The leadership lessons I learnt from a Dragon-boat experience
For the second year in a row, I find myself holding a paddle.
Once again, it’s a Dragon-boat team-building.
This time however, the people attending the event are not my direct reports like last year, but peers: it’s the leadership team of the division.
As I formulate this thought, I realize I tend to call “my team” the individuals that I lead, as opposed to any other subgroup I belong to, within the company. Doesn’t it happen to many of us? Or is it just me? This realization makes me aware of the pitfall of this mentality. Horizontal leadership predicates ideas like: screw the hierarchy and the functional silos, work broadly across organizations, holistically connect the dots looking at the bigger picture, share ideas and initiatives… there’s no real win if we don’t win together: not just the team, not the function, not even the company. Customers need to feel they won, too.
Bottom line: I must go through a paradigm-shift and start perceiving as my primary team the extended network of people I work with on a regular basis… or even on an occasional basis, as long as the interactions are generating value in the form of ideas or appropriate decisions for the company.
Back to the dragon-boat team-event. There is another substantial difference compared to last year: the instructor makes an extensive explanation of the rowing technique and how are we supposed to operate as individuals and as a team.
Here’s what struck me: in the professional realm of this discipline each team has its own “ideal” rhythm… for any given team, more strokes per minute do not necessarily create a faster boat. This entails that the pace itself is not the sole factor that determines success. Why? Because other elements play an equally important role: for example, the strength of the strokes and the coordination between team members, both in terms of pace and power.
As I clumsily try to parrot the movements of the colleague in front of me while wondering why on earth the one behind me constantly hits my paddle, I realize that the leadership lesson I’m learning from this experience goes far beyond the obvious fact that coordination between individuals is critical for the success of a team. Here it is:
Each team has its own “ideal pace”. There’s no “one-fits-all”.
The instructor is having us trying different paces (from “hop… hop… hop…” all the way to “hop-hop-hop”) until he finds what seems to be a decent one for us to operate as a team (which in our case means: the lowest possible risk of hitting each other with the paddle or soaking half of the crew).
We are indeed learning something. What if this activity was not chosen by accident as a team-builder?
What is the “pace” of a team in the business world?
It’s the “how” we want to operate.
You look at your competitor being successful in deploying a certain strategy.
You observe another team and realize how well they work together as a whole.
In both cases, the temptation is to believe that copying the same strategy, maybe enhancing it or adding some elements of novelty to it, will make the job. Might work, indeed. Sometimes.
However, with this approach you’re likely to miss an important point: your stroking pace is a function of the unique set of assets that you have and nobody else has: your people.
Every team is unique because every individual is unique. So is the ideal pace at which each team can perform at its best.
This is what the leader has to find in the first place: given the team I have, I must figure out the pace that makes us go fastest.
Finding the pace entails as well searching for the best possible configuration: who sits in the first row and who in the last? Who sits next to whom? How do I make each individual conscious of the whole?
In the corporate world, you can picture this as the way you structure your staff and how you want your functions to cooperate. This depends heavily on the people you have at your disposal.
Of course, you can have your “ideal pace” in mind and then look for the individuals that best fit to that. Indeed, we love building our own teams and shape them around us, our beliefs and our purposes. However, more often than not, you are asked to succeed quickly. In many cases, you are even blessed to get an amazing group of individuals from day one (Hey! There’s a subjective and perceptional factor at play here: why couldn't we embrace this as our standard approach when we take on a new role?).
We all know, making revolutions in your staff in a short time-frame often carries a huge risk of creating operational disruptions and confusion in the rest of the organization.
Will you be able to let-go of your idea of what the “perfect pace” should be, and rather sacrifice that thought to work with the team you have - and get the best out of it? Leadership is not about you. It’s about everyone else.
Are you willing to set your ego aside?
We tend to think of Leadership as a science. Gazillions of books have been written, not rarely contradicting each other or, at most, simply evolving theories and practical suggestions, over time. I like to think of Leadership as an Art.
For few people leadership skills come natural, to a certain extent. Most of the time however, these skills can be learned as well, although not at the superficial level that we often think of.
For instance “influencing skills”, intended as a mere technique to get what you want from people, are often crossing borders with manipulation… and even when they don’t, they will get you up to a certain point. So what is the deeper level?
Emphatic listening and the genuine will to find triple-win solutions (me, you, the world) will take you way beyond, in the long run.
As leaders connect more with the emotional side of people, the edges of the “science of leadership” become blurred.
Ultimately, we all need to go through cycles, successes and failures, joys and struggles. Every step, if consciously undertaken and singled out with gratitude, will make us better leaders.
Each of us needs to find out his very own creative way to connect all the paddles on the boat, so that we proceed harmoniously forward.
