With our next Tetepare Leadership Experience now only a couple of months away, I thought it might be a good time to address one of the most common questions we get about all our leadership experiences. That question is: “Why are these programs so remote?” A frequent related question is “Hasn’t the whole outdoor leadership development thing been overdone?”

It’s certainly true that outdoor and ‘experiential’ leadership programs developed into a fad for a while and, as with most fads, their underlying purpose was lost. In particular, many programs failed to properly connect the ‘experience’ with their participants’ organisational cultures and issues. The result was often about ‘feeling good or having succeeded’ but little in the way of lasting benefit to either participants or their organisations.

In the case of our leadership experiences, the choice of remote locations is quite deliberate. There are three major reasons why we take this approach.

First, we have found that taking leaders to truly remote locations is the quickest way to help them reconnect with, or balance, all three of their thinking ‘centres’: the head, the heart and the gut (or instinct). (Read more about that here and here.)

Our leadership experiences are all about achieving clarity of thought and in our view the only way to achieve maximum clarity is to find a balance between the centres. The absolute stillness of a place like Tetepare, a world away from the pace and noise of our participant’s regular lives, provides the opportunity to gain this remarkably quickly. In addition, we find that visiting these hugely contrasting locations gives our leaders a new reference point: when they return to work, they are able to revisit the feeling of stillness from time to time and cope with demanding situations more effectively as a result.

The second reason for taking leaders to remote locations, an in particular the specific locations we have chosen, is the perspective that these locations provide. One of the principles of the work of Global Leadership Foundation is that leaders can see themselves and their leadership in the context of a ‘whole’ system. This becomes much clearer when you are detached from the relative minutiae of a single workplace and exposed to global issues in real time. To see, as in the case of the Solomon Islands, a habitat significantly affected by logging and mining is to ‘fast forward’ past our local debates about jobs vs environment and see the end result of what could be considered to be unsustainable practices, first hand.

With the perspective and insight that this exposure provides, we find our participants much more open to discussion about the nature of leadership generally and their specific experience of it. Our leaders return to their work with a much clearer focus on the things they hold dear – the things that really matter – and a better understanding of the things that really aren’t so important.

The third reason for our use of remote locations, and – again – the specific locations that we use such as Tetepare, is the benefit that our work brings to these communities. Making a real difference to the planet, on a local scale through stewardship, is another of the principles of Global Leadership Foundation. Our leadership experiences provide the ideal opportunity for us to achieve this while also providing development for our leader participants.

The community benefit is realised in a number of ways. First, while our participants are in the experience, they do real, hands-on work with and for the communities. Each day is an opportunity for physical engagement, whether it is helping to count sea grasses for scientific audits in Tetepare or contributing to the releasing of endangered species in the South Australian outback.

Another, major, community benefit to flow from our programs is the sustainable financial support that the programs allow us to provide. On Tetepare, for instance, we currently sponsor three separate scientific projects (including the Rangers who work on these projects) which are only viable because of this support. We also sponsor scholarships for children of the Tetepare Descendents to be able to continue to attend school. And, of course, while we are on the island, the custom we provide the eco-resort (which employs cooks, housekeepers and guides while we are there) provides a significant contribution to what is really a very small economy.

For all these reasons and more, our choice of Tetepare and our other remote leadership experience locations is quite deliberate and a far cry from ‘adventure for adventure’s sake’. These are not faddish experiences: they are deeply moving leadership experiences you are unlikely to find anywhere else.