The rescue this week of the 33 trapped miners from 609m underground in Chile has caught the focus of much of the world. This was reality TV being used correctly - it allowed us to share the joy, the excitement and the emotion of a truly miraculous discovery, sustaining and recovery operation over the past 69 days. Rescue rather than destruction of lives made such a change on news media around the globe. The globe rallied round and supported the Chilean people, with a fantastic positive outcome in the end. But what of the leadership side.
The full leadership picture will emerge over time I am sure, but there would have needed to be strong leadership (and it seems a good deal of faith) throughout the ordeal to ensure that there was not panic and distress amongst the trapped miners. First reports indicate their physical health is in remarkably good shape and it seems there was exceptional leadership by the shift leader Luis Urzua, 54. He took charge in the early stages before they were discovered with a clear metric of ‘stay alive’ and set up food rationing, water access and routines (see: http://www.news24.com/World/News/Shift-leader-helped-miners-live-20101014). This ensured that the trapped miners had hope built around structure and self-preservation as a team.
Above ground the President and key politicians and management supported the very clear metric of ‘get the miners out’ and were able to build a platform for positive messaging and national leadership visibility.
In an apparent further show of good leadership Luis was the last of the trapped miners to be taken out the mine - reflecting again his commitment to his team and giving a clear demonstration of his people values - and Servant Leadership. It will make an interesting study to follow the process to establish the sequence of exit - aside from the known ill health or hyper tense miners identified in the first groups. From the bits we can glean so far, there was generally good spirit kept up by the miners but we will need to wait for the debriefing reports and memoirs to be released to fully comprehend the dynamics and leadership skills that were prominent especially during the first 17 days before discovery by their rescuers. A wonderful finale for a fascinating human and engineering challenge.