President, Asia Pacific
Leadership
Peak Performance: How Climbing 7 Summits Shaped Two Leaders
In Conversation: Australian leaders Cheryl Bart and Esther Colwill discuss their experience scaling the world’s seven highest summits.
May 29, 2025
Beware the False Summit, and Other Leadership Lessons from Mount Everest
Korn Ferry Asia Pacific President Esther Colwill was just 13 when she scaled her first major summit: Mount Kilimanjaro with her family. Lawyer and company director Cheryl Bart AO has scaled the highest mountains on every continent with her daughter, conquering Mount Everest in 2008.
Both leaders are part of a very selective club: fewer than 500 people have scaled the seven highest summits of the world.
They recently sat down to discuss what each challenge meant to them—and how they’ve brought that resilience and discipline to the pressure of leading through adversity and transformation in today’s corporate world.
Cheryl Bart: Esther, how does the challenge of climbing the highest mountains compare to leadership pressures you deal with day to day?
Esther Colwill: There are two similarities I draw on every day. One is discipline—not just on the mountain, but before you even get there. It’s the work in being prepared, whether you’re presenting to the Board or your people at a Town Hall, you’re ready for whatever comes at you.
The other is the ability to anticipate. You have to scan the environment constantly. The first time I attempted Mount McKinley—it took me three attempts, it’s brutal—we made mistakes. The weather is so unpredictable. We got up onto high camp in really poor weather, we had a fall, and we had to get out.
I think about that need to adapt often given the challenges of today’s constantly changing market.
Bart: McKinley is beautiful and magnificent, but it was also the one I found hardest to scale. What did you take from that experience?
Colwill: You don't learn when things go to plan. In fact, if you don't have failures, you're just not as good.
I couldn’t have climbed Everest without learning those lessons. The mountains I failed at, where we had to turn back because the conditions were too hard, or we were unprepared, or there were challenges within the group, those experiences taught me the most.
Colwill: How do you put those lessons to work as a Chair and non-executive director?
Bart: I see discipline as a personal responsibility. As a leader, you have to find methods to take care of yourself. Not just for your own success, but for your team—personal responsibility is also a group responsibility.
You really need perseverance to keep going. The adrenaline kicks in when it gets exciting and dangerous, but you need to maintain that full focus with every step. So that’s the discipline to get through the boring parts of any climb.
It’s really about having resilience through those setbacks. Resilience is how you get back up, and the mountains teach you that lesson every single day. I think sometimes we are too protective of others—our employees or our children—which denies them the chance to learn and develop.
Colwill: As the first mother-daughter team to climb every summit, did that make you think differently about how you assess risk?
Bart: Risk is part of everything. A business will not thrive unless there is risk. It's the same story on a mountain, or in your personal life.
We called ourselves the ‘Forrest Gump’ of mountaineers. I’m a lawyer, she was studying medicine, and not in our wildest dreams did we think we would climb Everest. But we just took it one small step at a time. We’d already ticked off Kosciuszko, then we climbed Kilimanjaro, and then Elbrus was our first time on snow and ice with axes and crampons. And we just did another and another. And our training has taken us to so many fabulous places on earth, it’s all part of the journey.
We read every book there was about every mountain, worked through every disaster, and realised it's always something that you didn’t plan for. The wrong gear, the weather. You just have to control what you can control.
Cheryl Bart with her daughter Nikki at 8,000 metres
Colwill: We’ve talked about how climbing comes with a lot of unpredictability. How has that affected how you help organisations deal with unexpected challenges?
Bart: In the biggest disasters, I'm very, very calm. I don't try to apportion blame. I tell people let's get through it together, and then we'll have a look at the lessons learned and what we can do differently next time.
Colwill: That’s so true. On a climb, your guide is your leader, and the best guides are calm in a crisis. Critical failure points can come anywhere, but you all have to share the responsibility of getting through it. There’s no blame game.
Bart: And I think it’s the small things that can make a difference. I’m always watching people to see if they’re okay, and thinking about what might encourage them. Sometimes they just need some space. Or maybe they need permission to try something different, just a tweak.
Colwill: One of the things our sherpas did best was how they observed us, they knew by our movements how we were feeling. They might hand you a full water bottle so that’s one less thing you have to think about. Actions speak louder than words.
Bart: Thinking about those big challenges, how do you make the impossible feel possible? While it’s often about just getting to the next milestone, I found the worst struggle might be between camp two and camp three, not the last push.
Esther Colwill in Antarctica
Colwill: Yes, you’re getting up to an altitude and it’s just so steep and feels relentless. And the other big lesson there is to beware the false summit.
A false summit might mean celebrating the verbal deal before the money’s in the bank, or if you have a great quarter and then hit a slump two weeks later. You have to maintain that drive, you can’t get complacent.
Bart: It’s not over until it’s over. The biggest accidents on Everest are often on the way down, that’s when people make mistakes. You do not celebrate at the top, you have to keep focus.
Colwill: Cheryl, you were the first Australian woman to also complete the Explorer's Grand Slam. What’s one lesson you’ve taken from mountaineering into your life?
Bart: Go do it. If you see the mountain, go climb it. What are you waiting for? I still go ice climbing every year and it’s always a challenge, always uncomfortable. But I love five stars or five million stars. Nothing in between.
Colwill: The rest of the world sees the summit, but they don’t see everything that gets you to the top. And that’s what shapes us.
If there’s one thing I’ve taken from our conversation Cheryl, it’s that we’re not business as usual people. We like change, and we embrace the chance to build and adapt every day.
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