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Business Teams

Leadership

INTRODUCTION

How did a group of nineteenth-century explorers survive a deadly winter in Antarctica with a ship trapped in ice, no working instruments to guide them, and a sun-less existence that slowly started to turn men mad? Penguins, that’s how. They ate raw penguins and lots of them.

In 1896, the Belgian naval officer Adrien Victor Joseph de Gerlache de Gomery bought a whaling ship from Norway called the Patria. He renamed it the Belgica, and with the support of his government set sail for Antarctica the following year on the first scientific mission to explore the continent. Accompanied by a multinational crew of scientists and officers from Norway, Romania, Poland, and eventually the United States, he set sail from Antwerp in August of 1897.

Onboard was a crew of over twenty men, which included the yet-to-be-famous Norwegian Roald Amundsen who would later lead the first successful expedition to the South Pole. During this voyage, however, he served as first mate. On its way, the Belgica stopped in Rio de Janeiro where the crew was joined by the American Frederick Cook, who became the ship’s doctor and would later lead an expedition to the North Pole himself. Both he and Amundsen kept detailed journals of the trip, making notes and observations that later equipped and emboldened them to attempt their own adventures.

The group was far from adequately prepared for what was to come. Many of the men lacked basic seamanship skills, and others did not possess the discipline necessary to survive such a journey. Some quit, others were dismissed, and those that remained were not any better off.

In January 1898, they reached the coast of the Antarctic peninsula, the northernmost part of Antarctica. Over the next month, they sailed through a string of islands, charting and naming several of them, then crossing the Antarctic circle in February.

By March, they had become trapped in the ice of the Bellinghausen Sea, frozen in place. Despite the crew’s attempts to break free, they soon realized their predicament would not be easily overcome. Cook wrote: “We are imprisoned in an endless sea of ice... We have told all the tales, real and imaginative, to which we are equal. Time weighs heavily upon us as the darkness slowly advances.”

The winter was harsh and unforgiving. In May, the sun set and did not rise again for months. The crew, deprived of sunlight and enough winter clothing for every man on board, grew sick and demoralized, the situation far from hopeful. There was not enough food, so the men had to hunt to stay alive. In spite of the only doctor onboard—Cook—recommending a diet of high protein (which included raw penguin and seal meat) to avoid the effects of scurvy, the ship’s commander initially forbade the diet. He didn’t like the strange taste of the meat. As a result, both he and the captain grew so sick they wrote their wills and confined themselves to bed, expecting to die.

Some men did die, others became deathly ill, and even others went mad. It was a dire time. The crew was filled with despair, and death loomed just over the horizon of each dark day. In June, Emile Danco, a Belgian geophysicist, died of a previously existing heart condition that was worsened by the lack of proper food and extreme conditions. The Polish geologist Henryk Arctowski wrote of the burial, “In the obscurity of the midday twilight we carried Lieutenant Danco’s body to a hole which had been cut in the ice, and committed it to the deep. A bitter wind was blowing as, with bared heads, each of us silent, we left him there...And the floe drifted on...”

Since both the commander and captain were now ill, Cook and Amundsen took command of the ship and ordered the men to eat high rations of the stored penguin and seal meat. Soon, they

were eating seven meals a day, which restored the men to health, including their mental faculties and physical strength. As the crew improved, Cook encouraged the men to sit in front of the fire each night and to play card games, gambling with imaginary sums of money. All of this helped them focus on something other than the imminence of their own extinction. They soon drummed up enough courage and motivation to break out of the ice tomb in which they had been encased for the duration of a harsh, polar winter. The question now was, “How?”

After a series of experiments, ideas sourced from various crew mates and officers, they eventually used a combination of saws, explosives, and pure luck to break through the ice. It took the ship a month to get out. This effort was largely directed by Cook with the help of Amundsen and the rest of the healthy crewmates. de Gerlache, who eventually became a convert to the diet of penguin and seal meat, was slowly nursed back to health, as was the captain Georges Lecointe. By this time, they had joined the other two men now in command of the ship; and together, the four of them led the crew out of the icy quagmire. When the Belgica returned to Antwerp in November of 1899, de Gerlache was praised and awarded high honors, the mission considered a success. They had spent thirteen months trapped in ice, their crew nearly perished, and the man who became so sick he could no longer lead his poorly-prepared crew was made a hero.

What is this? This is the story we are often told of leaders; it is a tale that makes for great movies and inspiring feats of heroism. And it is a myth. What saved the Belgica during its two-year voyage to the end of the earth and back was not a single man put in charge of a crew of unruly explorers, scientists, and seafarers. It wasn’t even the copious amounts of penguin meat they ate. It was, in fact, leadership; but not the kind we are so often taught about in business school or Boy Scouts. What saved these men and allowed them to succeed wasn’t the efforts of a single leader but the will of an entire team. In spite of being ill-prepared and poorly led, these men found it in themselves to step up, take control while lacking any real authority, and save the mission.

In this book we want to make a simple argument: small but dedicated teams of empowered individuals can out-perform large organizations driven by top-down leadership any day of the week. What makes organizations great—truly great, not merely temporarily successful—is not the leader of the organization but the culture. And cultures can change quite quickly, it turns out, when it’s a matter of life and death. The culture formed during those dark days of winter on the Belgica became instrumental during what later became known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Out of necessity, they became what we call a “self-led team.” They had to be—their leaders were lying in bed, waiting to die. What saved those men was not a captain or a commander or even a doctor. What saved them was their ability to come together during a difficult time, strengthen themselves as a unit, and achieve the impossible. The discipline they learned to exhibit, the activities they used to boost their morale, the necessary but unpleasant diet they all adopted became important factors in the success of their mission.

Thirteen years later, Roald Amundsen would lead his own expedition back to the South Pole and safely return from it when his competitor Robert Falcon Scott would die trying. Often, such stories are meant to prize the skills or efforts of a single man; and certainly, that can be a factor. But more than that, what allowed Amundsen to succeed was what he learned on the Belgica and subsequent voyages that prepared him for his ultimate challenge. The same diet of penguin and seal he learned about from Cook became instrumental in his own mission over a decade later. In addition, he and his crew wore Inuit-style fur clothing at a time when it was considered unfashionable and somewhat savage (not to mention, the furs were hard to come by and cost a lot of money). He used dogs instead of horses to pull the sleds they used in contrast to Scott’s horses. When it came time to eat, they consumed lots of meat and would even kill one of the sled dogs to get enough protein to survive. These were strategies not decided by a lone genius; they were proven tactics he learned in the company of other men. They were, in a way, cultural norms. Amundsen had been on a team where the leadership had failed and the rest of the crew mates were forced to rely on each other. He knew what it took, because he had been to hell and back.

What we want to argue in this book is that the same kind of “culture” that saved a group of men on the brink of destruction and forever cemented their names in history can save your organization, too. History maximizes the importance of heroes but minimizes the significance of teams. We want to reverse that. In the work we’ve done with our company CultureForce, we’ve seen what it takes to create cultures that win; and in this book, we want to share with you what we’ve learned—from the countless organizations we’ve encountered and coached as well as the world-class companies and outfits we’ve gotten to be a part of and whose stories we’ve been honored to tell on our CultureForce podcast.

Of course, it’s not just any team that can cause a group of dying men to dig their way out of miles of ice, overcoming the unlikely odds stacked against them. Rather, what makes a winning unit is adopting the power of self-led teams. And we will demonstrate this not just in the world of polar exploration but also in the excellence of successful sports franchises, industry-leading tech companies, and elite military outfits. Nimble teams consisting of skilled but far-from-perfect individuals can accomplish far more than organizational behemoths driven by a single, dominating figure.

It’s not that leadership doesn’t matter; it certainly does. It’s just that it’s highly overrated. And once we understand that, change not only becomes possible; it becomes inevitable.