Climbing Kilimanjaro: how extreme experiences can impact leadership

There are countless ways to experience leadership, whether in a personal context when we lead our family, or in a professional context when we have a team. We can experiment and test new ways of exercising our leadership, taking classroom learning as a starting point and learning from the results. Resilience and emotional management are also constantly being put to the test and we often find ourselves in situations where we need to be resilient in the face of adversity or where we need to have the self-knowledge to react to situations with emotional intelligence.

Several studies have looked at how physically demanding experiences help us analyze how organizations and the people who are part of them work. Examples include climbing Mount Everest or rowing the Amazon River. In an article by Maslow from 1962, he already offers an inspiring reflection on how extreme experiences have a broad meaning, highlighting their importance for personal growth and the development of human potential.

In this context, we have developed the Peak Performance Leadership - The Kilimanjaro Challengewith the aim of offering a more complete and immersive training program, through which we believe participants will develop leadership skills through meaning and emotional management, both through meaningful content and through the immersive experience. The classroom program aims, on the one hand, to prepare for the climb up Mount Kilimanjaro to ensure that the experience is enriching and, on the other, to ensure that the experience is transferred to their personal and professional reality. The climb is the moment when you disconnect from your routine, expand your capacity to be open to new perspectives and confront your limitations and overcoming them. Your resilience will inspire other team members to face challenges with determination and optimism. Combining the characteristics of leadership by meaning with resilience results in committed teams, capable of facing challenges with determination and innovation, and employees who are fulfilled by the meaning their work gives them.