Organizations are in an ongoing struggle to structure themselves in a way that can enable continuous change to occur. For large, mature institutions this is a challenge that has many facets to it, dealing with legacy infrastructure, mature and profitable product lines that are nonetheless in terminal decline, and perhaps most intransigently trying to instill a culture of collaboration, support, and resilience.

So, what can be done to develop capabilities in people? To change their mindsets to ‘can do’ growth ones, over ones where people are afraid of failing and therefore fearful to push themselves to the edge of their capabilities – and even beyond? The solutions to these enduring challenges do not lie in academic analysis, they sit within emotions that are felt viscerally.   Cathy Bessant, Chief Operations and Technology Officer at Bank of America, and recognized as the ‘Most Powerful Women in Banking’ by American Banker magazine in 2018, has been involved with many of these issues in the fast-changing world of banking, where technology is disrupting old structures with a vengeance and change is a necessary, and exhausting, constant. Having gained her BBA at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan she also retains a keen interest in what can be done to develop talent. Despite these high-flying career achievements, Cathy also has an innate fear of heights, or to be more precise of ‘edges’.

Scott DeRue, Dean of the Ross School of Business since 2016, does not have a fear of edges – having summited Mt Everest in 2013, one of many high peaks he has collected outside of his own fast-track business and academic career. What DeRue’s mountaineering experience has shown him is “how groups and teams work, how to build trust, how to communicate and how to make decisions as a group when, in some cases, your life depends on it. At the same time, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about myself. You learn that you’re stronger than you could ever believe, you learn a lot about resilience and persistence” he asserts.  

With these concepts as a background, shortly after becoming Dean, DeRue had the idea of taking a group of Michigan undergrads and a handful of alumni to climb Mt Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa at 5,895m, just shy of 20,000 ft., to share an experience where teamwork, collaboration, and resilience would be needed to overcome the challenges and fear the mountain presents especially to those with little mountain experience.   Kilimanjaro is well-known for the fact that to get to the top you have to journey through a wide variety of climate zones, starting in cultivated Tanzanian uplands and going through tropical rainforest, heather, and moorland, and then highland desert before reaching the high tops where it becomes an Arctic climate. And so, in August 2018 a group of thirty mainly freshmen and seniors, with a handful of sophomores and juniors, plus DeRue, Melanie Barnett, the CEO of Michigan’s executive education department, Cathy Bessant, and two other highly successful alumni, along with two guides arrived in Tanzania to embark on the challenge.

Aside from DeRue and the two guides, the expedition in terms of its location, culture, physical requirements, and skill sets lay far outside most of the members’ comfort zones. While Kilimanjaro does not entail any technical climbing skill in terms of ropes and equipment, its altitude and the duration of the climb do demand teamwork, stamina, and camp craft and allow extended time for your mind and body to ask questions of you.  

In many ways, it is these mental questions and the time and space afforded to the expeditioners to think about them, that posed the most challenging moments of the trip and taught the longest-lasting lessons. As DeRue reflects “it’s less about the mountain and more about what you’re going to learn about yourself and what you’re going to learn about how you connect with others, and build teams so that you can go off and do amazing things in the world. Mountaineering provides a wonderful laboratory for that learning to occur it can accelerate the process. Everyone arrives asking ‘Am I good enough?’, ‘Am I strong enough?’, ‘Did I train enough?’”. Melanie Barnett also reflected that an increasing number of the Ross School’s executive education clients are seeking for their participants to learn to be ‘comfortable with being uncomfortable’ and that this experience certainly required all the team members to manage that.  

While DeRue saw the significant learning experience for the mountaineers as being how they coped with these questions, the signs of that often do not surface for a while as people internalize and process them. The first obvious experience was how the team came together, and in particular to see how the two generations, the alumni and the undergraduates, would interact and gel. DeRue noted that while the alumni had clearly had extensive travel experience, none had experience with the kind of travel climbing Kilimanjaro required, of living in shared tents, cooking your own food, not showering for days, and carrying a pack day after day over rough and ever-changing terrain. So instantly there were points of mutual inexperience that brought the two groups together. Thomas Laub, who has just completed his junior year at Michigan studying Business Administration, Musical Theatre Performance, and Performing Arts Management, acknowledged that before they left he had some preconceptions about the two different age groups. He expected that while the undergraduates may have greater core residual strength and fitness, he also believed that the alumni would be better prepared and experienced.

While the undergraduates may have greater core residual strength and fitness... the alumni would be better prepared and experienced

This presumption turned out be pretty accurate. Both Melanie Barnett and Cathy Bessant admitted to extensive and rigorous training schedules before leaving for the climb, while Laub had extended his pre-training as far as the Stairmaster at the local gym. Most of the undergraduate group had had two or three opportunities to get to meet each other before arrival in Tanzania; the students had completed a StrengthsFinder assessment and then been randomly assigned to groups of five or six people that they would work in, both before and on the expedition. While Laub was clear that everyone on the climb got on well with each other, he liked the fact that there were these different dynamics within the group. “We had our existing friends, we met some new people who we naturally gravitated to, but then we had assigned core groups, with whom we would do everything from prepping in the morning with to discussing the next day’s weather.”  

The students had been asked to reflect on what their goals for the expedition were, beyond ‘reaching the top’. For some it was just being in a different place and culture, for others it was dealing with the physical and mental discomfort, for others it may have been more personal issues. Laub saw the identification and sharing of these goals as an important part of the process drawing the groups together and the discussion and sharing of the goals allowed people to build trust with each other. This, he realized later, was to be an enormously beneficial aspect of the week, as strength and morale flagged as the week continued, and the minds and bodies started to have those recurring questions being asked of themselves. Laub observed, “It’s harder to have doubts when the only option is for you to trust the people in front and behind you when you’re going up the mountain because so much of your energy is focused on just taking the next step.”  

For Mira Kaufman, who was a freshman participant at the time, her initiation into the expedition was a little different. Having been a competitive figure skater in her high-school days, she had relished the idea of getting back to some rigorous physical activity and engaged in a structured exercise program. However, she had not been able to join the orientation meetings and had also injured her ankle prior to the expedition. Her reflection on this is telling “to have this insane goal of doing something I’d never done before helped me to stay motivated [as a freshman] but it made me nervous and anxious, which I like because that means I’m doing something interesting. And so yes, I was used to that that mindset [when an athlete], you need to train, you need to get ready for something.” As a result, Mira only knew three others before she flew out, so like the alumni, she had to start the teamwork from a clean slate. She was helped by being part of a group who had their flight canceled and this adversity and reorganization threw five of them together, who became firm friends.   These various biographies are important because while they all had a common goal of reaching the summit, they all had very different motivations and backstories that provided their individual contexts. What also becomes apparent is that while some preconceptions they had were accurate, a lot of their expectations and presumptions turned out not to be so. The differences between the alumni and the students were less than many had anticipated, and as DeRue had foreseen, once on the mountain any sense of hierarchy between them disappeared in the challenging conditions of the moment, they were very much all in it together.

Once on the mountain, any sense of hierarchy between them disappeared in the challenging conditions of the moment, they were very much all in it together

As the days and altitude progressed on the walk-in and ascent, everyone adapted to the routine of camping and trekking though inevitably the pace of adaptation varied. The Michigan team was supported by a larger team of Tanzanians acting as guides, cooks and porters for the food and heavier equipment, without whom the expedition would have been very different, and who brought a further cultural element and richness to the week. What was common across all those I spoke to was that at some point their energy level and mental strength deserted them. Thomas Laub, who had seen himself as someone who was consistently cheerful, “I was very bouncy and enthusiastic. Since I wasn’t feeling the altitude, I put myself in a ‘Let’s cheer everyone up, lighten the mood’ kind of role” was then struck by the altitude on the final ascent. The final day starts in the middle of the night so you are not on the snow when it softens as the day heats up.   Having started at 2.30 am Thomas tells of how he suddenly collapsed: “I, who hadn’t felt the oxygen, hadn’t felt the elevation, pretty much the whole time, collapsed onto my back on a rock in the pitch black at around 4 a.m. There was a moment where I thought I was going back down without having made it and that just came out of the blue. You can’t know what it’s going to feel like until it happens. And so that kind of snuck up on me and hit me like a ton of bricks. So, I was lying on my back on top of my pack on a small break on the side of the mountain and the only reason I got up is because one of my climbing mates came up to me and told me to get up. He picked me up off the ground gave me a little snack and just kind of said ‘Here we go, let’s do it.’ And for the next hour-and-a-half, I was less walking and more swinging my trekking pole in front of me, it was zombie mode. It was kind of falling up the mountain, taking the next step until about an hour and a half later. I was fine.”

Key amongst the lessons she has taken from Kilimanjaro is the critical importance of having a common goal for teams to coalesce around

That final climb to the summit, in the dark and the thin air, was not just challenging for the students. Cathy Bessant recalls she was some 500 feet short of the summit and had effectively run out of steam, both physically and mentally. One of the African guides, who was in his sixties and not had the privileged education that the Michigan students and alumni had experienced, came to her and putting his hand on her shoulder, with great wisdom and care told her, “There will be no more crying. No more crying. You’re not helping yourself. You can do this. I’ve watched you for six days. You can do this. Now let’s get moving. No more breaks. No more conversations. 500 feet, let’s go.”  

Cathy has reflected on this moment and comments “If that had been my husband, he never would have said it to me. He would have taken one look at me crying and said, “You’ve done it. Look how much you’ve accomplished. You’re good. Let’s go.” Meaning, let’s go down. He wouldn’t have been able to help himself. That’s what he would have done to support me, and that’s probably what I would have said I needed. But no, the respected expert in the moment, this elderly local guide, telling the truth versus what I wanted to hear, got the very best out of me.” She continues “I think that’s so important, how we do our coaching as leaders, how we teach our leaders to coach. And you could see the students do it with each other. And it was very, very moving.”

Bessant has drawn a lot of such insight from the mountain experience since returning. Key among the lessons she has taken from Kilimanjaro is the critical importance of having a common goal for teams to coalesce around. The mountain, she recognizes was a very tangible, visible goal for people to unify around, and in business, the goals are often less clear, but the discomfort can be just as real. “In financial services, you would say that fintech disruptors make us very uncomfortable but unify us to be our best. I think that’s one example. In so many industries these days, growth comes from acquisition or merger.  

And those organizational situations, while very positive for shareholders, and very positive for the companies typically, are very uncomfortable for the people. I think there are lots of examples that are very different than the financial crisis [that can still be very unifying as a common goal]. Discomfort is one word. In that experience, we were all afraid, every one of us. Either afraid of the unknown, afraid of whether or not we’d make it, afraid to let other people down, and those are very much unifiers from a discomfort perspective too. And I think those dynamics all exist in an organization.”

Mira’s Crucible Moment in her own words:  

“The hardest moment for me happened during the summit day. I was really struggling to breathe; I was doing the pressurized breathing … I couldn’t tell you how far we’d gone or how much further we had to go because minutes can feel like hours and then it gets a little confusing but we were all in this snake line with our headlamps down trying to follow the footsteps of the person in front of us. And the thing that I remember most is I actually had no thoughts. I didn’t have enough energy to have the wandering thoughts that you have when you’re walking somewhere or your mind just goes somewhere else. I physically didn’t have the energy to do that.  

“And so all I did for hours was just repeat over and over ‘left, right’ as I looked at my feet; we weren’t moving fast and I wasn’t thinking fast and it was just all I could do. I couldn’t really even think about the next break or reaching the summit, it was just one step at a time. I got to this point when I just felt like I had to stop … as I really felt like I couldn’t breathe anymore.  

“And I stopped dead in my tracks, I’m hunched over with cold. I really truly felt like I couldn’t breathe. I think that was the scariest moment. But the night before Scott [DeRue] had said ‘It’s a mind game, it’s 80% mental at this point. But all of you can do this.  

It’s just whether you’re going to. So, I felt like I didn’t have a choice because I knew that going down at that point wasn’t going to be any easier, I was really scared and I’m not a very emotional person … but I was almost in tears because I was so fearful for how I was feeling and I really just questioned everything.  

“It was like every doubt that anyone could have when you take on a challenge like that, that I hadn’t really felt up until that point, just flooded through and I didn’t understand why I was putting myself through that. I didn’t understand why I thought I could do it and I was very scared and I was physically in a lot of pain because it was so cold that every time I moved it hurt my leg because I was so stiff and my hands had been throbbing, but then they got to the point where they were so cold that I couldn’t really even feel the core part of my hand. I could just feel the tingling in my fingers, and I remember a porter rushing down and asking me if I was okay, and I’m just like ‘Yeah, I’m fine, I just can’t feel my hands!’ He gave me a hand warmer and waited there for me and I just started walking again. I was way behind my group at this point and so it was scary too because now I wasn’t just someone struggling with the group, and I knew that I was in the final group also, so I knew that there was no one else behind me and I just kind of had to catch up.  

“I truly don’t know where the strength came from to take the first step after I stopped and I think that was probably one of the most powerful moments for me of the trip. I really couldn’t tell you where that strength came from or what I tapped into but I just started walking again and I wasn’t walking fast and I probably looked terrible but I just started walking and I didn’t stop and I caught up to my group and I kept walking when they were taking a break because I wasn’t sure if I would keep walking again if I stopped and I ended up actually going the rest of the way to the summit with just Dean DeRue and myself.  

“There’s this very narrow path to get to the summit that’s just ice on both sides of you and there’s only one person can go at a time. So, it’s a single file and it was just me and Dean DeRue for some time, which was also a really interesting and special thing to happen.  

“I’ve reflected on that moment so much since the climb and what it really means and sort of tried to put that into words. I think it was when people talk about what it means to make progress at something and slowly, slowly accomplish something that is a lot bigger than just you. I kind of thought this safety, this care for our well-being, and this care for each other that we had for this entire trip was sparked by this ginormous challenge that was scary and intimidating. And I wondered ‘Why can’t we bring that energy, that care, that generosity of time and of empathy to everything? Why does it have to be something that’s so scary?’ And now, after the trip, anytime I find myself procrastinating, or I just feel like I don’t want to do something or I don’t know if I can do something I think of that moment when I took that first step. I come back to that and I think what made us as a team able to get up that mountain was that we acknowledged how hard it was going to be and we decided we were going to take a step anyway, and that’s kind of what I did in that moment. I knew it wasn’t going to be any easier, but I decided to keep going anyway. And so since then, even if it’s something really small when I’m feeling uneasy or getting doubtful I sort of acknowledge that ‘oh, I’m feeling this way because whatever this thing is, even if it’s not hard for someone else it’s hard for me in this moment.’ And that it’s okay that it’s hard. I can acknowledge that it’s hard or intimidating but then I can choose to keep going anyway, and there’s something about that that I think does make you feel more powerful and like you have more agency, and I think that is just the biggest takeaway I had from the trip for sure.”

Scott DeRue had tilled the ground for this when he had asked everyone to think through what their objectives were for the expedition, and Cathy acknowledges this “The whole experience for me reinforced that good leaders understand the motivations and objectives of the people that they work with. Scott led us through an open set of discussions around, look, what is it that you want? Is it a great journey or do you want to reach the summit? Is it you reach the summit or everybody reaches the summit? … It was such an experiential set of things that we went through together that when you come out on the other side it reinforced the kind of things you read in textbooks, but then forget for a few years. Really understanding, and respecting the motivations of others is core to leadership development, and this experience made us do that.”

Cathy Bessant also has drawn a clear distinction between being ‘fearless’ and being ‘brave’ from her mountain experience. “I’ve really been thinking a lot about organizational styles and approaches and about how we all talk about fearless leaders when really I think what we have to be and what we have to teach and develop our brave leaders. I am not a fearless person. Most people around me if they’re using a cliché will call me fearless. That is the last thing I am. But what I have learned to be is brave…. Fearlessness is almost an arrogance. Bravery is another unifier… I think it’s what the whole trip and the process was a way of helping us learn the pattern of bravery. And I thought that was really powerful because I’ve now started to parse through people that I will see and I will say, “There’s a fearless person. There’s a brave person.” And you can see the differentiated performance and the differentiated ability to gain peer respect and followership in that regard.”  

Tied into these themes of ‘common goals’ and ‘bravery’ is the concept of ‘positive intent’, that Bessant sees as the core of great leadership. “The last few years I’ve come to the conclusion that assumption of positive intent is a really important part of successful leadership and that team expectation setting, people sitting down and talking, setting expectations for each other and with each other. How are we going to function? What are we going to tackle? What are we going to do when we disagree? Those two things, positive intent and team expectation setting... Scott really ran a very disciplined process that put the students, and toward the end the alumni, into a very open discussion about the importance of assuming positive intent. What are you going to do when you want to listen to your earphones because you’re freaking out and the person next to you wants to chatter? What are you going to do? In a moment that could either be annoying to you or relationship damaging, how do you make it relationship-strengthening? And it starts with that assumption of positive intent. And it’s a really important thing good leaders have and mediocre leaders don’t.”  

Bessant is adamant on the importance of leadership development, boldly stating that “my job, more than any other part of my job, is management development and leadership development so that we’re getting the most out of our people. And it is not a part-time job when you sit where I sit. I’ve got 75,000 people and 20,000 more contractors, so 95,000 people and the real difference there in how you run that organization is a great talent and great leadership, not of me frankly, but the 10 people who are my direct reports and their 10 people and their 10 people…. I believe today in a highly technical data-driven, lots of compute-power world, talent is the most important thing that differentiates successful companies. And so my management today has to be brilliant talent and leadership development drivers. The students have figured this out already.”  

Bessant looking back on the whole ‘expedition as learning experience’ concludes that “I think it heightens their chances for career success because they come in with an experiential base, but also a maturity level and an understanding around team dynamics and maybe just leadership overall and sphere of influence. A sphere of influence is not... It took me 15 years to figure out that sphere of influence was not hierarchical”. This all begs the question as to how we can replicate these learning experiences without having to take people on a two-week-long expedition up Kilimanjaro.

"I’m a dramatically better and more effective leader today than I was before I went on the trip.”

“I don’t think though that it can be the sort of kitschy event kind of thing, one day on a ropes course does not do this. It’s the sustained pursuit of a common goal that I think is so fundamental here….  

Number one, I don’t think it has to be physical, but number two, I also think that short-term bursts can begin to give people insight, but it’s really that sustained pursuit of a goal.” Intriguingly, Bessant notes that many of these experiences actually occur in the course of business evolution in any case. “When we have acquired companies, we talk about the dynamic of a transition team. And everybody comes from a different discipline in the firm, and there’s an immense amount of work to do. People go off and do their work, and the pattern is we meet at 5:00 in the afternoon and go through what we learned that day or what needs to be tackled tomorrow. And then we got up and did it again, and then met at 5:00, and we did that over a period of weeks. And people still remember transition teams that they were on and what they learned 20 years later.”  

Looking through this prism, the benefit of Scott DeRue’s Kilimanjaro expedition, was that 30 young people gained a perspective on handling teams, adversity, and an understanding of personal resilience and tenacity as well as the wisdom of elders (qv Cathy’s experience at the top of the mountain) which brings more value, from a personal development perspective, than a multi-billion dollar banking M&A project.   Let’s leave the final word with Bessant: “It was far more impactful than I ever would have expected…. I have found over my career that lots of different experiences are pivotal in terms of my own leadership development or my ability to develop good leaders. … I’m a dramatically better and more effective leader today than I was before I went on the trip.”