Rebecca Stephens MBE

On 17^thMay 1993, Rebecca Stephens became the first British woman to climb Everest and was awarded an MBE for her achievement. The following year she went on to become the first British woman to scale the Seven Summits, the highest mountain on each of the seven continents.

Rebecca’s early career was in journalism, working first as reporter and then deputy editor of one of the Financial Times magazines. It was writing for the FT Weekend that she was assigned to Everest and discovered her passion for climbing. She continues to draw on her experiences of the outdoors and business to write articles for The FT, as well as the Times, The Independent, The Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday.

Rebecca’s approach to leadership development is something refreshingly different from the norm. Many leadership courses on offer draw on academic leadership and organizational behaviour models. Indeed, Rebecca works with academics in this field and draws on many of these models – but her unique offering is drawn from her experiences in the high mountains providing extraordinary insight into the human condition, and this, combined eloquently with more academic models where appropriate, allows participants to explore leadership issues at both an intellectual and deeply emotional level.