What startup founders can learn from high-performance sports teams

It’s a year out from the America’s Cup match in Barcelona, and Emirates Team New Zealand is ready to return home at the end of the month from a four-month Spanish sojourn.

Don’t confuse it for a vacation. It’s been an intense block of training, testing, shadow boxing in full view of their sailing rivals in Barcelona’s Port Vell and learning the vagaries of its weather and water.  

Kevin Shoebridge, Team New Zealand’s COO and a veteran of 10 America’s Cup campaigns, sees the strain is starting to show on some of his 110 teammates. “It’s been very intense up here, and people are starting to feel it,” he says.

“We always knew it would be a critical part of the campaign – our last chance to gather really important information for the design of the AC75. So we came here and gave it a big push.

“But you need to be across what’s going on in the team daily. There are lots of times we need to know when to push and when to rest. To recognise when the team is getting burnt out, while still making sure we hit all the goals we set and not just dawdle along.”

It’s that kind of thinking a high-performance sports team needs to ensure it’s getting the best out of its people, especially over a three-year campaign. And it’s one of the many skills Team New Zealand has honed and that are transferable to creating a high-performing team in business.

Skills like building a unified culture and strong communication, having leadership across the team, keeping experienced heads while fostering new talent and making sure every single team member feels like they’ve contributed to its success.

And often returning to the basics of why they exist – in their case, to win a yacht race.

Although Team New Zealand has existed since Sir Peter Blake’s campaign won the America’s Cup for the first time in 1995, it’s been through many revolutions.

In its early years, Team New Zealand resembled a startup enterprise – every new Cup cycle, people would be assembled, and new funding sought. “Depending on the result, you didn't know if it would carry on or not,” says Shoebridge. “You’d build a really strong team, then lose people because you had no ongoing way to sustain it.”

But in 2007, when Team New Zealand failed to wrest the Auld Mug from Alinghi in Valencia, the Grant Dalton-led team decided to “just keep rolling”.  

“We saw that if you don't maintain your people, your knowledge and your IP, you're starting from scratch every time,” says Shoebridge. “Now we look to keep building on the base we establish each cycle.”

“That's really important to try and make the team stronger every time – and I can put my hand on my heart and say, I think we're the strongest we've ever been this time. And we should be. You keep learning, developing and figuring out areas you need to plug – especially in the design space, because it's such a technology game.”

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Team culture

The most successful team in the history of Super Rugby, the Crusaders are also in it to win. The Canterbury franchise has collected 12 titles since the inaugural 1996 competition – when it finished last and brought in the innovative Sir Wayne Smith, who focused on building a team culture.

Now it’s sharing the secrets of its success through the Crusaders Leadership Programme – an online course tapping into some of the sharpest minds in the game, including Smith and fellow All Blacks coach Robbie Deans, former All Blacks captain Kieran Read and Sam Whitelock, and the next national coach, Scott ‘Razor’ Robertson.

Since it was launched just over a year ago, more than 400 leaders from 30 countries have come through the programme – some coaches, others company heads.

“Among our last cohort we had the chief executive of a construction company, and a guy from Major League Baseball, from the Cleveland Guardians,” says leadership expert Kaila Colbin, who has partnered with the Crusaders to deliver the programme through her company, Boma.

“This product is appropriate for anyone who needs to bring individuals together to accomplish something collectively greater than what they can do on their own.”

Colbin says the two-week programme is proving the experiences and lessons learned in elite sport can be applied to the corporate world. “And it’s hugely effective,” she says.

“What’s unsurprising but sort of heartbreaking is that more corporate leaders don't see themselves as leading teams in the way that high-performance sports leaders do. They’ll say things like, ‘Oh, well, you know, it's different. You don't have a game, you don't have as clear an outcome, it's not so black and white’.”

“But guess what? It is 100 percent the same.”

Others can see the connection. Tim Eggers, managing director of creative agency Concoction, says having access to Deans and Robertson – “two of the greatest people managers” – through the programme was incredible. “There’s some really nice theory within in that’s directly transferable to business.”

Watching sport has never been American-born Colbin’s jam – although she’s been a ‘hardcore’ athlete, in boxing, mountain biking and rock climbing. But forming a partnership with the Crusaders changed her attitude.

“I just didn’t appreciate what goes on here – the scale of leadership required and the investment that's been made over 27 years to build the culture they have,” she says. “Now I'm all in.”

She’s become a better leader, she says, by listening to these rugby stars: “Like Sam Whitelock saying the most important thing as a captain is learning when to be quiet… I learned so much from them,” she says.

“I've been able to see up close just how consistently that entire organisation lives and breathes their values – from the board chair down to the custodial staff. It's not just about the players and coaches. And they're pretty unusual in that regard to have an organisation where everyone is so committed.”

One of the key transferable skills, Colbin says, is that culture needs to be cultivated deliberately. “Most cultures emerge organically, but it's an absolute strategic advantage to deliberately invest in a high-performance culture. It has a massive impact on performance.”

Another is an appreciation that a leader’s number-one job is to create an environment where every team member can perform at their best. “To do that we have to know our people – what they’re capable of, what their aspirations are, how to push them and how to bring them together in the right combination to achieve what we’re trying to achieve.”

The Crusaders operate in a more structured environment than a corporate one, having to perform every week during the Super Rugby season.

“At the beginning of the week, the coach does most of the talking and ideally by the end of the week, the coach is doing almost none – it’s handed over to the players. That's different to the startup environment,” Colbin says. “But saying ‘What am I handing over? What am I empowering people to do? How am I taking accountability for what I'm authorising and supporting them to achieve?’ It's all the same conversation.”

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More than one leader

Every sports team strives to build a strong culture. Team New Zealand has done so, Shoebridge says, by being as Kiwi as it can. “We’re very much a national team, which helps bind us together,” he says.

“We’re well organised now in how to get the best out of a team on a finite budget, and we’re strong on our communication.”

“And we’re very good at including everyone on the team to make them feel like they’re making a difference. That’s something we really strive for: if you're ever lucky enough to win the America's Cup, you want everyone on the team to feel they were a meaningful contributor.; the win means as much to the engineers and shore crew as it does for the guys sitting on the boat.

“It's hard to explain to the outside world how much effort and how many different areas of the team must be right on top of their game for us to even have a chance at the end.”

Team New Zealand prides itself on strong leadership dispersed throughout the team: “It’s not just one leader at the top,” says Shoebridge.

“I look at how we run on a daily basis to what it was 15 or 20 years ago, and it's on a different planet. There was no leadership plan. It's morphed into what it is by having the right people in the right spots.”

But they’re also big on bringing a new generation into the fold, through engineers’ internships in their design team, builders’ apprenticeships in their boatyard, and new sailors in their crews for the Women’s and Youth America’s Cup regattas to race, for the first time, in Barcelona.  

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