Corner-Office Volunteers ; Executives Gain Leadership Lessons from Charitable Projects

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Eight high-level managers from UPS fan out for the day to a range of social-service sites in New York City. They read stories to homeless children, visit senior citizens, conduct mock interviews with teens. For four weeks, the clock-bound atmosphere of package delivery is replaced by the rhythms of a community's needs - and glimpses of how they might do things differently back at their own jobs in Iowa, Germany, and elsewhere.

While many firms encourage volunteering and even pay their employees to support philanthropic efforts, UPS and others such as Xerox and Cisco have gone a step further, structuring longer-term projects to hone leadership skills. It's a kind of …