Imagine racing a 70-foot yacht, darting left and right as you steal wind from your competitors, while gales flatten your hair back and spray whips onto the deck.
Now imagine doing this at work.
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At some companies, it’s required. In an attempt to foster cooperation in the office, some corporations are sending employees to Newport to learn how to sail. In a single day, the companies that own yachts can teach people how to race a 72,000-pound-boat through high winds, all while out-smarting and out-maneuvering opponents.
And along the way, corporations believe, they can teach workers about teamwork and leadership.
“The experience is one you simply never forget,” said Fred Clay, manager of development programs for Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, Conn.
Clay takes a group of newly hired engineers – most of whom have just graduated from college – to Newport each summer for a three-day retreat. The third day is devoted to sailing, and the group of about 25 is herded onto three yachts and drilled all morning on the basics of sailing, seamanship, and leadership. Each learns his or her job onboard.
Then, in the afternoon, they’re ready to race.
“They typically walk in as strangers,” Clay said, “and they come back as really great friends, ready to work together.”
CREW AT WORK on sailing yacht at sea.
The opportunity to sail, and race, the America’s Cup yachts docked in Newport is unique. No other city has as many such yachts (nine), and no other city has companies like Seascope Systems Inc. and America’s Cup Charters, which offer corporate team-building services.
It’s a business that started in the mid 1980s and has grown over time, as more and more companies realize that sailing is an alternative to mountain climbing, hiking, or other adventure team building activities.
“The business has skyrocketed in terms of what we’ve been able to do since the start-up,” said George Hill, owner of America’s Cup Charters, which owns six America’s Cup yachts. “Over the years (we’ve) developed a pretty wide customer base.”
American Express, BankBoston, Fleet Bank, and Johnson & Johnson are a few of them. They come to sample an experience that Hill, a life-long sailor, has had a large hand in creating. He grew up in Marblehead, Mass., a seaside community where he first learned to sail. He has since made a career of captaining and restoring yachts. Thirteen years ago, he bought his first America’s Cup yacht, the Weatherly – winner of the 1962 America’s Cup – in Seattle and sailed her through the Panama Canal on his way to Newport.
Soon, he began taking people on charter tours of the Bay. He then teamed with Herb Marshall, another yacht collector, and started offering the team-building service in 1990. It was a natural outgrowth of his charter business.
America’s Cup Charters and Seascope function similarly. Each trains novices and experienced sailors, and each fits the experience to the client. For example, at Seascope, companies select the level of intensity. Level one is a cruise, in which people participate voluntarily. At level two, everyone must help sail the boat but no leadership activities take place.
Then there’s level three, favored by Pratt & Whitney, in which all are responsible for manning the different stations – from the wheel to the ‘coffee grinders’ that hoist the sails – and for forming strategy. Students learn leadership in three stages: First, they are bombarded with technical terms. Then, they sail with almost no help from the crew – who nonetheless watch over the boat to be sure everyone is safe. Lastly, they sail with the ideal amount of instruction.
By then, they should know exactly how much communication is needed to run a team operation.
“They’re out there on their own and they have to figure out what to do in silence, and it’s very frustrating. But you know what? That’s life,” said Elizabeth Tiedemann, director of sails – not a misprint – and marketing for Seascope, describing step two in the leadership training.
“People really see the proper way of leadership by (observing) the improper way,” she said.
A boat is a special teaching tool. And boating companies do everything they can to make the most of the factors that make it so. For example, because of the yacht’s size, it is virtually impossible to avoid coming into contact with your crew mates. Companies, therefore, are advised to think carefully before picking their racing teams. Tiedemann recommends they put departments that don’t know each other well on the same team, or that they organize them so that people who need to cooperate better are forced to do so on the boat.
It’s also a humbling experience. Everyone is dressed casually. And almost everyone is just learning to sail. The company dispatcher might find him or herself giving orders to the president.
Best of all, Tiedemann said, it gets competitive. When the boat is leaning far off to its side as it ‘tacks’ left in and right into the wind, while your colleagues in the competing boat push ahead and attempt to steal your air, adrenaline spurs workers to fight it out.
“We’re breaking down these folks because they’re not in suits and ties,” she said. “And no one likes to lose.”
America’s Cup Charters builds teamwork and leadership by constantly challenging crew members to do things slightly ahead of their capacity. It’s what forces them to strive to improve. And when they’re racing, everything they’ve learned is tested.
“(Sailing) a boat requires the participation of all the people on board,” Hill said. “When you add a second boat you have a model of the marketplace, where someone else is out there trying to do it better and faster. It’s one thing to get along as a group, but it’s another thing to do it under pressure.”
The sailing experience, which goes for $1,300 per boat per half day, $1,800 for a full day, is cheap compared to other kinds of team-building activities Pratt & Whitney has done, such as rock climbing, Clay said.
Thus, the existence of such a service is a good selling point for Newport when companies are considering the city for their corporate retreats, said Robert Rosenberg, president of the Newport Convention & Visitors Bureau.
“It’s something that’s getting out in the marketplace and seems to be extremely popular with meeting planners,” Rosenberg said. “That whole area (of boating) is a tremendous marketing tool for us.”
But before you book your boats this season – which begins in late March and ends in November – be sure your team-building activities are backed by solid business strategies that use teams to better the bottom line, warns Anna VerSteeg, president and founder of Competitive Solutions Inc., a Raleigh, N.C. based company that implements team-building strategies for companies like Kellogg Co., Harley-Davidson, and the U.S. Army.
VerSteeg’s philosophy is that companies must build teams from the top and work their way down, while holding employees accountable at weekly team meetings that deal with the company strategies.
This is the kind of daily teamwork that needs to be in place for activities like sailing or rock climbing to be beneficial, she said.
“I think they (excursions) can have value,” she said. But she added: “I think a lot of companies make the mistake of thinking that that’s all they have to do.”
Only about 20 or 30 percent of U.S. companies send employees to outdoor team-building excursions, noted Gayle Carson, president of Carson Research Center, a Miami Beach company which tracks business trends. And she agreed that any such activities must be backed by good business practices.
Still, she noted that a trend has been emerging in business management over the last decade: As sports stars have become celebrities, as winning coaches pump out books aimed at business people, and as business people look at championship sports clubs as models for successful teamwork, the team concept is emerging.
The result of this is that managers are now asked to coach, rather than merely supervise, employees. This is especially effective with Generation Xers, Carson said, because job requirements today are changing quickly, meaning employees need to be trained more often than before. An analogy can be drawn with the sports world, she said.
“A coach doesn’t hire just anybody,” Carson said. “(He) has a particular player in mind. And I think Corporate America has to start paying more attention to that – the new job doesn’t necessarily look like the old job.”
But that is exactly what makes sailing a good teaching tool, noted Laura Sawall, sales and marketing director for America’s Cup Charters. Sailors must react instantly to changes in the weather or in their opponents’ actions, she said.
“They’re forced to cope with uncertainty,” Sawall said. “The ability to react to changes is crucial in racing as well as the corporate world.”
