BEYOND MOTIVATION
Booking.com is one of my sponsors. My favorite thing about the company is the way they build their physical workplaces. Booking has more than a dozen offices around the world. I’ve visited several of them, and no matter which one I’m in they are all instantly recognizable as a Booking office.
The offices don’t look identical—each uses the culture of its home country to add a unique spin—but they do all feel identical. Any one of their employees could fly from Amsterdam to New York, swipe their keycard, and instantly be in a familiar, comforting, energizing space. They can go from being strangers in a strange land to being in the comforts of their own “corporate home.”
To me, being able to provide this kind of ambient inclusion for a team is a strong step on the path to high performance. A large number of Booking employees stay at the company for an unusually long time. In my opinion, that’s because of the culture.
Teams need to be on the same page in order to execute, and this usually means going a lot further than holding regular staff meetings on Wednesdays. Teams cannot be just a collection of talented individuals. They need to be fused together into something much more powerful.
I learned that the hard way.
THE BOAT
The starting line for the Talisker is in the beautiful town of La Gomera on the island of San Sebastian in the Canary Islands. It’s more than 5,500 miles from my home in California, but it was starting to feel painfully close as the days ticked by. I had less than a year to prepare for the race of a lifetime.
I knew the training would be difficult. I had already bid a sad farewell to sugar, gluten, and alcohol. I had upped my workouts to eight a week, taking only Sundays off to rest and stare at the ice cream I could no longer eat.
I had discipline to spare, but what I didn’t have was a boat. Fortunately, the rowing world is tight. I asked around and eventually found my way to Rannoch Adventure—a British company that specializes in the creation, maintenance, and stocking of ocean-ready rowboats.
Fresh off my successful sponsorship meeting with Carlisle, I put a call in to Rannoch. The voice on the other end of the line sounded like a cross between Russell Crowe and Idris Elba—the exact voice you want the guy building your boat to have.
That glorious baritone belonged to Angus Collins, who would be happy to build our team a boat (for a reasonable six-figure sum, of course). All he needed was a name to put on the side.
And I knew exactly which one to choose.
THE TEAM
Recruiting for a race like the Talisker is easier than you might think, but recruiting well is another story. I had three rules for who I would pick to crew this race. The first: make sure the people I put in the boat at the start of the race are able to walk out onto the dock in Antigua at the finish.
There’s no shortage of weekend warriors who think that rowing across the Atlantic can’t be much harder than the Tough Mudder they ran last July. More than a few of these guys reached out to me when word of my plans started to get around my small suburban community.
What I told them was thanks but no thanks. What I wanted to tell them was that every boat in the Talisker has to set sail with a body bag, and I’d rather not have to put them in it.
The second rule I followed was that all my rowers had to be American.
This wasn’t part of some far-right mission to Make America Row Again. This was about putting together the team that could generate the most glory. At the time I was recruiting, no American team had ever won the Talisker. Historically, the European teams have kicked our asses. Recruiting European athletes would give us a better chance to finish well, but the allure of captaining the first American team to win this race was too powerful to pass up.
Which brings me to my third rule: rowers in my boat wouldn’t be there to finish; they would be there to win.
As incredible a feat as it is, finishing the Talisker wasn’t a goal I considered worthy of myself. Maybe it was coming up short for the Olympics, maybe it was never winning a national championship at Sonoma State, or maybe it was not getting that puppy for my sixth birthday. Whatever it was, for once I didn’t just want to be good. I didn’t just want to be elite. I wanted to be the undisputed champion of the world.
At this point in my life, I felt like I was constantly looking at a wall full of silver medals. The Talisker was my chance to go for the gold, but I couldn’t do it alone.
For a race like this, every boat needs an engine, a person so strong and so consistent that he can pick up the slack of the smaller, lighter crew members if need be.
I met Nick Kahn when we were rowing for different teams on Boathouse Row. Even among rowers, Nick is a beast. He’s the kind of guy who makes you say, “Oh, shit!” when you see him in the boat you have to beat.
Nick is six foot five inches and 225 pounds of pure power. Back in his Philly days, he had rowed to great success for both Temple University and Undine Barge Club. He was living in Pittsburgh working for Google. He was also at the top off my call list for potential Talisker teammates.
I’ve never known Nick to back away from a challenge, and this was no exception. After one phone call, he was in. His why matched my own: We were agreed. We weren’t entering this race. We were winning it.
One down. Two to go.
Ethan
Ocean rowing is a master class in Murphy’s law. At some point, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Formulating a strategic route and a strong game plan at the beginning is important, but when the wind shifts or the ocean decides it’s had enough of you, you need something better than a plan. You need a fixer.
Ethan Davis had a reputation for solving problems. I had worked with him on more than a few leadership programs for my day job, and he’d earned my respect for his ability to think quickly and act decisively in a crisis.
On top of that, as the head of the Greater Houston Rowing Club, Ethan was no slouch behind the oars, either. He wasn’t as big as Nick or even me, but he was strong. As a trustworthy fixer who was light enough not to slow us down and powerful enough to keep us moving, Ethan offered our boat some much-needed utility.
Ethan sought me out when he heard about the race. I like people who take initiative, and after a few weeks of questioning and contemplation, he committed himself to the team.
Three seats out of four were now filled with traditional, experienced rowers. I could easily have filled the final spot with another of the same. But where’s the fun in that?
Tom
More than a few people whom I consider friends asked to join the team. These weren’t just thrill seekers, either. They were big, strong, successful rowers. But for one reason or another, I had to turn them away. All except one.
Tom Magarov has sharp, dark features—a product of his Eastern European heritage. He worked for the same leadership firm as I did, and together we had organized and executed events on almost every continent.
Tom and I have run on the Great Wall of China. We’ve swum with sharks in Thailand, ridden camels in Oman, and drunk ourselves silly in Bavarian beer gardens. We’ve talked, we’ve laughed, and we’ve shared stories. We were, and are, tremendous friends, but he wasn’t on my radar to crew an ocean row.
He’s tall—six foot four to be exact, the same height as me—but he’s skinny. Even though he eats well and exercises religiously, mass just seems to avoid him the way I avoid any music released after 1995. He had some rowing experience, but he wasn’t someone I planned on asking to join the team. Then I heard his why.
Tom grew up in Azerbaijan with his mother and younger brother back when it was still a Soviet Socialist Republic. His mother took good care of her two children, but he can still remember waiting in line for bread while watching the tanks roll by.
Eventually, his whole family moved to Denver so that Tom could wash cars and put himself through college. Years later, he had a well-paying job, his mother had become a successful nurse, and his brother had just graduated with a degree in finance and great career prospects.
Even before they moved, Tom had loved America. His dream was to move here and live the life he had grown up watching on television. Now that he was here, he had a new dream.
He wanted to say thank-you to the land that had embraced him so richly. He wanted to become a champion for his adopted home. He wanted to give it something it had never had before: a win in the Talisker Atlantic Challenge.
Of all of us, Tom was the weakest from both a rowing and purely physical perspective. But his why was just as strong as, if not stronger than, my own.
I’m a map nerd. I took a look at the coordinates for each of our hometowns and averaged the latitudes of each one. Once again, putting my college degree to good use. To my surprise, I arrived at a nice round number. Our team was complete. And then, we had our name. Latitude 35 was born. We could win; we would win. I was sure of it; I was convinced of it.
I was wrong.
LEADERSHIP LESSON:
MEASURE THE CHANGE
Due to the circumstances vividly described in the next chapter, this version of Latitude 35 was not bound for victory. At least not the victory we had in mind.
Some of those circumstances were out of my control as a leader, but not all of them. The most serious mistake I made was thinking that strong rowers would automatically become a strong team, that just sharing the same space and the same heading would make us a team.
Recruiting is like gambling. You do your best to make an informed choice, but ultimately the end result is often out of your control. A brainiac from MIT can win that control back by using formulas and statistics. Leaders have a tool to do this as well. It’s called motivation.
Motivation is the process by which a leader shepherds one or more individuals toward a common goal. This means different things to different leaders. Some try to motivate through fear, others through friendship, and still others through offers of opportunity. But I have yet to meet a leader who understands motivation the same way I do after taking this original Latitude 35 team out onto the open ocean.
What I learned out there is that emotion is not a practice; it’s a process. What most leaders call “motivation” I call “step one.” And it’s a relatively simple step.
Every person gets inspired by one of six motivators: time, money, security, challenge, purpose, or positivity. Here’s how they are defined:
Time: The possibility of creating more agency for yourself
Money: The possibility of earning a larger income. Managers need to stop acting like money is only a bonus. People like money, and they usually want more of it. Some want it more than others, and these are the people who are most powerfully motivated by the possibility of earning a larger income.
Security: The possibility of eliminating anxieties.
Challenge: The possibility of becoming a better person.
Purpose: The possibility of creating a better world for other people.
Positivity: The possibility of being in and adding to a welcoming, encouraging, and uplifting environment.
Everyone’s mind at work will be most directed toward one of these things. But that doesn’t mean the others are not valuable. Too many leaders try to slot their teammates into simple boxes. Dan is only in this for the money. Tanya is the optimist of the group. Carl likes his time off.
But, in reality people are beings of nuance. They ebb and flow, they alter their course, they change. The way you as a leader can go beyond “motivation” and push toward high performance is to become aware of those changes and measure them.
Do this exercise with your teammates: have each of them take those six motivators and order them on a piece of paper from most to least important. This gradient will be a much more powerful guide for you as a leader than a simple statement “I’d like to be promoted by the end of the year.”
It will also likely help your teammates become more attuned to their own mind-set, passions, and reasons for being in their job in the first place. As a leader, you cannot rely only on intuition or your own observations to decipher what is driving your teammates. This process is too important to be subtle. If you want a high-performance team, you need each team member to know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. And you need to know that as well. Which leads to the next step in the process.
If you were an average leader, you would stop as soon as you realized your teammate wanted more money. You would divert energy to putting that person on a path to more money and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. That strategy will work, but only up to a point. Even understanding a teammate’s full motivational spectrum will not give you all the information you need to understand and motivate them properly. That ability can be mastered only when you go beyond typical motivation and start measuring the change.
You have to repeat the gradient exercise at least once a year, if not more. You will find that the results are fascinating. Teammates who said they were most interested in getting more free time for themselves will suddenly be more interested in money, or vice versa. By capturing that change, you will inevitably ask yourself the question why? and the answer will be the overarching why that is driving that teammate.
Most of us can understand our own whys, but this process allows you to diagnose the whys of other people. The reason your teammate who was interested in time is now interested in money is because she got engaged last month and is eager to start saving for a down payment on a house. If you don’t take her through this spectrum more than once, you may be going out of your way to get her more vacation days when what she really wants is to be in the office working overtime.
You might think that motivation is something you do, when really it’s a collection of many things that you keep doing over time. People are constantly evolving, so as a high-performance leader you need to make it your mission to become obsessed with those evolutions. Those changes will reveal who your teammates really are and what they truly care about.
Once you have that understanding, you can begin to make the decisions and take the actions that leverage those team-mates’ emotions and make the best use of the gathering points you provide for them.
In building the first Latitude 35 team, I didn’t map out these motivational spectrums or take the time it required to truly understand the whys of my team.
That was a mistake. A mistake that almost cost us all our lives.
THE STARTING LINE
Aside from my wife, there’s only one “she” I would ever call truly beautiful. Except this she is made out of carbon fiber and infused with a healthy splash of optimism.
True to his reputation, Angus built our team an incredible boat. Everything from her colors to her state-of-the-art design to her name was a testament to the purpose of our team. She was American Spirit, and she was ready to row. And, after two years of training, so were we.
Nick, Tom, Ethan, and I had spent the last two weeks in La Gomera getting to know the other racers and preparing to launch. As we strapped ourselves in behind our oars, I couldn’t help thinking about my dad.
When I was a kid, he set up a simple net between two trees in our front yard. He walked 30 paces away and dropped a bucket of baseballs. If I really wanted to be a pitcher, I had to empty that bucket as many times as I could against that net every day. And I did.
This, I thought, would be no different. An ocean to cross is just like a bucket to empty. You can throw only one ball at a time. You can take only one stroke on the oars at a time. That, as my dad would say, is the key to becoming a champion.
I was torn out of this warm reverie by the sharp crack of a starting pistol and the thunderous roar of the spectators. My legs surged, my back engaged, and the American Spirit erupted toward the open ocean.
The race was on.
GATHERING POINT:
MEASURE THE CHANGE
Ask the questions: You must properly assess your team members’ motivations.
Study the gradients: You should know that these motivations will change as each team member advances in their career and personal life. What was once their number one motivator may not be a factor at all a year later in driving them to be more productive.
Act on the results: Your job as a leader is not to judge an individual’s motivations. Your only task is to learn their true motivators by understanding their gradient and how it changes over time. Then you can create a path that gets them those things while simultaneously pursuing your team’s larger goal.