Six (wo)men in a boat: What made this team work so well?

Many people (myself included) felt I was brave and possibly a bit foolish setting off to row 3000 km around Great Britain in a tiny boat with five men I barely knew. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made and one of the most remarkable teams I've had the opportunity to be part of.

Good #leadership and #teamwork are critical to the success of any undertaking but it's amplified when the complex decisions you make every day could carry life and death consequences. Named #Albatross after the bird that travels great distances at sea, this was one of those rare teams that just worked from the moment we came together and was a complete joy to be part of, so it has been fascinating to reflect on what made it work so well.

Composition of the team

We were five men and one woman; 4 of us had significant #rowing experience; 3 had extensive #ocean experience; 4 come from the world of #entrepreneurship as business #founders and/or #investors; 2 had spent part of their careers in the #military; 5 of us had #expedition experience.

One way or another, we all had some prior experience of working in #teams to perform in intense and challenging situations or environments, so we each knew the basics of what it takes: discipline, respect, individual accountability and mutual support. This stood us in good stead but was certainly no guarantee of #performance.

Choice of #skipper

As we often learn in the #startup world, the most obvious #leaders (I'm going to coin the accronym MOL; by which I mean those with the loudest voices, strongest opinions and the energy to get things started) are often not the best leaders of the venture itself.

In a brilliant move, our MOL, the visionary and indefatigable William de Laszlo (central to forming the team and indeed the whole event) suggested Albert Farrant should be skipper (pictured together, discussing navigation).

Albert was the perfect choice - highly competent but humble, measured and consultative in his leadership style, taking the time to build #consensus in #decisionmaking so the whole team was happy with (or at least understood) each chosen course of action.

This enabled Will to thrive as the crew's main motivator, never letting us lose sight of what we were aiming to achieve. At the same time, it created an environment where everyone had a voice and felt able to question and challenge things they didn’t feel comfortable with. We had robust debates at times, but they were almost always productive.

Crew characteristics

[Contrary to lazy generalisations we women are sometimes guilty of making about strong, successful men ??] all team members possessed a high level of #emotionalintelligence and almost entirely lacked #ego (at least the destructive kind). We supported and looked out for each other at all times, and everyone acted with awareness of how our words and actions could affect one another – both positively and negatively. This set us up for success in a fairly extreme situation where:

• We were living in a very small, confined space (at each end of the boat 3 people lived for a month in an area smaller than a double bed)
• We were often exhausted from physical effort and lack of sleep, and each person experienced highs & lows at different points in the journey
• We had different levels of confidence, experience and risk appetite
• We had to make many critically important decisions and judgement calls every day, balancing progress, speed and safety within the context of varying winds, tides, water depth and distance from land.

Special shout out to Andrew Hodge , 3x Olympic gold medallist, who knew the power he held to lift spirits with a well-timed compliment on rowing technique and deployed it at all the right moments.

And to Darren (pictured) and Eddie who achieved the same outcome via cups of tea.

Clear expectations

Each crew member had clearly-defined roles & responsibilities with daily tasks to be completed (e.g. I was in charge of the scientific data collection and social media).

Our crew handbook also set out etiquette onboard to avoid situations where minor annoyance could escalate to resentment within the crew. It covered everything from shift changes to toilet (bucket!) use; although the recommendation to use the privacy bin bag over the head when sitting on the bucket was quickly abandoned.

Everyone took personal #accountability for their own jobs and no-one missed a rowing shift in the whole 34 days, so we had absolute confidence that everyone was pulling their weight. At the same time, we recognised that each person had different strengths and weaknesses. I never felt less valued as a crew member for being less physically powerful than the others; I worked as hard as anyone else did on the oars, had other qualities that contributed to our performance, and was respected for that.

Communication

Despite living in such a small space, we rarely moved from one end of the boat to the other because the deck was always occupied by rowers, and this meant it would have been surprisingly easy for #communication to break down.

We avoided this by ensuring everyone spent time on deck with each other.

The rowing teams (2 groups of 3, alternating on and off the oars every 2 hours) were changed daily on a continuous rota, with two crew members swapping teams each evening.

This gave everyone a chance to talk and gauge each other's feelings on important issues (and less important ones!) as well as preventing any sense of unhealthy competition or factions developing within the crew. It also meant each person had an equal number of days where they had their cabin to themselves in off-shifts, so there was a real sense of #fairness.

We meant to stop for half an hour each day to eat dinner together, but somehow we were always racing to hit a tidal gate / weather window, or were fighting to make headway against the tide / headwind, or the sea state would suddenly change for the worse the moment dinnertime arrived, so in the end we only really managed this on days when we were at anchor... #adaptability turned out to be key there!

Continuous learning and improvement

We certainly didn’t get every call right. If we had, we wouldn’t have needed to be evacuated by the RNLI from the storm in the Irish Sea (more on that in another post)! But we tried to extract every possible lesson from the things that went wrong.

Our post-rescue debrief was a long and detailed reflection on how we came to end up in that position, what we could have done differently, and what processes we could put in place to ensure it would end differently if a similar situation arose again (and we did put them in place, and used them). We avoided blame - made easier by the consensus-based leadership - but didn’t shy away from constructive feedback, which was taken impressively well (coming back to the lack of ego).

Of course there were times when we irritated each other, felt frustrated at the time it took to make certain decisions, hated being woken up with the 10 minute warning at 1:50am, cursed the sea, tides and winds and the people in the cabins who put the boat off balance by moving ('just having a pee' is no justification!). But these were all fleeting.

I feel immensely privileged to have had the opportunity to be part of this team and in the process to have learned so much that I'll carry forward into all aspects of life, work, and (hopefully) future adventures!

With thanks to:

The dream team of Albatrosses: William de Laszlo Albert Farrant Edward Russell Andrew Hodge & Darren Saunders

And the behind-the-scenes team of GB Row Challenge NatureMetrics Harwin University of Portsmouth London Youth Rowing Porvair Filtration Group Gill Marine Islandbridge and many others besides