Today I had a wonderful dialogue with one of our female sailing stars Arianne van de Loosdrecht from JAJO Team DutchSail. She sailed last month the Women’s America’s Cup in Barcelona. We, from DutchSail had five women selected out of 60 to represent the Netherlands in the Formula 1 of sailing. It was for the very first time in the history of the Cup (since 1851) that there was a special event for females.
I asked her what her key learnings were from sailing a boat at 80 (yes eighty, this is not a typo) km/hour. Four times faster than the wind is blowing! What did you learn?
‘The key thing in this boat is that there is so much happening in so little time. The races last only 15 minutes, the speeds are enormous and with the four of us in the boat we have to make decisions, in an instant and continuously. We all wore headsets to communicate with each other but it’s only one bandwidth. So as soon as you start to talk at the same time you don’t understand a thing.”
“So how did you solve that? You need to share all the information that the 4 of you are seeing, sensing and expecting to come.”
Everything I say must be relevant to make the right decision
“Yes, my key learning was to continuously asses if the information that I wanted to share was relevant for the others to perform better. If it would improve the decision we had to make. And if it contributed to winning the race.’
“So you had to bit your tongue?”
“Yes, I (and we) tend to communicate a lot. And we talked already more than most other boats and showed more enthusiasm. We had to learn to be really precise in what we were saying, be very specific and asses if sharing it would improve the results we were looking for. There are so many decisions to be made in such a short time that literally everything you say needs to be relevant.’
“Okay. Most management teams can learn from that. There is always so much chattering in the room that is pretty irrelevant for the decision that has to be made. People riding hobby horses without reflecting if something is relevant or not.”
“Yes, just like we did initially.”
Feelings are data
“Something else I learned is that feelings are data. Big sailing boats and the AC40 generate tons of data through all the sensors on board. These help you to trim (adjust the sails a.o.) the boat better. We learned a lot from sailing with the four of us in the simulator in preparation for the races. But in the boat we discovered that what worked in the simulator, based on data, not always worked at sea.”
“Like what?”
“For example in these boats you need to lower the windward foil before you tack. In the simulator it just works. In reality the foil needs to ‘bite’ in the water. It has to build pressure to keep the boat lifted above the water. That is something that you feel and after some practice can see as well. Another example is to get the boat on the foils. You need to feel the boat and sails, it’s not only steering the right numbers on the dashboard screens in front of us.”
“After so many hours of sailing as I did in other boats, I can sense and feel if the boat is at full speed or not. What I learned in Barcelona is how to act on these feelings. Take my feelings seriously and translate these to the right action. I’m not sure but maybe women are better connected to their feelings? It worked for us and we felt comfortable with it.”
“Nice, can you share more about being comfortable with each other?”
Give trust vs gaining trust
“Yes, I felt comfortable. Never before I sailed with only women. I was even not too interested in it. Now I felt that it makes a difference. Among females, at least in our team, feelings are more accepted and it’s more comfortable to share what you think is important. But the key difference in our team was that we give trust beforehand. You don’t have to prove yourself first. We know everyone is doing her best within her capabilities. We know that mistakes will be made but we don’t judge. Everyone feels comfortable and gives what they have.”
“That’s wonderful Arianne. I’ve experienced that when I receive trust beforehand. I want to live up to that and I start to act at a higher level. But in a masculine culture, men quite often think they need to gain trust. They seem to think that they first need to prove themselves before others will trust them. That leads to a lot of male-alpha behaviour in the boardroom. That’s not always helpful to improve the team performance. My colleague Oscar David has written a beautiful book about it: ‘the biography of trust’. A recommendation for everyone who is interested in building trust in teams.”
Thank you for all the insights!
In these series about teamwork I share key insights of the best sailors in the world and translate these to business. I follow the model of ‘high value creating teams‘ developed by Peter Hawkins my colleague at Renewal Associates. This blog is about co-creating and learning as a team.