Building Teams: Lessons from sailing and pop bands

A cracking sailing team and a high-performing innovative organization — Not as different as you’d think.

If you’ve ever spent a couple of minutes with me, you would know I’m a slave to the sea; an avid sailor who spends his weekends religiously competing in races. It’s one of the few activities that allows me to disconnect from all the ‘bs’ on land and escape with the people I share a common interest with.

The day before I took part in a major sailing regatta recently, I got sucked into watching Netflix’s instant-hit ‘Blackpink: Light up the Sky’ documentary during one of my many self-imposed stay-at-home-order nights. My inquisitive movieholic nature was instantly drawn to the promotional headline, which highlighted the success of this female K-Pop band — the first to play at Coachella. The series showcased the humble beginnings of each member, who worked their socks off for years without any guarantee of stardom. The raw behind the scenes struggles from their intense world tour really made you feel as though you personally knew the women making up this record-breaking global sensation. One thing was made abundantly clear, Blackpink is a tight-knit group, who deliver.

What struck me in particular was how each band member had their own distinct role and were clear on the personal contribution they were expected to make to ensure the band’s success. In their own right each woman was talented — a rapper, a dancer, a songwriter and a quintessential homegrown Korean sweetheart with a captivating singing voice — but together they became a force to be reckoned with. They didn’t want to disappoint one another, but more importantly their combined talents made them into the giant K-Pop machine.

In another one of my recent Netflix favorites ‘The Playbook: A Coach’s Rules for Life’, José Mourinho says: “It’s very important for a coach to understand that you are not going to teach them [Ronaldo, Drogba, Ibrahimovic] how to play football. You are not going to teach Ronaldo to how to take a free kick…You are going to teach them how to play football in THAT team.” Mourinho’s ethos was reflected in the narrative of all of the coaches in the mini-series. The notion of a team being “larger than the sum of its parts” is pertinent in both cases.

Going back to the regatta I touched on at the start of this piece, we sailed really well together and were delighted to win it. Afterwards I couldn’t help but draw parallels with our feat, Mourinho’s words and Blackpink’s success. We had a team, just like the other teams, and each team member has their specific talents. We all work hard to reach a goal that we all mutually agree upon, pulling on each other’s’ personal strengths by putting our best foot forward. Maybe that is it… success is down to putting your best foot forward, while making every effort not to let your team mates down in the process.

As most qualitative analyses come in threes, I thought about three factors that are common in my recent team experiences and the factors that make up a winning one. Do the best functioning teams bring together the best people for a particular role or is it the best ecosystem for talented individuals to work towards a common goal? Should a leader’s job be trying to keep his people (and fire the ones that don’t fit) or create an environment where everyone brings out the best in one another and complement each other?

My recipe comprises:

· Trust: Why should a bunch of strangers work together?

· Path to success: How to get there.

· A complementing team: What makes up this winning formula.

Trust: Trust up, down and sideways. For the purpose of this article, the idea that “a team needs trust to function well” is oversimplifying it — that’s a given. It’s important to dive into what that trust looks like between each member. Trust is defined as “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something”. In a high performing team environment then, this means:

· At the first sign of struggle, the rest of the team members rally around and help the team member in need. Nothing feels worse than looking around a team you are supposed to be part of, only to feel left behind and excluded. (Character)

· When the going gets tough, the team get going. Nothing bonds a team better than going through adversity together. It’s tough, but you always come out stronger if you pull together. (Strength)

· Trust the leader. Strong and decisive leadership is the glue that holds people, processes and systems together. Once there is any doubt about the leader’s commitment and competence, trust erodes, because the steadfast belief system for the cohesive achievement falls in peril. (Ability & Truth)

For the majority of the regattas, I race in, I would usually helm my own boat with my Welsh co-owner Michael, who is also a lifelong sailor. We gel well; our shared understanding and awareness of what makes a sailing team and boat successful are, to a large extent, the same. Our boat is a racehorse; fast, agile and can be extremely dangerous if you don’t know your way around it. Every time we are on it, we have to ensure every member of the team is matched to the right role for their skills and experience and keep everyone safe. This can be both physically and mentally exhausting during a tight race in high winds, barking orders to keep the team safe.

Dealing with mechanical issues and fixing the sail trim during a race, needs the utmost concentration from everyone and especially the helmsperson. A wrong move at the helm or an overlooked wind shift, can send several people overboard, which happened to me on a cold January day off the cost of Lamma Island in the Southwest of Hong Kong. Luckily, I had a lifejacket, and was able to control my breathing to conserve heat and energy and the boat was still nearby. However even long before this, I have always tried to sail with people I trust, and who would, quite literally, have my back when I’m sailing on their boat. When I trust the person and the team behind me, I can perform my assigned tasks at peace with dedication and focus.

This translates 100% to business as well. When you are in an organization or a team that you trust on all fronts, you are much more engaged, and probably perform to your best abilities. As further evidence into the importance of trust, Paul Zak, an American neuroeconomist, explains in his HBR article1, the close relationship between a person’s physiology and trust. In an experiment that saw subjects transact investment with one another in the hopes of receiving an interest back, Oxytocin hormone rose significantly in subjects both sides of the exchange due to increasing trust in one another as they facilitated more transactions. Oxytocin is the primary hormone for social bonding, also known as the ‘cuddling hormone’, which also regulates emotions relating to ‘prejudice’.

Paul also shared this: “…high stress is a potent oxytocin inhibitor. (Most people intuitively know this: When they are stressed out, they do not interact with others effectively.) We also discovered that oxytocin increases a person’s empathy, a useful trait for social creatures trying to work together. We were starting to develop insights that could be used to design high-trust cultures…”1

The same article reports “Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, 40% less burnout.”1

A team who trusts one another, will be more at ease with pushing themselves beyond their limit, reassured that the other team members have their back. They will protect one another secure in the knowledge that every other team member would do the same for them. They buy into the shared vision of their values, and keep their efforts focused on that north star. Cohesive trust is the enabler for success.

Path to success:

Sharing the same goals and employing a unified awareness and belief system of how to get there is just as important as who you have in your team. Using the sailing analogy; when you first board an unfamiliar boat, you realize the countless ways of trimming lines and utilizing certain parts of the boat. This is further exacerbated by everyone having a slightly different approach to sailing and method to doing things.

Sail racing is as much a mental test (for you and the team), as it is a test of the equipment you have. It’s a team effort with each member of the team’s contribution having dramatic potential to make or break the process of winning. And winning is a process. It’s a process of the belief system in the tasks that follow one another and the shared awareness of the capabilities of the collective, working in harmony through practical means.

According to a survey by Clear Company, a talent solutions firm, 97% of employees and executives believe lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project2. However, aligning the path to success through storming and norming can take an indefinite time if teams are left to their own devices. A true leader and a coach would be the catalyst for these human systems to gather around the most appropriate solution and devise a route that will lead the team to success.

Just like a football and a sailing coach exerting physically and emotionally strenuous effort into laying the long and arduous path to success; a band of young and multi-talented artists need the same type of guidance.

Early on in the Netflix documentary, we meet Teddy Park, one of the modern architects of the K-Pop fandom. Teddy is both the producer and the Oppa (오빠, colloquial usage for “an older brother”) of the girls. Initially starstruck by him, the group quickly gets comfortable under Teddy’s tutelage. He is one of the top music producers in Korea, having worked on top charting songs for the top K-Pop artists such as Big Bang, 2NE1, Taeyang and Se7en. With a proven track record and in hot demand by artists such as Lady Gaga, he presents himself as the beacon for the girls to follow on their path to success. They trust him, because he has accomplished similar types of success with other groups and has the right approach to do the same for Blackpink.

The same applies if I were to race on a boat that I have never set foot on before. My buddies and I would be keen to get up to speed with the boat and learn the ropes (pun intended) as soon as possible. Together we would focus on the weather, the competition and the racecourse to chart a successful race. An expert tactician, an Olympic racer or a top sailing coach would be the perfect addition to our ideal team. However, personally, I would feel even more at-ease with a good sailor with the right coaching attitude, who has won the same race on a similar boat. Where we lack skills, the coach would fill the gaps with his experience. He has seen it, done it, and won it. Experience sets an undeniable precedence, although it’s not the be all and end all requirement.

A complementing team:

Just as Jose Mourinho’s Inter, Chelsea, Manchester United couldn’t have won a single match with 11 strikers on the field, a boat consisting of only skippers or only bowmen would have a hard time winning a race against a multi-faceted team. We have to separate two concepts here — having an all-star team vs. an all-star team with skills that do not complement each other. The latter would doubtless create friction and differing opinions interfering with the collective decision-making process.

Managers of an upcoming female K-Pop band knew the special formula that would create success, and therefore were clear about their selection criteria. When they invested in the group of four and put them through a grueling but rewarding training/selection process over several years, they were laser focused on the role for each member. Each member’s talents complement their fellow band members’, making them unbeatable as a group. This certainly is no mean feat — it takes time to get a team to gel together and to realize you are not a threat to one another, but rather each other’s gateway to success.

In one of the interviews Blackpink’s Lisa, explicitly spells this out: “”We all have things that we’re good at, so we each have our own roles in the group. Since I’m a good dancer, I take care of all things dance-related, while Jennie initiates things, Jisoo makes the difficult decisions as the oldest, and Rosé is in charge of all the little details.”3 The candidness is admirable.

Once the harmony of strengths and weaknesses have been established and celebrated, little stands in the way of teamwork, mutual trust and support. The duty of a good leader should be to create an environment that nurtures, drives self-purpose, collective strength and a safe environment. Yet many companies and managers regretfully still compare people in their teams to one another and approach them from a one-size fits all perspective, disregarding the complementary value each member brings to the success of the overall business and team. The shortsighted manager singles out a couple of success metrics that are either universally accepted or dictated by the corporate vision. Often these fail to reflect the ever-changing needs of the current times.

In the book ‘The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization’ from Harvard Business school, team is identified as “…a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they are mutually accountable.”4

Surgically analyzing the complementary skills needed for a high performing team requires either a vast experience in the subject field by the leadership, or a high degree of understanding of the organization design. Organizational design is the process of aligning the structure of an organization with its objectives, with the ultimate aim of improving efficiency and effectiveness5. It’s also an art, especially when it comes to newly formed organizations and teams due to the lack of reference points for proven success factors.

In one of my recent projects, this came to serve as a proof of concept, when I was part of a team made up of a subject matter expert, a visualization expert, a facilitation and change management expert and a client relationship manager. As the project demanded a multi-faceted approach to solving daily problems swiftly, each member’s unique skillset and experience took the front seat several times during the daily battles. Complementing one another with the fire power we have accumulated from our past work and academic backgrounds, enabled us to help each other when needed. We never chastised one another for not having the same level of expertise in every area of the project. We recognized each other’s strengths and were aware of one another’s weaknesses. As a result, we were able to guide the project to success during challenging times, while reinforcing mutual respect and trust.

The most effective team leader knows the complementary skills and experiences required for success; can surgically devise organization design; can bring the right people together; and can inspire trust and confidence to permeate across the organization.

Thousands of books and articles have been written about the success human dynamics of teams in the field of business, sports and arts. It’s a complicated topic that encourages relative viewpoints to seek an easily comprehensible and adaptable explanation. However, the proof is in the pudding. We will have to test out the hypotheses ourselves and note the relative assumptions that go along with each experience. If I were to summarize my ideal way of forming a team, it would probably go something like this:

1) Create a “culture” of trust in every way:

Certainly, easier said than done, building trust across all levels of the organization and a project team will require significant transparent communication about the overall plan and vision.

a. Each member of the team should clearly understand and acknowledge the value brought in by other members of the team. There should be no lingering doubts or cynicism about the purpose of any one individual.

b. The team must be able to trust the leader to always have their backs and to be willing to do what it takes to get to the shared vision of the goal through investing in the right enablers (people, process, systems).

c. An honest and thorough self-reflection about the needs, shortcomings and limitations of the endeavor from the leader down to the operators is paramount. There is no shame in admitting to be lacking in specific skills or experience. Identifying what is missing and filling the skills gap can only help you towards your goal.

This has to happen quickly in a sailing race, when you have limited time to get acquainted with everyone on board and need to trust each crew member to be familiar and comfortable in their role. This is not simply to achieve a win, but also to keep everyone safe on the water. Some of my greatest observations of success and leadership examples have been on the water.

2) Path to success should be agreed by most of the group; it would be a wishful thinking to believe it would be accepted by all. Perhaps one of the most detrimental blows to the unity of a team is when a few team members start to sow doubt that forms cracks in the team cohesion. I’ve seen it many times, taking exceptional teams down. Leadership should layout the clear path to success, the target to be achieved, and leave no thorny details out. Path to success can be solidified by having a clear grasp on:

a. Process: A standard operating way of doing things that is agreed by the most qualified authority

b. System: Hardware and software that is most suitable for the operating model environment

c. People: Having or hiring the right people force to bridge the skills and experience gap

In a sailing race, the effects of path disagreement are exacerbated by speed. Everything happens fast, with not much time for discussions. Disagreement about the way to put up a sail can gain you seconds in a race and can decide the winner or send someone overboard if badly timed.

3) A complementing team: “I love it when a plan comes together” says John “Hannibal” Smith on The A-Team. Perhaps in our rapidly changing world, we should modernize it by “I love it when a team comes together”. A great leader realizes the potential gains by hiring people who they would have never thought of having on board before. This shows the expansive vision of that leader. If you are in the growth mindset and want to expand your business to new heights, hiring the same type of people will just reinforce the same way of doing things, and won’t really push you to see the different horizon you need to grow towards. A new and emerging position in the C-Suite has been “Chief Strategy Officer”; a multi-faceted executive with years of experience on multiple organizational fronts. A position like this brings viewpoints that expand the horizons of the C-Suite and connects the internal dots with the external journey.

Did we have a complementing team at the end? The team for our winning race was carefully selected, each person with a position matched to their experience and physical conditioning. While I was not part of the regular crew on the boat, for this instance, I was just going to be an extra body to help with jumping around between jobs due to my physical agility. I was happy to oblige because the leadership knew what needed to be done to achieve victory, and each team member was aptly placed.

To close it off, let’s recall what Steve Job told us: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. It makes more sense to hire smart people and train them enough, so they start telling you what to do.”

1https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust

2https://technology-signals.com/the-importance-of-organizational-alignment-and-how-to-achieve-it/

3https://www.cosmo.ph/entertainment/why-blackpink-doesnt-have-a-leader-a483-20201020

4Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (1993). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization. Boston: Harvard Business School.

5www.southampton.ac.uk/