Life-changing trips offer lessons in leadership

Zoe Dryden (L) includes time for reflection in her workshops. Photo / Supplied

If you want to change your leadership style and the way you communicate with your team - or if you're trying to reconnect with your beloved teen before it's too late after years of working long executive hours, Second Base, a customised leadership and team-development programme, might be the one to help you.

You'll have to be prepared to travel. Zoe Dryden, who started Second Base in 2006, takes her groups to Nepal for the workshops. She has taken companies such as Coca-Cola Amatil, Maersk Line, Contact Energy and Port of Nelson on her programmes, which involve working on community projects in impoverished, rural communities, trekking in the Himalayas and undergoing leadership coaching.

The Nepal programmes are ideal for newly formed leadership groups as well as existing ones, Dryden says. The life-changing trips are about humility-based leadership and reflection and transformational leadership.

During the recession, wanting to work with more large corporates, the executive coach took her idea to Britain, where she has been helping senior executives at British Gas and the BGL Group. One senior executive from British Gas came back so changed, he refused to make sweeping redundancies.

"He was given a directive from British Gas to make mass redundancies but he pushed it back because there was no values alignment," says Dryden. Instead he put together a different plan for cost savings.

A New Zealand executive has become more involved in his local community since his trip to Nepal. "A forestry operator in Kawerau, he has been inspired to set the intention to transform his community and is running free counselling services to tackle P and domestic issues," says Dryden.

"He has removed his annual Christmas function to replace it with a Kids Day that offers free helicopter rides and bouncy castles."

It's a bigger-picture viewpoint, wanting to change and have an impact on your staff, she says.

Senior executives may raise an eyebrow when they meet the youthful Dryden, who is in her early 30s, but she has an impressive background.

At 21, after her marketing management degree at Victoria University, while she worked in consulting, she set up the International Rugby Academy, now run by Murray Mexted but in which she remains a shareholder.

For five years from the age of 23 she ran a container services company, Pinnacle Corporation, with a staff of 350 and depots in New Zealand and Australia. She has won fans over the years, including former Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung, who recommends her as a coach. The businesswoman also has an academic side - in 2003 she was invited back to Victoria University to teach strategic planning as an adjunct professor. On the holistic side, she's a trained yoga instructor.

Meanwhile, her leadership workshops have been recognised internationally. Last year she was a finalist for Best International New Business at the Stevie Awards in the United States.

For 2011, she has developed a new stream of programmes called Parent and Teen. This was triggered by a few teenagers accompanying their parents on a leadership programme and experiencing big breakthroughs on the trip.

After her latest course, three men returned saying they wanted to bring their kids back to Nepal.

"It is mostly parents who are corporate executives, who see the value of their children developing that connection with them before they leave home. A lot of executive women are wanting to do this too, to reconnect."

Their children are typically privileged and have missed out on some key lessons, such as humility.

This is not an inexpensive exercise. The 14-day executive programme costs $9500 a person plus fares. The parent and teen programme is $6500 a person plus flights.