In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set off to cross Antarctica. The ship was called Endurance. Bold name. Didn’t quite live up to it.
A few months in, the ice closed in. Slowly at first, then like a vice. The ship was trapped, then crushed. One moment they were explorers. The next? Castaways. Hundreds of miles from help, floating on shifting ice, with winter closing in.
Shackleton changed course, not geographically (they couldn’t go anywhere), but mentally. The mission was no longer conquest. It was return. Survival.
Photographs taken by Frank Hurley during the expedition.
He never said as much in rousing speeches. What he did do was rearrange sleeping quarters so the dissenters & trouble makers slept closer to him. The dogs on board were brought out, and dogloos (snow kennels) built to house them, and keep warm. He played cheerful songs at dinner. He tore pages out of books with portraits of polar explorers who had died in similar conditions, and burned them. Quiet edits to morale. Signals: we are not them.
One of his men, Frank Wild, later said, “Shackleton was the boss. No matter what happened, we always felt he had it in hand.”
That’s the line that stays with me. Not because he did have it in hand, he didn’t. He was improvising, one cracked boot at a time. But he created conditions where panic couldn’t spread and decisions, however small, moved people forward.
He made risky calls. He left most of the crew behind on a desolate rock while he sailed 800 miles in a lifeboat, hoping to reach help. He did. Then he came back for the rest. No one was left behind. Not one man lost.
Shackleton never reached the South Pole. By traditional metrics, the expedition failed.
But what a strange definition of failure that would be.
Maybe leadership isn’t about sticking the landing. Maybe it’s about what you do in the drift, when the plan sinks and the map is useless and everyone’s watching to see whether the light in your eyes is still on.
Leaders today are carrying their teams through a different kind of winter. There’s no frostbite, but the climate- economic, emotional, organisational, can feel just as chilling. Shackleton’s story still holds. For the way he reset goals. For how he kept everyone close. For the fact that no one was left behind.
If nothing else, it’s a pretty good compass.
We’d love to hear from you, what’s your version of leading through the cold? Write back. We’re listening.
