Upside Down Leadership
- Mar 3
- 9 min read
Once a year there is a brief window in the last few weeks of May when the weather conditions are tame enough to make climbing to the peak of Mount Everest possible.
Over 800 mountaineers from around the globe gather on the lower slopes spending months preparing for their attempt.
And when there's a break in the weather there’s a mass scramble to the top.
Mount Everest is 8,849m high, roughly the level that passenger jets fly at.
What makes Everest especially challenging is that once you pass 8,000m you are in the death zone, where the oxygen is too low to sustain human life and your body starts to die.
With prolonged exposure to the death zone, fatigue begins to overwhelm you, frostbite is an everpresent danger, digestion becomes nearly impossible, you start to drown in your own fluids, and your brain swells affecting your ability to think straight and inducing hallucinations.
If you camp overnight at that altitude you can sleep yourself to death.
So climbers shelter below that level and attempt to dash to the top and down again in a single day.
On the 10-11th May 1996 over 30 climbers were making this final push to the summit when a fierce blizzard suddenly struck the mountain in the afternoon.
Within a few hours eight climbers were killed in what was the single biggest loss of life on Everest until that point.
The One O’Clock Rule
Three teams of climbers were fatally caught up in the storm.
The Adventure Consultants team, led by the experienced New Zealander Rob Hall, two other guides, seven sheerpas and eight clients (less experienced climbers who had paid to be supported up the mountain), were approaching from the South Col.
The Mountain Madness team, led by the American mountaineer Scott Fisher, also had two additional guides and eight clients, with eight supporting sherpas, were also attempting the same route.
And from the other side of the mountain, up the North Face, a team of three climbers from an Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition were advancing towards the peak.
There’s a universal rule of summiting Mount Everest, that you have to reach the top by the middle of the day.
Any later than this and the chances of being able to survive the descent plummet.
Rob Hall called it the ‘one o’clock rule’, and he made it very clear that his team had to reach the summit by 1pm (or 2pm at the very latest), or turn back for safety.
But on the 10th May, things were not going to plan.The teams of sherpas setting up the final ropes to the summit fell behind schedule, delaying the climbers' attempts by an hour and a half.
This setback combined with the number of people trying to ascend or descend the single-file route up the mountain created a series of significant bottlenecks.
Despite these issues and with the temptation of reaching the summit in front of them, Rob Hall, Scott Fisher and climbers from each of the three teams all made the fatal choice to push well past the sacrosanct ‘one o’clock rule’.
Hall and his client, Doug Hansen, were still on their way up to the summit at 3pm when the first snow started falling.
To the north the three members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police team finally reached a point they believed to be the summit at around 3.45pm.
At roughly the same time Fisher, who had become increasingly ill on the final stages of the climb and had fallen far behind the rest of his team, reached the peak.
Finally, at approximately 4pm, Hall and Hansen struggled their way up the final few feet to the top of the mountain.
As the three sets of climbers turned to descend the conditions deteriorated rapidly and oxygen levels suddenly dropped even further than usual.
At 5.30pm, in what was now a full-scale blizzard, Andy Harris, the Adventure Consultants guide, started back up the mountain to try and help Hall and Hansen.
Throughout that evening and night, in terrible visibility and conditions, the climbers stumbled around in the death zone trying to escape.
That night and the next day Andy Harris along with two of the Adventure Consultants clients, Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba, died from falls or exposure.
Scott Fisher died of exposure after managing to descend just 500m from the top.
And all three men of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police were lost, Subedar Tsewang Samanla (the senior officer of the three and lead climber), Lance Naik Dorje Morup, and Head Constable Tsewang Paljor.
Rob Hall was the last to die.
After holding on until the afternoon of the 11th and after being separated from Harris and Hansen, Rob Hall, weakened by frostbite and hypothermia, made a final satellite call to his pregnant wife back home in New Zealand and his final words were, “Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much.”
Hierarchy
Over 7,500 people have reached the summit of Mount Everest.
At least 344 people have died trying.
Climbing in the Himalayas has been tracked since the start of the twentieth century and those records provide a unique set of data that researchers can use to understand how teams of people operate in extreme circumstances.
In 2015 researchers used these records of 30,625 climbers from 56 countries across 5,104 expeditions to explore the impact of hierarchy on the success or failure of teams.
Mountain climbing is an ideal context to study hierarchy.
These teams have to make key decisions while facing extreme uncertainty.
They have to coordinate their efforts closely while responding to feedback and rapid situational changes.
To succeed they need to effectively communicate and coordinate at all times.
The researchers correlated the outcomes of the expeditions against the levels of hierarchy of the nations involved.
They found that teams from more hierarchical cultures were the most successful at getting climbers to the summit.
But when things went wrong the climbers in the teams with more dominant hierarchies were “significantly more likely to die.”
Hierarchy increases group coordination, but it also impairs performance by preventing low-ranking team members from sharing their concerns and highlighting critical errors.
Top-Down Failure
A lot of factors led to the 1996 Everest disaster, but the hierarchical cultures of the teams was a major contributor.
Rob Hall, who by all accounts was a calm and caring leader off the mountain, believed that in the final moments of the climb there was only one way a successful expedition could operate; “I will tolerate no dissension up there. My word will be absolute law, beyond appeal. If you don’t like a particular decision I make, I’d be happy to discuss it with you afterward, not while we’re up on the hill.”
This approach worked well when things went according to plan (he’d successfully summited Mount Everest three times before), but it also ensured that his support team and clients were essentially passive at the moment when they needed to be involved.
As Hall made his way up the mountain others in the team didn’t question his decisions in the death zone, a zone of impaired judgement, despite his actions being counter to all his previous guidelines.
Scott Fisher’s team operated in the same way.
Neil Beidleman, one of the Mountain Madness guides didn’t feel comfortable telling Fischer and others that they should turn back, because of his place in the expedition pecking order: “I was definitely considered the third guide, so I tried not to be too pushy. As a consequence, I didn’t always speak up when maybe I should have, and now I kick myself for it.”
There is little on record about the Border Police team, but as a paramilitary organisation they functioned as a hierarchical team with the most senior officer of the three leading the summit attempt.
The Strong Man Leader
The traditional view of a leader is the powerful authority who takes command and decisively drives their organisation to success.
The way we map organisations reflects that hierarchy, with the strong leader at the top of a neat pyramid of subordinates.
Decisions are made at the top and instructions are passed down to the people who execute the leader’s will.
Under certain circumstances this strong central command works well, like in tame environments (predictable, stable scenarios, where problems are clear and solutions are known), a crisis, or in a tribe.
We’ve spent tens of thousands of years living in small tribes and evolving to favour the idea of a ‘strong man’ leader.
When things get difficult we naturally default to the hope that an ideal and supremely competent commander will save us, succeeding through absolute authority as the central decision-making power.
But in today's more complex VUCA world having a ‘strong man’ commander almost always fails.
In this new reality it’s just not possible for anyone to be supremely competent and well informed enough to consistently make great decisions.
A commander can drive short-term action, but this structure also stifles innovation, disengages teams, and creates environments of fear that result in long-term issues.
“There are no simple answers to complex problems.” - Valerio Massimo Manfredi
Servant Leadership
The servant leader is the exact opposite profile to the directorial leader.
Robert Greenleaf introduced the idea of servant leadership, in an article written in 1970 called “The Servant as Leader”, and his later book “Servant Leadership: A Journey Into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness”.
As he describes it, “The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.”
In Greenleaf's vision the goal of the leader is to sacrifice their own needs to help and lift others, by focusing on empathy, stewardship, and the personal growth of their team.
A servant leader asks, “How can I help you thrive?” and works to remove obstacles, foster collaboration, and build trust.
The great examples of servant leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., come from civil rights movements.
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” - Mahatma Gandhi
“Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
But most of us don't lead civil rights movements, and like the 'strong man' leader, there are limits to how useful this style is.
The Continuum of Leadership Behaviour
The dictator style of leadership and servant leadership are extremes.
Three years after Greenleaf’s article, Robert Tannenbaum and Warren Schmidt published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “How to Choose a Leadership Pattern”.
They arranged leadership behaviours across a spectrum:
At one extreme is the dictator, relying on their position of authority to tell subordinates what to do.
And at the other extreme is the servant leader putting others first and empowering them to make the key decisions.
Across the rest of the spectrum are leadership styles that are more frequently used.
You need to use the right leadership behaviour, in the right context, at the right time.
“It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.” - Nelson Mandela
People often use servant leadership as a catch-all term for most of the right of this spectrum.
But when the term is used out of context it’s not useful, or aspirational, and it has historically undervalued the essential leadership behaviours that fall in that section.
One key thing that the right hand side of this continuum has in common with servant leadership is the way you work with your team.
The Upside Down Organisation
The top-down leadership approach is limiting.
It’s a way of expanding one person’s ability, but it’s slow moving and incredibly difficult to scale.
If you’re managing competent people in wicked environments and experiencing complex, ill-defined, issues with no clear solutions, situations like a startup, you have to flip the chart.
Now it’s a system of support and guidance.
The leader's role in these situations is empowering others, ensuring communication is high and guiding everyone in the right direction with vision.
When each person is effectively managing themselves the cumulative results are far greater.
The bottom-up approach gets the most out of many people’s abilities and allows for scale.
And when you're dealing with complex situations, the quickest way to improve is to get more people using their own initiative to actively address the opportunity.
So rather than servant leadership I use the term Upside Down Leadership.
“Most people think leadership is about being in charge. Most people think leadership is about having all the answers and being the most intelligent person or the most qualified person in the room. The irony is that it is the complete opposite. Leadership is about empowering others to achieve things they did not think possible. Leadership is about pointing in the direction, articulating a vision of the world that does not yet exist. Then asking help from others to insure that vision happens.” - Simon Sinek
Anicich, E. M., Swaab, R. I., Galinsky, A. D., "Hierarchical cultural values predict success and mortality in high-stakes teams", Psychological Cognitive Science Research (2015)
Krakauer, J., “Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster”, Villard Books (1997)
Burnette, J. L., Pollack, J. M., Forsyth, D. R., “Leadership in extreme contexts: A groupthink analysis of the May 1996 Mount Everest disaster”, Journal of Leadership Studies (2011)
Kayes, C. D., “The 1996 Mount Everest climbing disaster: The breakdown of learning in teams”, Human Relations (2004)
Elmes, M., Barry, D., “Deliverance, Denial, and the Death Zone: A Study of Narcissism and Regression in the May 1996 Everest Climbing Disaster”, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (1999)
Mangione, L., Nelson, D., “The 1996 Mount Everest tragedy: contemplation on group process and group dynamics”, International Journal of Group Psychotherapy (2003)
Greenleaf, R. K., “Servant Leadership: A Journey Into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness”, Paulist Press (1977)
Tannenbaum, R., Schmidt, W. H., “How to Choose a Leadership Pattern”, Harvard Business Review (1973)
