EAT BREAKFAST

How do people actually work together? Google “management styles,” and you’ll find out that there are only four real types of leaders. Oops! Actually, it’s six. Yikes! Scroll a little farther, and it’s seven. No wait, it’s ten! And, if you’re brave enough to scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll find out there’s actually no such thing as a management style; we’re all just monkeys fighting over a rapidly shrinking supply of bananas.

But once all of the Myers-Briggs tests and “data-driven” charts are stripped away, all of leadership comes down to that one simple question. How do YOU, as a human being, convince other human beings to execute an action? And it’s not the royal “you,” either. It’s personal.

According to the Harvard Business Review, there were more than 23 million managers and frontline business leaders working in the United States in 2016. The writer calls this an excess. And this particular one is costing the US economy more than $3 trillion every single year.

Why? Why do more managers, more structure, and more bureaucracy add up to less productivity, shrinking revenues, and stymied success?

I’ve spent most of my adult life studying, training, and coaching other leaders. That experience has shown me very clearly why more managers equals less success in America. The reason is this: most managers don’t manage people; they manage the results those people can create.

Of those 23 million managers, I bet that only a small percentage are able to connect with their teams on anything other than business terms. That is why we athletic leaders are sought out by our corporate counterparts so often. Corporate leaders may not know what it is, but they know we are doing something they aren’t. Why can our teams summit mountains or hike across entire countries when theirs won’t even stay until 5:15 without demanding overtime?

My theory is that the majority of organizational leaders are operating under the misconception that leadership is a right-brain analytical process when, in reality, it’s a left-brain emotional experience.

Persuading people, driving the actions you need, won’t happen just because you wrote a big number on the whiteboard at the last team meeting. But it will happen once you are able to identify, understand, and leverage the emotions of your team. That’s my theory. But, like all good theories, it needs to be proven.

My proof’s name is Thomas Magarov.

DECEMBER 2015

The Atlantic Ocean

Days 10 to 54

Rowing a 30-foot boat in the middle of the ocean makes you question the meaning of existence. Doing it at night makes you feel like you don’t exist at all. When the sun sets, the few visual anchor points you had vanish along with it. You become a disembodied spirit with only the burn of your muscles and the rasp of your breath keeping you tethered to reality. Without that, you feel as if your essence would calmly drift away from the waves to join the swirling phantasm of stars in the shining canopy above.

Nights on the ocean are usually beautiful beyond words. But ours are not. Two men alone, rowing for 16 hours a day, sleeping every other moment, eating freeze-dried food, and drinking less water than the average housecat—it’s all somehow even more brutal than it sounds.

We see some amazing things as we continue toward Antigua, but mostly it is repetitive, boring, and excruciating. To make things worse, we seem to be rowing slower every day.

Tom had far less training than any of the rest of us did before the race. His skills were ready to shine when we had two other men on board, but this new arrangement is not set up to support his skills.

To compensate, I abandon our traditional two-hours-on-two-hours-off schedule in favor of a new strategy: Jason stays on the oars until he’s about to pass out.

That isn’t to say Tom has it easy. Basically every task on the boat requires two people to be done well. Even something as simple as pumping fresh water has become a nightmare.

The desalinator on our boat is essentially a highly pressurized tube that sucks in water fast enough to create the intense pressure needed to scrub the water of all that pesky sodium. The problem is that this has to be done manually. Basically, you flip a switch on one end of the boat while a teammate listens at the pump. As soon as he hears a click, he tells you to shut the system off immediately.

Going too short could leave toxic salt in your drinking water. Going too long could make the pump explode. Win, win.

When we started the race we had hoped to finish in less than 30 days. But as the sun rises and sets, rises and sets, and rises and sets, our progress seems to grind to a halt. At this point we’ll be lucky to reach Antigua in 60 days.

Thirty-two days into the race we are a little over halfway there. Tom and I have been on our own since day 8. It is getting to us.

The connection we felt when he decided to stay with the race feels a million years away. It has been replaced by a silent indifference. We barely speak. We barely look at each other. We just row, sleep, eat, and row.

I begin to contract Nick’s penchant for hallucination. On those long rows by myself at night I can swear I hear children crying, dogs barking, and people speaking. In my weaker moments, I sometimes talk back.

By day 40 we realize something has to give or we are going to break.

I’m not saying this is a Knife in the Water situation, but I do catch Tom staring at the same blade he used to free Nick just long enough to worry me. I’m kidding. Sort of.

Just like every organization in history, we are going through a crisis. But Tom fixes it with a single question.

One morning while he is preparing his standard pack of freeze-dried monotony, he pauses. Then he turns to me for the first time in ages. “What do you want for breakfast?” he asks.

It is such a simple, human question that it throws me off. After a full minute I finally answer. “Chicken risotto,” I croak. My voice sounds foreign and fragile.

“Sounds amazing,” Tom responds. “I think I’ll have the spaghetti Bolognese. Do you want coffee?”

I laugh. A real, honest-to-goodness laugh. “Hell, yes, I want coffee!” My voice doesn’t sound so fragile anymore.

From that day on, no matter what, Tom and I had breakfast together in the morning. We weren’t rowing, we weren’t pumping water, we weren’t scraping the boat for barnacles. We were talking, we were laughing, we were dreaming together again. We were engaging each other’s emotions.

After breakfast everything changed. Suddenly, we weren’t rowing to finish this stupid race. On that boat, in that ocean, the two of us became what every single team should strive to become: a group of people who are more afraid of letting each other down than anything else in this world.

We both rowed harder and longer than ever before. Not because we were stronger but because we were together. We weren’t rowing to prove the headlines about us wrong. We weren’t even rowing to shove it in Ethan’s face. We were rowing for each other. We were rowing for breakfast.

Every team needs something like this. Your team needs something like this. So what is it? What is the ritual you’ve created that gives each person on the team the time and focus it takes to engage the others as people, not just as coworkers? It doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be inventive. It doesn’t even have to be particularly interesting.

For us it was two guys eating bad food with good conversation for 20 minutes a day. Yours can be just as simple. Just make sure it’s consistent, convenient, and intentional. Emotion matters, so make cultivating it in your team a priority. The results you see won’t just speed you toward the finish line. They will be what get you across it.

After 54 days, 8 hours, and 32 minutes, the American Spirit entered the port of Antigua and completed the 2015 Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge.

This was a feat that more than one journalist covering the race had already called “impossible”—in fact, one of them even said we were selfish for even trying and all we were doing was risking the lives of the rescue boat that would eventually be dispatched to help us. But we didn’t just finish. We did a hell of a lot more.

After the evacuation, we were in third-to-last place. But after our breakfast moment, we were able to finish in eleventh place out of 23.

LEADERSHIP LESSON:
RECOMMIT

Everyone in the world who was following the Talisker that year seemed to think that it was only a matter of time until we dropped out. People set world records all the time, so even though we didn’t even win the race, I still believe there’s an element to this particular race that goes beyond being the best in the world. That element is, what happened?

What Tom and I put together was leveraging human emotion at its pinnacle. During breakfast, we rediscovered each other as emotional beings, and in doing so we created a small but very high-performance team. This was a team of two, but those two people had become completely interdependent.

Before breakfast we were afraid of the ocean, afraid of our failures, afraid of having to quit the entire race. But after we started our little ritual, our list of fears dropped to one: letting the other guy down.

The former fears were threatening to destroy us, but the latter fear began to fuel us. Every problem was attacked together, every stroke was taken with a little more ferocity, every shift got 100 percent of our effort. There was no way we would fail each other. And by not failing each other, we also avoided failing in the race.

All high-performance teams need diversity. Diversity provides access to different perspectives, and that’s exactly what this world needs. But high-performance teams also have to focus on what they have in common in very practical ways.

As a leader, this means re-answering the question why? for your team. That’s what breakfast was for us. Connecting emotionally like that was a daily reminder of why we were working so damn hard. Becoming a high-performance team means becoming interdependent, and becoming interdependent means giving your team these breakfast-like opportunities to connect.

Most leaders don’t like setting their teams up this way. When prominent executives leave a big company, the companies always portray it in the press as if it’s no big deal. But if losing a member of your team is no big deal, then you don’t have a team at all.

Think about a sports team that wins back-to-back championships. That’s incredibly rare, and three in a row is so rare that as soon as a team does it, it is automatically considered to be one of the greatest of all time. But why is it so hard to repeat? It’s because it’s hard to keep a team together. High-performance teams are so interdependent that if one guy gets traded or twists his ankle, the whole ship comes crashing down.

It’s important to note that you can have a team that does a great job of checking in with one another that still misses the mark of high-performance. That’s because the emotional component of checking in, not the practical one, makes the difference.

You can’t just have a weekly meeting. You need to have a weekly meeting that people look forward to and feel the need for in their hearts. You can’t just create gathering points. You need to create the gathering points that your team craves.

For us breakfast was a gathering point that was so rich that it literally changed the way we felt not only about what was happening but also about the way we performed.

The pushback I get on my ideas most often is this: well, that worked for you on the ocean but I’m just a [insert mundane job here]. Leaders want to know this: how do you re-create the emotional desperation of being adrift at sea when you’re in a comfortable office with plenty of free snacks? The answer is simple: you need to make things more difficult for your team.

This advice cuts against the grain of what most leaders are trying to do for their teams: cutting down stress and making life easier overall. But let me just say this: if your environment is mundane, it means you are not asking enough of the team you lead.

Gathering points become rich once they are needed, not once they are entered on a calendar. If there’s no challenge, who cares about checking in with one another? But when the heat is on, team members need to see one another. They’re desperate to. Checking in is the only hope they have of hitting this massive and impossible goal. So if the people on your team aren’t feeling the need to recommit with one another at this level, then as their leader you need to turn up the heat.

Properly leveraging human emotion means that a person is more afraid of letting their teammates down than they are of anything else. It raises the amount of sacrifice and suffering a person is willing to go through in order to achieve their goal by harnessing the power of the relational bonds that exist between all humans. That’s what breakfast did for us. It didn’t make us stronger or faster. But it reminded us that we were human.

Our priority shifted from trying to row a certain number of miles a day to remembering why we were rowing those miles in the first place. Re-answering the question why? for both Tom and me every morning became the most important thing in the world. If you’re a leader, it should become the most important thing to you for your team as well.

In reality, the process is 99 percent of achieving a goal; the outcome is just that final 1 percent. What you as a leader do and how you respond to your team during the process is what determines whether your team becomes truly high performance.

Simply achieving your goal or outperforming the competition will not be enough to get your team to recommit. You must find ways to explain and celebrate the process more than you explain and celebrate the outcomes you want the process to achieve.

You have to do this with discretion and always from the mind-set of leveraging emotions, not breaking them. But, trust me, humans want to make emotional connections, they want to push past their limits, and good leaders give their people the opportunity to do so.

JANUARY 2016

The Finish Line—English Harbor, Antigua

On the last day of the race, Tom is giddy, almost drunk with excitement. He laughs uncontrollably and nearly bursts into song when we finally see land. He has done what he set out to do. He has represented his adopted country with flying colors. His race is finally over.

I join in as much as I can. I smile and joke and congratulate him for this amazing accomplishment. He has done what he set out to do. But, for me, something is wrong.

Sure, I am happy to be getting off this damn boat. I am happy I’ll soon be eating food that didn’t come out of a packet. I am very, VERY happy to be reuniting with my wife.

But part of me—the part that sharpened when I saw Thor getting ready to throw that line—is not happy. That part of me realizes something that the rest of me won’t admit for several months, that in life there are moments to rest and moments to quit, but there are also moments to push.

I have just rowed across the ocean. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It has nearly killed me.

But I know I have to do it again.

GATHERING POINT:
HEALTHY FEAR

Emotion is everything: Properly leveraging human emotion means that a person is more afraid of letting their teammates down than they are of anything else. It raises the amount of sacrifice and suffering a person is willing to go through in order to achieve their goal by harnessing the power of the relational bonds that exist between all humans.

Stay close to your why: Re-answering the question why? becomes a leader’s top priority in any team that is trying to sustain high performance. That’s because maintaining that level of output for impossible goals is so difficult, a leader must understand that their team members are going to need to continually recommit themselves to the team.

Process over results: The process is 99 percent of achieving a goal; the outcome is that final 1 percent. What you as a leader do and how you respond to your team during the process is what determines whether the team can maintain their level of output. Simply achieving your desired goal or outperforming the competition will not be enough to get your team to recommit. You must find ways to explain and celebrate the process more than you explain and celebrate the outcomes you want the process to achieve.