When I met Scott Kress I had to remind myself that I was speaking to someone who had climbed Mount Everest and summited peaks in four other continents. He looks like a regular guy, but the lessons he’s learned about leadership and teamwork are no regular lessons. Not only did he conquer the world’s highest peak, but he did so in 2008 when the Olympics in China meant that Kress’s team had to overcome military blockades, chaos and delays.
In our most recent video podcast, Scott shares some of the lessons he’s learned about leadership and teamwork while leading climbing expeditions.
According to Scott, “It all starts with vision. You need a definition of what success is. If you can’t define it, you can’t measure it; and if you can’t measure it you don’t know whether you’re doing it or not.” Clarity of vision was a critical element to Scott’s team’s success on the mountain. Surprisingly, when he talks about vision, he’s not just talking about the vision to scale the peak, “On the mountain, it wasn’t necessarily our vision of getting to the top of the mountain, it was who we wanted to be as people, as a team. It’s the soft-skill-side of things.” One of Scott’s valuable lessons learned on the mountain is that if you don’t have your people side together, you won’t achieve your goal.
In addition to being a mountaineer, Scott is President of Summit Learning and Frontier Training and an Executive MBA professor (Scott was recently voted professor of the year at University Of Windsor Odette School Of Business.)
For more insights from Scott, view the full interview.
Title: Learning in Thin Air
Featuring: Scott Kress, mountaineer, facilitator, professor and President of Summit Learning and Frontier Training
Length: 6:12 minutes
Check out more podcasts from the OREA Centre for Leadership Development.
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