Robson Gmoser respected risk – and pursued it with a passion

Ian Brown

The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Mar. 20 2015, 1:01 PM EDT

By general agreement, the most effective skill that mountain guide Robson Gmoser possessed was his laugh. This is not a sentimental observation. It rose quickly and frequently from somewhere between his Roman nose and his bottomless lungs, and seemed to take him by surprise. Clients of wilderness guides tend to ski in places where you can fall headfirst into a three-metre tree well, or disappear down a crevasse, or ski off a cliff, or be buried in an avalanche. Robson Gmoser’s laugh told you not to worry.

But when a guide dies in an avalanche, as Robson did on March 10 – when a person revered for keeping others safe slips over the lip into the silence – everyone who loves the mountains takes notice. A worm of doubt begins to turn in the collective mind of an otherwise practical, flinty community.

Robson was one of the best known and most accomplished mountain guides in the country – a small but storied club of wanderers that poses an existential question to every person it encounters: If intensity of feeling increases with risk, how much risk should you shoulder to feel sufficiently alive? He ran a B.C. mountain lodge, and infused thousands with his addiction to the wilderness. He was a father, a husband, a brilliant skier. That he was Rocky Mountain aristocracy – a son of Margaret and Hans Gmoser, who invented helicopter skiing in Western Canada – meant his death attracted even more attention.

Beneath the tragedy, of course, is another question: Why him? Or, to ask it a different way: Why do people of such talent and character feel compelled to put their lives in the path of danger? Was his decision worth it? He was only 45.

The shock of the random
The avalanche occurred less than a kilometre from Sorcerer Lodge, a remote ski cabin northwest of Golden, in B.C.’s Selkirk Mountains. You reach the lodge by helicopter, then spend gorgeous days climbing up and swooping down the surrounding slopes.

I skied with Robson (my third tour with him, a piker compared to many others) at Sorcerer two springs ago. It’s a heartbreakingly beautiful place, a lodge on a ridge below a vast theatre of snow-upholstered peaks and bowls and valleys and spires. The red trim of the lodge stands out, a tiny human dab on huge and haughty nature. A friend of mine from Edmonton, John Mitchell, remembers that 12 centimetres of new powder had fallen around the hut the night before our last day there with Robson. The new snow and the sunny day made us optimistic. Nothing could go wrong.

“We were all so excited,” John reminded me when I called him after hearing last week’s news. “We were going up high to play in the snow. I exited the hut, and approached Robson to have him conduct the usual morning avalanche beacon check. He leaned in and said, in his quiet tone, ‘This should be an okay day!’ Then he burst into his laugh. That laugh. It was his greeting.”

Robson’s accident occurred on a Tuesday at approximately 5:30 in the afternoon. He had returned a group safely after a day on a nearby glacier, and carried on to prepare a nearby slope for the next day’s outing.

He was with a guide-in-training, a fellow named Darren, who was working on the uptrack while Robson cut a narrow trail – a rail of a platform barely two skis wide – across a steep slope known locally as the Heinous Traverse. “We never go in there blind, because it’s so hard to turn around,” Tom Raudaschl, Robson’s long-time co-guide, told me the other day.

The traverse is a shortcut to Mount Iconoclast, a peak that offers luscious descents: You hold your breath and step daintily to get to the good stuff. Robson had set the uptrack, and was skiing back on it when a Size 3 avalanche swept him down the hill. A Size 3 can slide for a 1,000 metres and have a mass of 1,000 tonnes, enough to bury a car, destroy a small building, break a few trees.

Darren tried to reach Robson on his radio, twice, to no avail – Tom could hear that on his own radio, back at the lodge – and set out along the track to see what was wrong. He saw a crown (the fracture line) and avalanche debris, radioed back to the cabin (Tom was already preparing rescue gear), and skied down the runout path, using his avalanche beacon to find the one strapped to Robson. It was Darren’s first ski tour as a guide-in-training.

He did everything he was supposed to do, and did it heroically. But he was alone. It took 10 minutes to clear Robson’s face from under almost a metre and a half of snow, from the time Darren spotted the avalanche, bringing Robson’s estimated burial time to approximately 30 minutes. Ten minutes is considered the outside margin of survivability, through there are exceptions and even miracles.

By then, Tom, two other ski guides and two ER doctors had arrived at the accident in helicopters. Tom helped Darren and the guides dig Robson’s body clear while the doctors tried to resuscitate him. There were nearly a dozen doctors skiing at the lodge, including the two ER physicians; the squad was carrying adrenaline and oxygen. None of it was enough. “He was really the first person I found in an avalanche,” said Tom, who has been a guide for three decades, “and the first dead person I had to dig out of the snow.” He’d known Robson for 22 years.

According to Tom, the slab of the avalanche that smothered Robson wasn’t thick – 25 cm, “not a deep release or anything.” But it was enough to sweep Robson over a 25-metre cliff. “He still had a pack on. And there was no obvious sign of trauma.”

Tom and I were talking on the phone, three days after it happened. It was late at night. He was having a whisky and thinking about Robson. “Just his overall personality; nothing would stress him out, really. And he had some really bad farts the night before. I remember that, too. I asked him if he was taking his enzymes.” It was an old joke of theirs.

Tom was heading into the mountains again the morning after we spoke, to lead a new party of expectant skiers. That’s the life of a mountain guide. The accidents are shocking in their randomness and tragic in their effect, but they do not delay the next group. Within six days of Robson’s death, his wife, Olivia Sofer, herself a guide, was on e-mail, arranging replacements for her late husband’s upcoming tours. People were still counting on him.

At 15, alone in the backcountry
Some friends and I once spent a few days in a tent with Robson in a whiteout on the Columbia Icefield. When we weren’t playing cards or telling jokes or checking the weather, we talked about what you talk about in a tent, which, depending how long you’re stuck, can be just about everything. Every time I remember that conversation, I think of something else I want to tell Robson.

He was born June 20, 1969, while his father was climbing Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies – hence his son’s name. The usual joke is: Thank goodness the old man wasn’t climbing Mount Assiniboine.

Growing up, Robson and his older brother, Conrad, spent so much time outdoors they were almost feral. This was near Canmore, Alta., and at their father’s fledgling lodge in the Bugaboo Range to the northwest, where Hans was determined to establish helicopter skiing. The boys had a pair of coyotes as pets. As he approached his 15th birthday, Robson was allowed to take a two-week ski tour in the backcountry, on his own. One doubts that happens much these days.

As a skier, his physical grace was unmatched. He made you want to move the way he did, but you never could. Everyone in a ski party wants to be like the guide, and that was especially true with Robson.

Robson earned a degree in forest ecology from the University of British Columbia, but what he wanted to be was a mountain guide, like his father. He started with hikers at Mount Assiniboine Lodge, to the west of Canmore, in 1985, and later worked in the heli-ski business.

But after Hans sold his heli-skiing company, Canadian Mountain Holidays, for a reported $15-million in 1995, Robson began to lead his own ski tours out of Battle Abbey, a remote backcountry lodge of which he would eventually inherit half-ownership from his father.

I first met Robson at Battle Abbey, on one of the trips he guided there and elsewhere every year with Tom Raudaschl and Eileen McKie, their cook. Eileen always said he had a guide’s enviable all-round capability: could build anything (a wood-burning oven, a sauna, a pumphouse), was resourceful (he used a sawed-off hockey-stick blade to cut uptrack turns in hard-slabbed snow), took care (he liked to stuff his infant son, Max, into a backpack and take off down a pitch, Max shouting “More! More! More!” all the way).

He liked to memorize poems on the uptrack – William Henry Drummond’s The Wreck of the “Julie Plante” and Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee were favourites – to recite in the evenings back at the lodge. “Back at the lodge” was a concept that mattered to him: He had a talent for creating comfort where you wouldn’t expect to find any, and a need for groups of people to enjoy it.

Once, his mother made a winter ski-camping trip from Jasper to Lake Louise with the writer and explorer Chic Scott. Before she left, she wanted to see what it was like to sleep outdoors in the winter, so Robson lent her a sleeping bag. The temperature dropped to minus 40 overnight, and Robson found his mother tinged with blue in the back yard the next morning. He’d inadvertently given her a summer-weight bag. He was exceptionally well organized but could be absent-minded.

We think of (male) mountain guides as manly types with technical skills, but it is their caring side, their ability to comfort nervous people in subtle ways – their mothering, if you will – that distinguishes the best ones.

Robson’s father was one of the more famous he-man mountain guides on Earth; his mother, who spent more time raising him, is one of this country’s most adventurous women. (Last summer, at 69, she toured Nepal on foot, walked across a good chunk of Europe, and spent the rest of the season hiking in the Rockies.) That strange combination of solid softness, of gentle reliability, of daring plus caring, was one of Robson Gmoser’s notable traits.

The other was humility. There’s an old joke about mountain guides: The difference between God and a mountain guide is that God doesn’t think he’s a mountain guide. Robson wasn’t that type. Olivia, his wife, met him in 2005, at Bugaboo Lodge. He was working as a lawn boy.

“I had no idea he was a ski guide or of his background in relation to CMH,” Olivia says. “He never said anything. I only found out after a few weeks of being there, from someone else.” She liked his “calmness” and his “great looks.”

The risk we all face
Robson was no stranger to avalanches: He broke his femur in one a few years ago, and avalanche deaths were a regular feature in the early days of heli-skiing. The deaths deeply upset his father, who became a nervous wreck when snow conditions were shaky; partly because of Hans’s influence, accredited Canadian mountain guides are among the best trained and most rigorously tested avalanche analysts in the world. Hans had a ready reply when he thought Robson had done something questionable in the mountains: “Don’t be a fucking idiot.” Years later, when Tom and Robson discussed a potential route, the conversation often boiled down to a single question: “You’re not being a fucking idiot, are you?”

To someone who spends no time in the high wilderness, the motive for adventuring might seem indulgent, or moot, or even illogical: Why do dangerous things at all, if you love life or have children or don’t want to die? Why try to feel more alive by trying stuff that could end your life?

The answer is not recklessness or endless adolescence or selfishness: guides try to beat the odds by being extra careful. They do a good job of it. Robson Gmoser was the fifth avalanche fatality in Western Canada this winter; the average at this point in the season is 12. There is no evidence he was careless. There had been very little fresh snow for four weeks, and while the skiing was lousy, Tom Raudaschl says, “the stability was very good. So there’s no way you could have triggered any of it.” Karl Klassen, the manager of the Public Avalanche Warning Service at Avalanche Canada, himself a guide for 37 years, agrees: “I’m not convinced that anybody would have predicted that large an avalanche at that particular time.”

The avalanche that killed Robson, in other words, was the kind that every guide fears – the “low-probability, high-consequence event.”

The rogue no one sees coming
“Most of the risk you can calculate, right?” Tom said over the telephone – he meant, by examining the snowpack and the slope and the terrain and the weather: the standard moment-by-moment assessment of risk that is the tireless routine of winter guiding. “But there’s always the rest of the risk you can’t calculate. It’s part of the job.”

He was talking about the non-negotiable risk that we all face, driving to work, crossing the street, taking a bath.

I might be wrong, but I had the impression Robson Gmoser went into the mountains because he had to. Maria Coffey, the author of Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure, who lost a partner, mountaineer Joe Tasker, to a climbing accident, called the urge “a search for transcendence” when I called her the other day. “It’s a moment everyone craves – when you’re lifted out of the ordinary into something sublime. It’s the moment when the traffic stops and the mind stills. Focus is probably one of the most satisfying experiences there is.”

Skiing in the high country, you have to pay attention. The confusing flurry of life, its extraneous detail, is clarified to essentials. You focus on necessities and proceed step-by-step; gradually, life below seems more manageable by comparison. It’s a form of liberation. The only catch is that, once in a rare while, for all the precautions, someone still dies, due to the incalculable risk.

Of course, if you worried about that possibility all the time, you’d never go skiing again. Robson would never have agreed to that. I wish he were still alive, but I’m glad I got to ski with him anyway. He showed me a way through the danger.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story implied that Tom Raudaschl at one point dug Robson Gmoser’s body out of an avalanche on his own. He was in fact helped by two emergency doctors and Mr. Gmoser’s co-guide. This has been corrected.

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Lead Like a Guide

To Be a Better Leader: Lead Like a Guide

By Dr. Chris Maxwell

This article first appeared in the November-December edition of the European Business Review

Business leaders often call on metaphors from mountaineering to inspire employees and boost organizational performance. Visualizing the summit, with its promise of uncharted horizons beyond, stirs the heart of the entrepreneur and manager alike. Setting a common goal, building effective teams, determining a route, overcoming adversity – all are essential components of both mountaineering and business.

It’s no wonder that firms often hire Mt. Everest climbers to give motivational speeches to their employees, writes mountaineer and author Edwin Bernbaum. “Just as Everest stretches people to do more than they thought they could, so companies want to stretch their employees to help the organization reach the loftiest goals, to be number one in the field, to provide the best product or service in the industry group.”1 Inspirational images like Mt. Everest signify to all employees the importance of the organization’s top-level goals. Just as for mountaineers, an organization’s vision must be linked with a clear route to the summit. With the vision and route established, what happens next is largely dependent on complementary leadership action. My research shows that world-class mountain guides demonstrate six key leadership strengths that help their charges reach for the highest peaks in challenging conditions, and that these same strengths have a significant impact when applied within organizations.

My advice: To be a better leader, lead like a guide.

The six leadership strengths of mountain guides:

Mountain guides employ six key leadership strengths. Guides are:

• Socially intelligent, quickly establishing positive interactions with clients
• Adaptable, matching their leadership style to rapidly changing conditions
• Empowering, providing clients a supportive space for growth and development
• Trust-builders, helping clients learn to trust themselves and their teams
• Risk-aware, operating with skill and safety in uncertain conditions
• Big-picture thinkers, taking a holistic view of the endeavor

With these strengths as a complement to technical ability, a guide actively models leadership in a manner that inspires and motivates a team to work well with others, adapt to change, focus on strengths, develop trusting relationships, build comfort with uncertainty, and take a broad view.

1. Guides demonstrate social intelligence
Guides consistently interact with clients in a manner that demonstrates social intelligence. Psychologists Chris Peterson and Martin Seligman, write, “Social intelligence concerns one’s relationships with other people, including the social relationships involved in intimacy and trust, persuasion, group memberships, and political power.”2People who are high in social intelligence, Peterson and Seligman say, are able to understand and manage emotion, accurately assess one’s own performance at a variety of tasks, act wisely in relationships, and use social information to get others to cooperate.

Guides understand that they must get to know their clients quickly, and must build relationships that will work as the challenges of the day get tougher. “I’m a good listener,” guide Jack Tackle told me. “I can tell within a few minutes how it’s going to go.” Guide Mark Newcomb says, “Over time I’ve developed a sense of what peoples’ skills and talents are after working with them for just a few hours. Then I can start to help them find their role in the process, help them gel as a team. I can also give them some things they can work on to round out their skills and apply their strengths.”

Christian Hoogerheyde, a Data Solutions Architect at Socrata, was a participant on a guided expedition that reached the summit ofHvannadalshnúkur, Iceland’s highest peak. “A highly-valued skill in the consulting world,” he says, “is the ability to interact comfortably with people in any type of organization, no matter their function, rank, or location. The ability to quickly establish positive relationships is crucial in this highly-competitive industry. Our guide, Halldór Albertsson, received a group of clients with experiences and backgrounds vastly different from his own, and he needed to garner their trust quickly.” Hoogerheyde says his guide was “skilled at establishing positive relationships with each of us, and this has served as a lesson to me every time I try to earn a new client’s trust. I now see firsthand how far social and emotional intelligence go towards achieving business success, and I am thankful for the example of a guide who showed me the way.”

“A highly valued skill in the consulting world is the ability to interact comfortably with people in any type of organization. The ability to quickly establish positive relationships is crucial in this highly-competitive industry.”

2. Guides adapt leadership style to match changing conditions
Guides employ a number of different leadership styles while helping clients to manage difficult terrain and reach for their summits. Guides try to help clients along a path of self-discovery and accomplishment, building on their strengths and coaching and teaching on the finer points, but guiding in the most severe conditions can quickly become a “follow me” or even “do it, now” process. Daniel Goleman terms the former an “authoritative” leadership style which provides a vision and clear direction, and the latter a “coercive” style, best reserved for a crisis situation.3

Expert guides toggle smoothly through leadership styles in a process that Doug Coombs, a ski mountaineering guide and two-time World Extreme Skiing champion, called “teach, coach, guide.” Coombs, who guided clients on steep slopes around the world, told me he wouldteach clients patiently before the day began or in the evenings once back at the lodge, coach clients to help them improve their technique while in the field, and guide them firmly, requiring compliance if conditions on the mountain were uncertain or changing for the worse. Guide Al Read says “You need to be aware of what the client is doing all the time. You have to take charge, but not in a military way unless things get really tough.” A skilled guide makes it all work seamlessly by assessing conditions and the environment, as well as the competence and disposition of their clients, and applying the right leadership style at the right time.

Mansi Jain, an analyst with McKinsey & Company, recently trekked in Patagonia with an expert guide. “My guide employed a variety of leadership styles,” she says, “such as collaborative when designing the trip and authoritative for issues related to our safety. His ability to fluidly adopt different leadership styles while always aiming to lead by example is the reason that I developed respect for him.”

“One of the most important skills consultants learn,” she continues, “is how to tailor their approach to the individual or group they are working with. I exercised this skill while working on an implementation and capability-building project with a bank. At the beginning of the study our clients were wary of my credibility and experience in the industry but were also in dire need of direction and effective execution. As a result I employed an authoritative leadership style; I led training sessions, proactively steered key discussions, and explicitly gave research-based opinions whenever possible. Towards the end of the study, however, I needed to ensure that the clients had the capabilities to have sustainable impact. I therefore changed my leadership style to one of ‘leading by example’ or ‘showing, not telling.’ I created templates for the clients to fill out, appointed others to lead training sessions, and pushed the clients for their opinions before offering mine. The clients were ultimately able to roll out and sustain high-impact changes to the company.”

3. Guides empower others to reach for their own summits
Research conducted by Josh Arnold and his study team revealed that critical leader behaviors in empowered team environments in three diverse industries included leading by example, coaching, participative decision making, informing, and showing concern/interacting with the team.4 Guides lead by example by climbing first and modelling behavior, coach towards self-reliance before and throughout the climb, ask for team input about comfort level, provide information on weather conditions and route, and show concern by building caring and supportive relationships.

“You really are building others up, inspiring clients to find in themselves what they might not have thought themselves capable of,” says internationally-certified mountain guide Christian Santelices. “Anybody who comes and wants to climb the mountain has to think that they can make it. Yes, occasionally a guide has to turn a client back from the summit, but more likely, it’s ‘If you push just a little bit, right here, you’re going to make it through this, one step at a time. You can do it.’ ”

Edmund Reese, VP and CFO, US Consumer Card Products at American Express, climbed the Grand Teton as a member of a guide-led team. “Having leadership responsibility for over two thousand people,” Reese says, “I’ve learned that to achieve our objectives and enjoy the work on the way to success, I must take the first big step. Generating confidence in the workplace to ensure that members know that success is attainable and there will likely be a solution for challenges to come has been an important focus. The leadership lessons taught both by the guides and the mountain itself has honed my focus on embracing the front lines. After the strategy is set, delegate authority and stay close to those most directly engaged with the work. If we build leadership in others, we develop a stronger line and an overall stronger organization. This approach has helped us take very bold steps and reach many objectives.”

4. Guides facilitate the development of trust
Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist, tells us that trust, “always carries the connotation of reliability in the face of contingent outcomes, whether these concern the actions of individuals or the operation of systems.”5 Trust, Giddens says, is “not the same as faith in the reliability of a person or system; it is what derives from that faith. Trust is precisely the link between faith and confidence.”

Guides facilitate the trust-building process from the very beginning, creating a positive learning environment by modeling behavior and providing support. “A climber is never alone up there, you’re always part of a team,” says guide Jack Turner. “The first ascents on El Capitan were done by a small group of climbers who wouldn’t go up without each other. They really believed in each other, and it was that trust in each member of the team that allowed them to get up there in situations where they couldn’t easily get back down. Their trust was based in shared experience, and a strong set of similar values.”

“Trust is not the same as faith in the reliability of a person or system. Trust is precisely the link between faith and confidence.”

John Sims, Partner, Managing Director & CFO at Snowden Lane Partners, reflects on what mountain guides taught him about trust on his guided climb: “If you don’t trust the person who has you on belay,” he says, “chances are that you are not going to get very far. You will slowly inch your way up the mountain face. The rest of your team are all stuck behind you, unproductive, until it is their turn to climb the same path, with the same trust only in their own abilities.”

“Without trust,” Sims says, “you will be painstakingly slower. The team may run out of daylight well short of the intended goal. And so it will be in business. Without trust in your teammates, you will only do as much as your faith in your own limited abilities will take you. You will not risk stretching your own expertise or experience, and you are unlikely to learn as much from those around you. Each person will revert to being an island, placing trust only in their own abilities and therefore limiting individual and corporate horizons.”

5. Guides manage risk in an environment of uncertainty
Uncertainty is a fact of life in the mountains. It is within this challenging context that guides have to manage all manner of risk. Guides know that risk is an inherent part of mountain sports, yet also know that clients actually want to experience the very real mental and physical challenges that climbing offers. Paul Asel, a professional in the venture capital and private equity field, writes, “Mountain climbing attracts those who enjoy stretching beyond perceived limits, and whether a deterrent or a welcome feature, risk is integral to the calculus of climbing when testing these limits.”6 “We offer opportunity to experience risk – that’s a big part of it,” guide Mark Newcomb says. “When people come to climb a mountain, what they are getting themselves into is a situation in which they feel uncomfortable and they may perceive a large risk. You can look way down below and imagine yourself pitching over the edge. When clients start to feel overly worried about the exposure, to the point where they are not doing the right thing, perhaps freezing up a bit, letting their fear get the best of them, leaning in to the rock too much, I try to break it down into really small steps for them. I might say, ‘That space is an irregular ledge, but it’s larger than the curb you stand on every day for the bus!’ “

Lyndsey Bunting, now a Senior Financial Analyst at Birchbox after a stint in investment banking and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama, made two attempts on the Grand Teton. She fell ill at 3,500 meters on her first try, but successfully led her team of climbers to the summit a year later. “The element of risk-taking applies to startups in particular,” she says. “In working at a startup there is risk and uncertainty, and correctly weighing those against the potential benefits can make all the difference. One of our guides said that you can’t hide on the mountain, meaning that every fall was public. He mentioned that for relationships where there was a clear hierarchy (for example, boss to employee) this experience was often most difficult for the person in the position of power. No one wants to fail, and it’s even harder when there is an imbalance of power in the relationship. On a more positive note, he mentioned that you could always tell a strong relationship when neither partner is afraid to fail – when someone isn’t embarrassed to fall, dusts off, and gets back up again with the support of their partner.”

6. Guides see the big picture
The lure of the summit is strong. Guides know that their clients want to reach the top of the mountain, but they also know that the summit as the only goal isn’t the best idea for anyone. Wharton School management professor Michael Useem writes, “Thinking like the CEO or the guide does not require brilliance, but it does necessitate strategic thinking – the ability to see ahead and see the whole.”7

To guides, the journey to the summit is not simply something to get through. Guides have learned to appreciate the uncertainty of the endeavor as something to be savored, and the best guides do what they can to pass this wise understanding on to summit-focused clients. “The outcome has to be unknown,” says guide Wes Bunch. “Most start to see the big picture as it comes along — it’s the journey that counts.”

“Business leaders who lead like a guide will provide the kind of leadership that supports the vision of the organisation and uplifts the people who work to make that vision a reality.”

Deborah Garber, a category manager at Microsoft who was a member of a climbing team on the Grand Teton, says, “Reaching the summit at work can mean a lot of things; executing a successful multi-million dollar marketing campaign that meets the metrics you established; learning an insight about your target market which you can use as a competitive advantage; or it can simply be coming in every day and contributing to growing the market share of your product. When I realized that I wasn’t passionate about reaching for the same summit any longer, I found a manager at work who could see the big picture and who put me on the path for my next adventure. He helped me figure out that I wanted to investigate a totally new function in my next job, and introduced me to four other leaders across the company. One of those introductions led to a new job that has turned into a dream role and has helped me progress more quickly in my career than I thought possible.”

Summary
World-class mountain guides develop and employ six key leadership strengths. Their work requires them to rapidly build relationships that will flourish in tough conditions, provide leadership that ranges in tone from coaching to directing as the situation demands, and to assess a client’s strengths and find ways to enhance them. Guides also help clients learn to trust themselves and their team members as they make the ascent, and to develop a sense of comfort in new and unfamiliar surroundings. Finally, guides inspire us to reach for the peak, but they also understand the meaning of the journey we are all on. Business leaders who lead like a guide will provide the kind of leadership that supports the vision of the organization and uplifts the people who work to make that vision a reality.

Download the digital edition of The European Business Review here.

About the Author

Chris Maxwell is a Senior Fellow, Center for Leadership and Change Management, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Chris holds a graduate degree in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and earned a PhD in Public Administration from the Pennsylvania State University. He can be contacted by Email: maxwellc@wharton.upenn.edu or on Twitter: @drchrismaxwell

References

1) Bernbaum, E. “Lessons from the top: Mount Fuji, Mount Sinai, and other peak paradigms.” Chapter in, Useem, M., Useem, J., & Asel, P. (2003) Upward Bound: Nine original accounts of how business leaders reached their summits. p. 170. Crown Business. New York, NY.

2) Peterson, C., & Seligman, M.E.P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. pp. 338-339. American Psychological Association and Oxford University Press.

3) Goleman, D. (2000). Leadership that gets results. Harvard Business Review, March-April; 78-90.

4) Arnold, J.A., Arad, S., Rhoades, J.A., & Drasgow, F. (2000). The empowering leadership questionnaire: The construction and validation of a new scale for measuring leader behaviors. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21; 249-269.

5) Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. p. 33. Stanford University Press. Stanford, CA.

6) Asel, P. “Scaling up: Ridge walking from Silicon Valley to McKinley’s Summit.” Chapter in, Useem, M., Useem, J., & Asel, P. (2003). Upward Bound: Nine original accounts of how business leaders reached their summits. p. 118. Crown Business. New York, NY.

7) Useem, M. “Thinking like a guide.” Chapter in, Useem, M., Useem, J., & Asel, P. (2003). Upward Bound: Nine original accounts of how business leaders reached their summits. p. 206. Crown Business. New York, NY.

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