Racing Yachts & Winning Cultures

On a scale of 1-10 how psychologically safe do your team feel? On a separate 1-10 scale how dominant are you in your market space? I have a long-term obsession with the idea that true high-performance (of the sort which wins Olympic medals) might be diametrically opposed to the kind of open, tolerant, and safe workplaces we are all trying to build. Can there be true mastery without suffering? Is pain and sacrifice the only way to achieve greatness or is it simply the earliest proven path?

It's certainly not a sustainable path - the greatest teams tend to be built with a fairly short-term goal in mind - a World cup, a Champions League run, or a Superbowl. Does that mean that the route to glory will only include sacrifice and can only be a short to medium term thing? Or is it possible to create lasting success through a sustainable and inclusive kind of dedication to a cause?

The kind of single-minded focus required to be a top level sports professional seems not to leave time for any other high-level discipline either. Does that mean that teams just need pure specialists with incredible dedication to work on single problems? Does group work, particularly interdisciplinary group work, just lower total potential?

There are lots more questions we could ask because the subject is so central to the way we build teams and businesses. Answering this question correctly (if that is even possible) it's supremely valuable - how can I build a business that people want to work for and that continually wins?

Deloitte summarised years of research into employee engagement and making work matter. They suggested five key areas that define those workplaces which produce excellence through attracting and engaging talent. They call it Becoming Irresistible

Meaningful work: We enable our people to maximise their strengths and talents, and foster their entrepreneurial spirit. We encourage them to own their role, challenging them to stretch beyond what they thought possible and making an impact that matters.

Great management: We help our people reach their full potential through coaching, feedback and development opportunities.

An inclusive, flexible, fun environment: We want to create a great environment where the work of our people is recognised. We invest in their wellbeing and give them the flexibility to balance their work and private lives. They are continuously inspired by our diverse network of people and enjoy both working and having fun together.

Growth opportunities: We support our people with training, prepare them for new challenges, and encourage them to embrace career opportunities across our local and global network.

Cultivate open communication with leaders: We want to give our people a clear and compelling company vision that they can believe in. Inspirational leadership is key.

None of theses are technically difficult, all of them involve an outstanding philosophical commitment from leadership and the energy to maintain the momentum when times are hard and the temptation is strong to dip back into command and control.

The other phrase that isn't used here is winning. There is no reference to excellence, to competing or to "leading a market". The word challenge is mentioned twice, but both times it is in the context of personal development rather than organisational success.

So this could mean that Deloitte aren't out to win anything, they are happy with market share. It could mean they feel that winning has nothing to do with the average worker, as long as they follow the master narrative from the leadership they will win anyway, or it could mean that they lie to their applicants about key values and surprise them with incredible pressure when they join.

Your correspondent has never worked for Deloitte but I don't think it's any of those things. Instead I feel that Deloitte has managed to (philosophically at least) transcend the hustle that smaller businesses struggle with. They have understood that true and long term wins come from the ability of business to attract, empower and retain talent better than others.

If you are not focusing on whole-person support then you are both capping potential and decreasing your ability to attract and retain the sort of staff who are capable of doing the winning.

Contrast this with firms with a reputation for driving talent hard, places that pride themselves on hiring the best and then having them compete with one another. These businesses often succeed admirably in the short term. In the short term, the volume of work completed per hour multiplied by unsustainable hours per week can deliver spectacular and outsized returns. This kind of work requires sacrifice, and willing teams will give it. This level of sacrifice is unsustainable over a long span. A winning sports team might sustain this sacrifice for a season, an Olympic athlete might sacrifice for four years to throw a javelin furthest on a particular day, but in all cases there is a finite timescale - a goal at the end. We cannot build companies on the premise of sustained sacrifice alone. Our, rather, we can but we should not be surprised that they fail.

Of course, the opposite applies. If we were to try and build an organisation whose sole purpose was to maximise the ease and indulgence of its staff, not only would the business struggle to make any impact at all but I would argue it would struggle to restrain staff, lacking as it does a cause for them to fight for.

What Deloitte seem to have done, and what I encourage my clients to do is to maximise the ease with which your teams can do great work. Put in place high standards, set high bars, expect excellence, then hire people who will derive the maximum enjoyment from performing those objectives at high standards, and finally build support systems that do not add friction to the process.

I've talked about the first two at length, so this article will focus on the third part of the process. Building systems that give agency and reduce friction is of course about looking at all your internal processes on how work gets done but it is also about looking after the people who deliver the work. If you are not focusing on whole-person support then you are both capping potential and decreasing your ability to attract and retain the sort of staff who are capable of doing the winning.

This is not fluffy or soft stuff, it's not about creating a culture of indulgence, it's about attention to detail. Human beings enjoy challenge, but suffer under excess stress. Going after hard targets at pace at all times causes stress and diminished performance over time.

An inexperienced leader might see the results of a team working flat out and assume this performance is sustainable (or even improvable) and then be disappointed when performance dips. Often these leaders will revert to strongarm leadership - chastising the team for dropping their own high performance levels. This has the result of temporarily bringing performance back up to standard (panicked staff put in extra work for the short term win ignoring long term impact). But, much like improving acceleration by pushing the rev counter deep into the red before changing gears, the short term is positive, but at the expense of putting undue stress on the engine. Eventually the engine needs work. The harder the car is driven, the shorter the timespan between engine work.

Racing Yachts are designed to perform at an extraordinary level - for a single race. Few would question why that kind of performance would require a complete strip-down, analysis, and rebuild between events, yet we insist on trying to get human beings to perform at 100% with little rest. The proposals above should be viewed in the light of the kind of work, support and attention investment you would put into a high performance piece of machinery like a racing yacht or a Formula 1 car.

Because investment in people really can be an investment in winning. No matter how "fluffy" an initiative like "company-wide" mental health days, out of hours email restrictions, or "work on your own projects days" might seem - these are exactly the kind of initiatives which have a force multiplier effect for your business. Sharper saws cut faster than blunt ones. Teams who can take down audacious goals need recovery investment. Plus building these kinds of initiatives into the culture of your business is a great employee value proposition and an incredible retention tool.

Furthermore, a team that wholly trusts in the good intentions of their CEO to take care of them as people when they need it will be more comfortable with high expectations, rapid changes and periods of real intensity.

And finally, an organisation that celebrates the wins, uses learning from events to encourage individuals to develop their skills, and offers a range of pathways to contribute to the next project, campaign or mission will find people willing to get deeply into the next challenge.

A friend who sails told me about her one-time experience aboard a racing yacht. She is a capable and experienced sailor, and understands all the situations a boat might be faced with on the water. She was trusted for her knowledge, but open about her lack of experience.

As part of the orientation to the first practice run, the Captain took her to one side and explained his approach and philosophy. He needed her to understand some implicit rules about his communication style and the reasons behind it. The boat and the team were set up to win - every decision, action and movement would need to be executed at extreme pace in order to maintain momentum. Seconds and even tenths of seconds matter enormously in a boat race. The gist of the message was this "I need you to hear the missing please’s and thank-you’s in what I say on the water. I need you to know that, had we time, I would happily explain each decision and action and answer questions you may have about why or how. When I scream at you to grab a rope, trim a sail, or roll tack, you need to act quickly, for the good of the boat. But I would like you to know the please was there in spirit"

This model works for three reasons; firstly, the race is a specific length, and the full commitment required is for a timed duration. There will be recovery time. Secondly, the faith the team has in the Captain - the crew need to trust the intention of the Captain is to win the specific race, not for themselves (even though the Captain may get disproportionate credit) but for the boat and the crew. And thirdly, the long-term trust in the captain's abilities and his belief in them. This latter will be demonstrated in the training, development, feedback, support, development, understanding, encouragement, attention, and compassion they show their crew in non-race moments.

If racing yachts raced for years with no crew changes it is easy to see how this kind of pressure, intensity and demand would become a problem. The captain's kind intent behind his (almost certainly expletive-ridden) yelled demands would eventually be forgotten. The yelling would just become just yelling.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that people-centred environments need not sacrifice competitive edge. Winning teams can be teams that care for one another. Indeed care is not the limiting factor of performance over the long-term, but the enabler.

A high trust team full of bright, motivated, growth-minded people will make enormous sacrifices to deliver on challenging objectives. The secret to leading them effectively is to ensure the races end and the team get to recover, build their skills, and reflect on their learning before the next one.