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Navigating toward team success

Wolfgang Jenewein and Felicitas Morhart
University of St Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland

102
Received September 2007
Accepted December 2007

Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to outline a set of principles which enable companies and
managers to effectively handle people as a resource and allow them to turn teams into high
performance teams.
Design/methodology/approach The Alinghi sailing teams approach to establishing and
managing a high performance team was explored by means of an ethnographic case study. The
development, organization and leadership principles of the team were subjected to intense scrutiny.
This was done by interviewing the key players in the different areas (sailing crew, design team and
management) at different stages, by observation of the group at work and video analyses. To
substantiate the findings from interviews and observations, workshops with team members and
experts were organized.
Findings The Swiss Alinghi sailing team was the undisputed winner of the famous Americas Cup
in 2003 and managed to defend it successfully in July 2007 against strong competition. The
principles implemented by team founder Ernesto Bertarelli also offer a valuable model for managers.
Originality/value The study is a useful tool for companies and managers who wish to create and
manage high performance teams.
Keywords Team working, Leadership
Paper type Viewpoint

They made it at last. The Swiss Alinghi team won the 2003 Americas Cup with a 5:0
victory over the title defenders New Zealand. This was the first time ever that a
landlocked nation won the Americas Cup and the first time a team won this most
famous trophy in sailing at its first attempt. Larry Ellison, boss of rival team Oracle
BMW, expressed his admiration at the end of the competition: Alinghi is the best
sailing team I have ever seen. The crews run of success has continued almost without
interruption and made them defend the Americas Cup successfully in July 2007.
What made and makes this extraordinary achievement possible? Our research led
us to conclude that the lead crews unique handling of its human resources was the
decisive factor in securing the teams competitive edge. Part consciously and part
intuitively, team founder Ernesto Bertarelli and his crew recognized the value of
human resources as a key competitive advantage. That way, the usual financial,
technological and size issues were not the deciding factors. Jochen Schumann, athletic
director and helmsman for the Team Alinghi, gets to the point:
The Americas Cup is not an auction which is won by the highest bidder. Rather, it is about
true competition which is decided by the people and the way they work together.
Team Performance Management
Vol. 14 No. 1/2, 2008
pp. 102-108
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1352-7592
DOI 10.1108/13527590810860230

In the field of management research, the Resource-based View (Barney, 1991)

promulgates this strategy. But to this day, scientists have no exact answers on how to
harness human resources most effectively in order to unlock their full potential.

We therefore subjected the development, organization and leadership principles of

the team to intense scrutiny by the means of an ethnographic study. As the focus of the
study were the processes and routines of managing a high performance sport team,
such qualitative approach appeared most suitable as it allows for uncovering the tacit
knowledge of the unit of analysis and for the development of frameworks and theories.
Adopting a participant-observer role, we thus immersed ourselves in the lives of the
Alinghi team by taking part in their preparations for the Americas Cup 2003. We
interviewed the key players in the different areas (sailing crew, design team and
management) at different stages in detail, observed the group at work and performed
video analyses. To substantiate the findings from interviews and observations, we
organized workshops with team members and experts. Interestingly, in a second study,
we discovered similar mechanisms at work in the Formula 1 team Sauber which
reinforced our conclusions (Jenewein and Erk, 2005).
How can companies and managers benefit from our findings? We have derived from
our investigations seven principles for effective handling of people as a resource, which
are also helpful and useful to the business sector. In keeping with the object of our
investigation, we have called these the Seven Maneuvers for Success with Human
Resources. To facilitate working with these principles or maneuvers, we have
assigned them the categories Personnel Management, Leadership and Team Culture.
The maneuvers are presented and discussed individually below based on this
classification.
Personnel management: finding the right team members
After Ernesto Bertarelli had assembled the Alinghi core team, he and his lead crew
immediately set about recruiting the other members. The lead crew agreed not to
compromise in their choice of team members. In particular, the crew was looking for
sailors who were highly skilled, had a businesslike approach, an ability to see the
bigger picture, a sense of humor and an ongoing commitment to furthering the teams
campaign. Simon Daubney, one of the team members responsible for personnel
selection, clarifies: We didnt simply search for good sailors. We also looked for people
with passion and a sense of humor. The final decision about whether or not to take on
a new member fell to the whole team. All team members were recruited according to
this democratic principle, which led many of them to describe the Alinghi story as a
story of friends.
Maneuver 1: No compromises in choice of personnel
One thing is for sure no other personnel decision has such negative and lasting effects
on your company as a badly chosen employee since so-called short-term solutions may
be difficult to reverse. Be aware of what qualities your new employees should have. It is
crucial to verify not only the candidates successes a relatively straightforward task
but also how well he or she would fit into the corporate culture. You should always take
the trouble to check the references supplied by the applicant. An informal chat with the
candidates former boss can reveal a great deal about your future team member that a job
interview fails to unearth. Finally, you should also trust the judgment of your own
employees. When you decide on new team members by consensus, you can prevent a
whole raft of potential interpersonal conflicts right from the outset.
Competition and performance are important. What counts is whether your
employees and team members are prepared to give their all every working day. At
Alinghi, internal training competitions took place regularly at which everyone,

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including Bertarelli, had to put their performance to the test. The lead crew only
decided the final sailing team on the day of the first Americas Cup race based on
training results going back over two years. Ernesto Bertarelli assures:
We followed the principle of the best person for each job and that applied to me, too. It is not
your job title that gains you recognition with the other sailors, but your skills and your
performance in the team.

Leadership: putting the team first

Before the start of the intensive training, all team members developed a joint team
philosophy. They defined and internalized their vision as a group:
We want to create a team to be proud of, a team that is capable of winning the Americas Cup,
and one that inspires other people to even greater feats.

The unique feature of this vision is that, in addition to the measurable goal of winning
the Cup, it also contains a behavioral component. Sports director Jochen Schumann
emphasizes:
Our vision stated that we wanted to win the Cup well thats only logical but the crucial
factor for us was also How. We have inspired our team members, we have competed fairly.
We have tried to stick to our motto and not just win the trophy at any price.

To achieve this goal, the team leaders relied primarily on the skills of each individual
team member and their readiness to take responsibility for their own actions.

Maneuver 2: Employees taking responsibility for their own actions

Ernesto Bertarelli believed that, in a high-performance team, everyone must be given
as much freedom as possible within the cooperative framework in order to bring
everybodys skills to bear and to maximize individual performance:
We have made sure that we work well together and that we allow each individual the freedom
to develop their skills. Our management style was based on getting the best people on the
team and then letting them do their job. However, this requires a firm foundation of mutual
trust.

Alinghis cooperation was thus based on the freedom to act.

If you have followed Maneuver 1, you should have excellent employees in every
role, in terms of both personality and technical expertise. Once they have worked their
way into the job, these people know best what needs to be done mostly even better
than you! It is impossible for you to be the number one expert in all the different areas
of your business. Trust the skills of your employees and give them the freedom they
need to do their job on their own initiative. Not only can you save yourself a lot of time
and worry, they will also return your trust by making more responsible and
well-considered decisions. It is important that you remain true to this management
principle even in difficult situations and crises. Of course, you should be present in
such situations, but take care not to snatch the reins from your employees hands. If
you do, they will soon start regarding the philosophy of taking responsibility as an
empty phrase.

Maneuver 3: Productive competition within the team

Make it clear to your employees that the achievements of each individual are for the
service of the whole enterprise and that, if the team fails, it is a failure for each
individual too. Combine competitiveness with cooperation and social exchange. This
keeps the internal competition fair and productive and enables a high level of collective
achievement which could never be attained by an individual effort alone.
The internal training competitions at Alinghi followed precisely this principle. The
two opposing teams were mostly on a par, so an individual crew member might be on
the winning team one day and one of the losers the next. This demonstrated to
everyone that victory or defeat did not depend on individuals, but always on the
collective achievement of the group. Jochen Schumann recalls:
The B team beat the A team at least as often as the other way round. This was not only a
consolation to those who didnt make it to the top team, but also a source of motivation and
pressure for the other team to do better next time.

Bertarelli, Schumann and skipper Russel Coutts would always try to get the persons
involved in conflicts to resolve their problems and differences straight away among
themselves without any intervention by the team leaders. In a corporate environment,
we often encounter precisely the opposite behavior. Encourage your employees to solve
problems in the workplace on their own initiative so that they take on high levels of
responsibility and develop their problem-solving skills.
Maneuver 4: Solving problems instead of complaining about them
Continuous complaining is a widespread phenomenon among company employees:
The IT department just cant get the computers working properly for us. The
supplier delivered the goods too late again and the quality was poor. Every so often
you will come across an organizational unit that tackles problems from an optimistic
angle by regarding them as challenges that need to be actively addressed. Such a
culture shifts the emphasis on future opportunities and perspectives rather than
problems, errors and omissions. When you rely on human beings as a success factor,
errors and problems are inevitable. Accept that and, when problems occur, set about
remedying them together without delay. Looking for a scapegoat only holds up the
proceedings and spreads bad feeling in the team.
With the Alinghi team, we observed a similar solution-oriented approach in all areas
of work. One example illustrates its importance in a crisis situation: One day before the
semi-finals in 2003, the mast of the racing yacht broke. Nevertheless, the team did not
let this seemingly unsolvable problem deter them and worked right through the night.
Every team member got down to work and gave their all to make sure the yacht was
ready for the race in time. Dirk Kramers, Chief Designer of the Alinghi team, recalls:
What I found fascinating about the whole thing was the way that, throughout that whole
time, no-one ever tried to find out who was responsible for breaking the mast. In other teams,
Ive often found that everyone wanted to blame each other for the error. Here it was different
we didnt talk about errors, only about solutions.

Maneuver 5: Setting an example to your employees

Save yourself the cost of expensive motivational gurus. Trust that your own approach
is effective in itself. Your employees will see through glossy presentations and flowery
speeches thought up by your PA straight away. The best principle for an authentic

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management style is and always has been: Follow up your words with deeds. Honor
your promises and behave as you expect your employees to behave.
At Alinghi, the training started every morning at 6.30 a.m. with weight-lifting in the
fitness room. Jochen Schumann was always the first there. Sewerman Curtis Blewett
stresses that:
. . . all team members knew exactly what they had to do and why. There were no pep talks by
the leaders or pseudo-motivational experiments. I only had to take one look at Russel at any
given moment to feel his ambition, intensity and concentration. That motivated me.

Team culture: courage to do the unconventional

Around two years before the start of the final races of the Americas Cup 2003, the
whole Alinghi team moved to New Zealand. True to the Alinghi principle of taking on
responsibility, every team member played a part in the building of the headquarters
and received a budget for individual accommodation in Auckland. Instead of
organizing shared accommodation for everyone, the team leaders left it up to each
member to find something suitable. Relatively quickly, crew members joined together
in twos or threes to rent together large and comfortable apartments or even houses.
Thereby parts of the team also became miniature communities in their own right
through sharing the same living space.
Maneuver 6: Trust to natural team-building
All too often, teams are physically separated, spread over many different offices,
corridors or even floors. Mostly the members communicate electronically by telephone
or e-mail and get together only occasionally at a meeting or discussion. This means
they rarely experience a real feeling of we. Yet this is absolutely essential if they are
to deliver a top collective performance. Bring the team members physically close
together to promote continuous exchange between them. Through continuous direct
contact, the employees get to know and understand each other on both a formal and an
informal basis. Social roles such as positions of trust, opinion leaders and arbitrators
crystallize of their own accord without having to be defined in an organizational chart.
Above all, internal cohesion, trust and loyalty within the group develop naturally.
For Alinghi, moving the whole group to Auckland was a key milestone in the
team-building process. Schumann describes it as follows:
The fact that we were all working under one roof and were all involved in setting up our base
camp together did more for us than any artificially orchestrated event. We consciously
steered clear of any large team-building events like crossing ravines etc. Instead, we
concentrated on the literal meaning of teamwork, namely working together.

Maneuver 7: Fostering internal communication

However difficult it might be for some individuals, encourage your employees to keep
communicating and providing constructive feedback. Alinghi valued this feedback
culture very highly and called it the imperative of the freely spoken word. True to
this principle, the team leaders organized a discussion after every training unit. For
each of these discussions, Jochen Schumann selected a team member to express direct
and honest feedback about the training unit. This ensured that everyone, even the most
reticent, took part in this open dialog aimed at mutual improvement.

Many employees mistakenly believe that information is something they are

supposed to be supplied with by others. They like to abdicate responsibility for
omissions or errors with a terse No-one told me that. Therefore, make it clear to your
team that each individual is responsible for acquiring the information relevant to them.
For your part, you must of course ensure that the relevant information is available at
all times to all team members.
From a structural point of view, sufficient space and opportunities for informal
exchange should be provided. In Alinghi, team members from the design department,
management and marketing worked out alongside the sailors every morning, giving
them an informal opportunity to discuss with each other the latest developments and
any problems that might have arisen:
We had a very unconventional and open style of communication. There were regular
meetings, but we didnt have to meet often as we actually exchanged information
continuously on an informal basis in the fitness room, in the corridor or in the evening over a
beer . . .

recalls Alinghis finance manager Catherine Pierrin.

A culture of information exchange and transparency can be fostered with the right
symbols, rituals or models. For example, instead of the management committee
meeting for days on end behind closed doors and emerging with an endless list of
tasks, you should allow your employees to take part in the decision-making process
themselves. When the employees know how a given decision, however unpleasant, was
arrived at, they are much more prepared to take responsibility for it and accept the
consequences it carries with it.
Summary
The seven maneuvers described represent the key principles behind Alinghis success.
Uncompromising in their choice of personnel, consistent in their leadership and
unconventional in the setup of their team culture, the lead crew succeeded in creating
an environment that fostered highly committed individual performance as a means to
achieving a common goal. Unhampered by egotism, vanity and internal power
struggles, the team was able to focus all its energy on pursuing its shared dream,
skillfully overcoming any difficulties that arose and winning the Americas Cup in the
most impressive way.
Naturally, the insights from Alinghis strategy do not all translate in every detail to
corporate practice:
.
For one thing, their goal of winning the Americas Cup gave them a clear and
measurable vision that was to be attained within a pre-defined time period
known in advance. The team members could mobilize their energy for this
manageable length of time. In companies it is far more difficult to pursue such
clear visions or have such fixed timeframes because of the volatile market
environment and frequent internal management changes.
.
A further difference is the fact that the leadership was able to build the whole
team up from scratch, which enabled them to search for ideal candidates for
every position. At the start of a major project, company managers usually have
to work with a set team of personnel that they can only add to selectively. Under
these conditions it is much harder to foster a positive feeling of we.

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Finally, it is an inherent feature of competitive sports that the participants

regularly receive objective and clearly measurable feedback on their
performance in contests and training sessions. In a corporate environment,
managers cannot always define the goals clearly in an easily verifiable way.

These limitations notwithstanding, we are convinced that the Alinghi team and its
unconventional approach to personnel management, leadership and team culture offer
companies of all sizes and industries both inspiration and guidance for better handling
of human resources. Were all in the same boat is a saying you will certainly have
heard many times in your company. Perhaps Alinghis example will help you see this
metaphor in a new light.
References
Barney, J.B. (1991), Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage, Journal of
Management, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 99-120.
Jenewein, W. and Erk, C. (2005), Sauber Petronas 2005: achieving much with comparatively
little, case study, University of St Gallen, St Gallen.
Further reading
Bass, B.M. (1985), Leadership and Performance beyond Expectations, Free Press, New York, NY.
Bass, B.M. and Riggio, R.E. (2005), Transformational Leadership, 2nd ed., Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Mahwah, NJ.
Hackman, J.R. and Wageman, R. (2005), A theory of team coaching, Academy of Management
Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 269-87.
Jenewein, W., Bruch, H. and Heidbrink, M. (2005), Alinghi 2005 the freedom to act, case study,
University of St Gallen, St Gallen.
Katz, N. (2001), Sport teams as a model for workplace teams: lessons and liabilities, Academy of
Management Executive, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 56-67.
Kets de Vries, M.F.R. (2005), Leadership group coaching in action: the Zen of creating high
performance teams, Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 61-76.
Spreitzer, G.M. (1995), Psychological empowerment in the workplace: dimensions,
measurement, and validation, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 38 No. 1, pp. 1442-65.
About the authors
Wolfgang Jenewein, PhD, serves as an Executive Director of the Executive MBA Programs of the
University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He is a senior lecturer in leadership and marketing and
advises various international companies and professional sports teams, such as the
VfB-Stuttgart, on leadership in high performance teams. Wolfgang Jenewein is the
corresponding author and can be contacted at: wolfgang.jenewein@unisg.ch
Felicitas Morhart, M.A., is research associate and doctoral candidate at the University of St.
Gallen. Her research interest centers on organizational behavior with specialization in leadership
and its application to various fields in business research.

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