John Oliver on Climbing Everest

One of our Bryant University alumnae, Lauren Reichert, brought this hilarious video to my attention this week.  In this clip, John Oliver offers a very humorous take on the wave of people trying to summit Mount Everest in recent years.  Given my research on the reasons why teams get in trouble on the mountain, I thought it would be interesting to many readers of the blog.  For more on my work about Everest expedition teams, see this recent article by Kyle Stock for Bloomberg, or this article from Entrepreneur magazine published in 2016.

Understanding Personal Goals to Drive Team Performance

Several years ago, HBS Professor Amy Edmondson and I developed a simulation to teach about team decision making.   The Everest Leadership and Team Simulation has become a common teaching tool at many business schools and executive education programs around the world.   Interestingly, several scholars have used the simulation to study interesting questions about team dynamics.  One such study was published recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology.  The study, authored by Matthew Pearsall and Vijaya Venkataramani, examined teams of undergraduate business students as they tackled the simulation.   The scholars wanted to explore the impact of team bonding and identification.  Does coming together as a team and engaging in some team bonding have a big impact when tackling challenging tasks?   After all, many organizations send teams off for bonding experiences of various kinds, thinking it will have a positive impact.  Specifically, the scholars were interested in exploring teams where members also had strong personal goals, as well as a common goal that they were trying to achieve together.  They recognized, as we did in developing our simulation, that balancing common and personal goals can be very challenging for many teams.

The scholars studied 56 teams of students, five students per team.   The scholars asked each team to complete a team identification assessment after working together for eleven weeks.   That assessment measured the extent to which members identified with the team, i.e. did they feel a strong a sense of belonging to the team.  The teams also completed a team learning assessment.  That tool measured "the extent to which team members were likely to learn about and understand each other’s goals."   One week later they engaged in an intervention with the 1/2 of the teams.  The intervention served as an effort to strengthen team identification and a sense of belonging.  Here is what happened:

A week later, the 28 teams in the high team identification group got a brief lecture about the importance of team commitment and identification for effective performance. They then competed in a contest to see which team could build a paper airplane that flew the farthest. They also were asked to create a team name and make a banner or flag for their team.

Then all 56 teams participated in the Everest Leadership and Team Simulation that Amy and I developed.   In the simulation, team members have some common goals and some personal goals that they would like to achieve.   The inherent goal asymmetry means that you can't accomplish all the team and personal goals.  Something has to give.  

The scholars examined how the different teams performed.  They also assessed the teams once again after they had completed the simulation.  What did they find?  Interestingly, the "high identification" teams did not do better than the other teams in the control group.    How about team learning orientation?  Did being oriented toward learning about one another's goals and interests help drive performance?  Yes, it had a positive effect, but not a large one.  The best teams scored highly on both team identification and team learning orientation.  You need both to succeed.  Yes, you need to bond with your team members and feel a sense of belonging.  However, that only helps if part of that bonding and identification process involves trying to truly understand the goals and interests of other team members.   At the end of the day, personal interests matter.  We succeed as a team if we can help individual members achieve their goals.  We can't simply ask members to put aside all personal goals for the sake of the team.   

20 Years Later: The Mount Everest Tragedy

Source: National Geographic

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the tragedy that took the lives of Rob Hall,  Scott Fisher, and other members of their expeditions. Many of you may have read Jon Krakaeur's book, Into Thin Air, which chronicled the events of May 1996 in detail.  Others may have watched the Everest movie that came out last year.  Still others have seen the tremendous documentaries produced by David Breashears about the events of May 1996.  

As most of my blog readers know, I've conducted extensive research on the decision-making processes of Everest climbers.    As part of that research, I've spent a considerable amount of time learning about the events of May 1996, including through multiple conversations with the leaders of the IMAX expedition team, Ed Viesturs and David Breashears.   Ed and David turned around, while the Hall and Fisher teams continued up the mountain.   Later Viesturs and Breashears helped rescue the survivors of the tragedy that took place when a blizzard occurred.  

What are some lasting leadership lessons from that tragedy?  

1.  Great leaders exercise restraint.   As David Breashears has told me, the best leaders don't simply order you up the mountain no matter what.   They listen to others' ideas before expressing their views.  They must be willing to gather input from a variety of people.  Unfortunately, he says, some leaders are not willing to listen to dissenting views.   The best leaders create a climate of psychological safety, where everyone is willing to speak up.   After gathering input and advice from multiple sources, the leader can make a more informed and thoughtful decision.  

2.  Great leaders don't attribute all their past success to their own qualities and choices.  Instead, they acknowledge that past success hinged upon favorable environmental conditions, a strong team to support and assist them, an effective support network back at base camp and at home, and a significant dose of good fortune.   When leaders begin believing that past success is all about their own excellence, and fail to recognize other contributing causes, they get in big trouble.  

3.  Great leaders recognize how cognitive biases can impair decision making, particularly in stressful situations.  They don't escalate commitment to failing courses of action in the presence of substantial sunk costs.   In other words, climbers don't simply keep climbing because they have put so much into the expedition (money, effort, time, and other resources that they cannot get back).   You can't look back; you must look ahead.  Don't keep moving forward simply because  you don't want to waste the investment you have already made.  Don't throw good money, or good effort, after bad!  Other biases include confirmation bias (looking for data that confirms what you already believe) and compensatory behavior (taking more risk because you know a safety mechanism or system redundancy is in place; in Everest's case, carrying supplemental oxygen can create a false sense of security according to Ed Viesturs).  

4.  Great leaders don't build rigid plans.  As Dwight Eisenhower once said, "Planning is everything.  Plans are useless."   In other words, be incredibly prepared.  Be ready for all scenarios.  Prepare meticulously.  However, once the execution of your plan begins, be ready to adjust and adapt to conditions on the ground.  Don't build a rigid plan in a turbulent environment.  Retain flexibility.  Don't just try to work harder to "get back on plan" when things start unfolding in ways you did not predict.  In fact, great planning is not about predicting the future.  It's about preparing for multiple scenarios that might unfold in the future.  

5.  Great leaders build a team around a shared vision, not simply a common goal.  What do I mean by that?  The Hall and Fisher expedition team members certainly all had a common goal: to reach the summit (we might argue that the more appropriate goal is to return safely to base camp).  The problem, though, is that each person was focused on their own personal attainment of that goal.  They didn't strive necessarily to achieve the summit as a team.  Contrast that with the shared vision of the IMAX team there in May 1996.  They strove to put a fifty pound camera on top of the mountain.  They wanted to create a great documentary.  It was not about individual accomplishment; it was truly a shared vision to create something extraordinary.   

For more of my work on the 1996 Everest tragedy, see the HBS case study that I wrote, as well as the California Management Review article that I published.  In recent years, I also co-created (with Amy Edmondson) the Everest Leadership and Team Simulation, available from Harvard Business Publishing.  

The New Everest Movie

On Friday, September 18th, the new movie - Everest - premieres at theaters across the United States.  The film chronicles the tragic events that took place on the world's highest mountain in May 1996.   Rob Hall and Scott Fisher, two experienced expedition leaders, died on the mountain along with several others.  Jon Krakauer wrote a best-selling book about those events (Into Thin Air).  I'm curious to see the movie, as I wonder how accurately it will depict the decisions and events of May 1996.   I'm looking forward to the film, as I have spent more than a decade studying this particular tragedy as well as expedition teams in general.   I've spent consider amounts of time interviewing climbers, including several people who were on the mountain when this tragedy occurred.  My work has focused on how expedition teams make decisions, and how leaders behave in these circumstances.  

My work on Everest expedition teams has included the following:

- Harvard Business School case study (and teaching note)

- Everest: Leadership and Team Simulation (a simulation for teaching about team decision making)

- California Management Review article about the 1996 Everest tragedy
- Great Courses lecture series - The Art of Critical Decision Making (Lecture 2)

- Ivey Business Journal article on how to avoid the sunk cost trap

- ILJE article titled  Teaching Business Leadership Using Non-Business Case Studies: The Mount Everest Example

I've also written about Everest climbing teams in my book, Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer.   Below you will find two videos about my work.  One focuses on the simulation, while the other discusses the leadership lessons from the catastrophe.  

What Happens to Hierarchical Teams in the Himalayas?

On this blizzard day, it only seems appropriate to draft a blog post about mountaineering in the Himalayas.  As many of my blog readers know, I've written in the past about why and how expedition teams behave on Mount Everest.  With regard to the infamous 1996 tragedy involving the Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants expeditions, I argued that the teams lacked psychological safety.  As a result, people did not speak when they had concerns about the teams' plans, climbers' health, and the mountain conditions.  I explained that the status hierarchy in the teams diminished psychological safety (though other factors also decreased psychological safety).  The failure to speak up contributed to the tragedy on the mountain in May 1996, though it certainly was not the only cause of the deaths that occurred.  

Now, in a new paper, Eric M. Anicich, Roderick I. Swaab, and Adam D. Galinsky have written a paper about expedition teams in the Himalayas.  They find that hierarchy has positive and negative effects on expedition teams.  It may help teams reach the summit, but it may also kill people.  In fact, that's exactly what occurred in 1996.  Many people reached the top, but a number of climbers died.  It reminds me of what mountaineers David Breashears and Ed Viesturs have told me repeatedly: getting to the top is optional; getting back down safely is mandatory.  In fact, many people die coming down the mountain, rather than on the way to the summit.  Thus, while getting to the summit may seem like an accomplishment of these hierarchical teams, I'm not sure that's the case.  Getting to the summit is not a success.   Getting back down safely is the real measure of success.  Here's an excerpt from the abstract of their paper:

Specifically, we offer empirical evidence that hierarchical cultural values affect the outcomes of teams in high-stakes environments through group processes. Experimental data from a sample of expert mountain climbers from 27 countries confirmed that climbers expect that a hierarchical culture leads to improved team coordination among climbing teams, but impaired psychological safety and information sharing compared with an egalitarian culture. An archival analysis of 30,625 Himalayan mountain climbers from 56 countries on 5,104 expeditions found that hierarchy both elevated and killed in the Himalayas: Expeditions from more hierarchical countries had more climbers reach the summit, but also more climbers die along the way.

RealBusiness Interview: Why Great Leaders Fail

Power Corrupts: When Leaders Dominate the Conversation

Francesca Gino, Leigh Plunkett Tost, and Richard P. Larrick have conducted a fascinating study on power and leadership.  For one of their experiments, the scholars used the Everest Leadership and Team Simulation that Amy Edmondson and I developed.   The simulation enables students and executives to learn by doing. They experience challenging team decision-making in a virtual climb of the world's tallest mountain.   Participants work in five-person teams in this virtual climb, and they face increasingly challenging decisions as they ascend the mountain.  One person serves as the leader.  Four others adopt pre-assigned roles, such as a team physician and team photographer.  

The scholars decided to modify the simulation, by asking some leaders to consider a time when they had control/power over others.   They asked those leaders to write about that situation, prior to conducting the simulation.   Other leaders did not engage in this "priming" exercise.  What did they find?   The "high-power" leaders (those primed to think about a situation in which they exercised power/control over others) tended to dominate the group conversation.  Their comments accounted for 33% of the air time during group deliberations in the simulation.   The other leaders only spoke 19% of the time!   Did the difference in leader behavior affect group performance?  It did!  The groups with "high-power" leaders achieved 59% of their goals (slightly below average in my experience running the simulation).   The teams without a dominating leader achieved 76% of their goals, a very solid performance.  Why?  The teams with a dominating leader missed key clues and did not share and integrate information effectively.  Gino explains, "Even subtle ways of making people feel powerful have powerful effects on behavior." 

Imagine, then, the effect that truly powerful executives have on group deliberations.  If this simple "priming" had such a significant effect, what is the impact of a dominating, charismatic, powerful chief executive in "real world" settings?

Our Everest Leadership and Team Simulation in the MBA Classroom

New version of Everest Leadership and Team Simulation released!

I'm very excited to announce that Harvard Business Publishing has just released a new, updated version of the Everest Leadership and Team simulation (Everest 2.0!) which we developed originally several years ago.  We are incredibly grateful to all the instructors who have adopted the simulation in the past few years, and who have taken time to offer us useful feedback.  We have tried to address many of the suggestions and ideas offered by faculty members and students.  We think you will really enjoy the upgrades! 

I'd like to thank the entire team that worked on the simulation as well.  I always enjoy working with my co-author, Amy Edmondson.   The team at Harvard Business Publishing is just terrific, led by Heide Abelli and Nicole Harris (Nicole, in particular, did much of the heavy lifting on the revision).  Finally, Michael Bean and his team at Forio do a terrific job of software development. 

By the way, for those who are interested, we have been working on a new simulation.  We have a fair bit of work left to do, but I'll post details once we are close to completion.

I've posted the official announcement about the Everest simulation from Harvard Business Publishing below, which contains a few details about the upgrades to the simulation. 

Harvard Business Publishing is pleased to announce that the Leadership and Team Simulation: Everest V2 is now available. This second release of the team-based simulation combines the proven learning objectives and storyline of the original with an updated user experience for both student and instructor.

Key Features:

• NEW Design—Updated visuals and navigation enhance the look and feel of the simulation while maintaining the principles of the original for continued ease of use.
• NEW Setup Options—Drag and drop functionality and the new auto-assign feature simplify and expedite team and role assignment.
• NEW Teaching Materials—The updated Teaching Note reduces simulation ramp-up time. A new Microsoft PowerPoint deck populated with your specific classroom results provides an effective and efficient tool for a classroom debrief session.
• NEW Performance Tracking—New debrief histograms offer role-by-role comparison of individual goal achievement across teams. Now you can also download results for multiple teams for more powerful results analysis.