An America’s Cup sailor shares lessons for building winning business culture

There’s no shortage of former uni athletes who turn the skills and behaviours they learned on the pitch to corporate life. Count me as one of them — I depended on a football scholarship to the University of Oregon to get me into college in the first place, as my family lost much of its wealth before I entered high school. And I made a fateful decision in 1987 to work as a starting grinder for a sailboat competing to win back the America’s Cup after Australia broke a 132-year winning streak held by the New York Yacht Club in ‘83. Since then, I’ve specialised in team dynamics, and how to steer groups of people with varying skill sets towards a common goal.

Whatever I’ve learned from both my failures and successes in business since my early days burning shoe leather as a Xerox salesman stem from those core lessons, gleaned from my early athletic career, which showed me both who I was, in relation to myself, my environment, function and role needs. As I recently told Joe Sprange in his High Performance podcast, coaches come immediately next to teachers and parents as the most influential people in a person’s life. Thirty-six years later, these are the lessons I’ve used from them to help my teams keep their heads in the game.

Teams must have a clear purpose: Unless there’s a common vision everyone strives to attain, then everyone just does what they do, hopefully their best. (I’ve become known for calling this the ‘Blind Dog in a Meathouse’ syndrome.) Oftentimes, figuring out just what it takes to attain that vision is not just half, but the entire battle. Before starting Ability Map, my co-founder Kevin Chandler had created a billion-dollar staffing and recruitment firm and contributed to turning Macquarie Bank into a people powerhouse along the way. Even so, he recognised that even with his skill as an organisational psychologist and all the psychometric tools at his disposal, it wasn’t returning the expected value: managers said they wouldn’t rehire 32% of their candidates after they joined an organisation. And I can tell you now that 100% of your candidates need to pull together in order to race in the America’s Cup. There, it’s not just about the team, but the close quarters, the sea, the breeze, the competition, the fatigue and the anticipation and immediate response to the changing environment that all has to be taken into account. If your purpose hasn’t factored in the playing field itself, I’ve found, your players will flounder within it (aka: Blind dogs in a meat house.)

You need to know what you’re working with and what’s needed: Few if any teams are stocked strictly with A-players; sometimes, you have to play the hand that you are dealt. However, opportunities to excel exist if the team members know themselves and what the environment expects of them at any given moment. Context is key. When I was sailing at the America’s Cup level, my core job was driving the grinder winches to pull in the sails, but my job existed within a context. This context included anticipating what the trimmer, the guy calling how the sail needed to be positioned, might need. I also needed to understand many other components not directly involved in my job but critical to the ultimate success of my job and the boat like ensuring none of the lines had knots and that we were always free to make the next move.

Find the right balance between hard skills and soft: Some will reduce teams to hard skills: can they code? How strong are they? Yet there’s a lot of lateral capabilities that they will need to draw upon in order to succeed in ever-shifting environments. I was extremely strong when I stepped onto the US61 yacht to prepare for Fremantle, yet my prior sailing experience prior was limited to Grandad on Blythe Spirit and doing a handful of races on SF Bay with my stepdad on a Knarr. And unlike the football field — or Grandad’s boat, sailing in the America’s Cup was constant labor, with no 25-second intervals in between plays to recuperate. However, digging into my more intrinsic skills of understanding what’s needed — and yes, that is one of my strengths in my ability imprint — helped me to rise to the occasion. These innate capabilities matter, and it’s putting all of these pieces together with those hard skills and the larger environment that make the difference when it’s time to perform. And it also places Human Resources in a crucial role in ensuring the success of this mission. They’re the ones who must perform the alchemy between hard skills and innate capabilities that can truly help a team live up to its full potential.

Every win is a by-product of who your team is as people: I first encountered this concept in high school through my football coach Bob Miller, a profoundly devout man whose faith informed much of what he taught us. For him, our wins needed to come from the right place in order to sustain our souls and uplift our characters. Regardless of where you land on faith, it’s those innate human capabilities that stem from character that distinguish the good from the great. And when an entire team is being uplifted toward their personal and collective purpose, it is something to behold and a gift to be a part of.

Every three months or so, I’ll post quotes from Michael Jordan and Rudyard Kipling on my tightly held Facebook account which illustrate those capabilities. Michael often launched into his failures as a springboard for his greatest victories: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost over 300 games. Twenty six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and I missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Rudyard Kiplig’s “If…” also illustrates several obstacles necessary to overcome in order to achieve meaningful success. In both cases they display numerous innate capabilities, from displaying consistency to achieving plans and adapting to change, that prepare you for handling the biggest wins and losses in your career.

What matters most, I’ve found, is when a person’s innate capabilities match with their roles in life. When that happens, it can seem to them like a sort of magic, as if they’ve entered into a flow where the work they do all of a sudden matters and they see a commensurate reward for the effort they place into the endeavor. What they do is truly aligned with their personal purpose. And they don’t just leave that at work, either — they bring it back home to their families and to the community at large as well. My team never got to challenge as the defender at the America’s Cup. That victory, as well as all the ticker-tape parades and White House visits that came with it, would go to Dennis Conner and the Stars & Stripes, as we all know. They earned that right. But it showed me the sort of magic that happens when a team is aligned with their environment and their goals, and how that fulfillment can carry over into anything you do later on in life. And every person who works in a business deserves to know what that feels like.

Mike Erlin is the co-founder and CEO of AbilityMap, a next-generation people technology.