of the ill-fated 1996 group. She spoke to them (and later again to Mr Useem for “Leading Up”) about how she wished she had heeded the signs that Mr Fischer, her leader, was feeling ill and exhausted on the day the group set out for the summit. After hearing that, Mr Useem says, the students approached him hourly to make sure he was feeling all right—having learned to lead by looking out for their leader.

Click here to listen to an audio interview with Michael Useem.