The Leader's Checklist by Useem Michael

Author:Useem, Michael [Useem, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Wharton Digital Press
Published: 2011-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

Leadership Triumph: Rescuing Miners in Chile

If AIG’s collapse is a story of unmitigated disaster, the 2010 rescue of 33 trapped Chilean miners is its polar opposite, a tale of unalloyed success. Regardless of outcome, I believe that close study of leadership at its worst and at its best is an essential source of fresh insights into what is essential for a complete Leader’s Checklist, and the miners’ rescue in Chile is certainly among the finest examples available in recent years. It reinforces the value of the consistent use of the Leader’s Checklist for guiding action—and underscores still another principle for the core checklist.33

Laurence Golborne made his mark as chief executive of Chile’s largest retail chain, Cencosud, an enterprise with more than 10,000 employees and annual turnover of $10 billion. In early 2010, the newly elected president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, asked Golborne to serve with him as the nation’s mining minister, and they took office together on March 11, 2010.34

Though he had initially questioned whether he should accept the government ministry in the absence of any prior experience in the industry, Golborne believed that his management know-how would more than make up for the lack of technical grounding. The mining ministry is “where I can contribute my management skills,” he had explained to his family. And now, without miner rescue experience either, he would eventually conclude that his management capacities were enough for him to assume responsibility for rescuing the 33 miners trapped in the Atacama. “Although I do not come from the mining world,” Golborne explained, “and was questioning myself what I could do in the mine—how I could help in the rescue given the magnitude of the problem—I understood I had to be there.” But getting to that point entailed a wrenching encounter.35

Golborne arrived at the San José mine, the scene of the disaster, two days after the cave-in, uncertain about the role he should play but determined to see the situation for himself. Later that same day, a rescue team returned from the depths and reported that the entire mine had become so unstable that nobody could safely enter most of it for any reason, let alone descending all the way down to the stranded miners some 2,000 feet below. A member of the rescue squad confided to the mining minister, “They must be dead,” and “if they are not dead, they will die.”

In the interest of transparency, Golborne decided to immediately disclose the bleak appraisal to the miners’ relatives who had converged at the mine’s entry. But when he noticed two daughters of one of the trapped miners weeping after he reported the dispiriting assessment, he lost his own composure and for a moment could not continue. “Minister, you cannot break down,” shouted one of the relatives. “You have to give us strength!” For Golborne, it became a turning point. The meeting with the miners’ families ended his ambivalence about whether he and the government of Chile should assume direct authority over the rescue, even though

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