Episode 69 – Rachael Robertson – Leaders On Leadership
Every team is formed with the purpose of achieving a single goal or a number of set objectives, but every individual within is different than the next one. If coping with teammates is already challenging for everyone, how much tedious is it for a leader to handle an entire group without losing sight of the endgame? Author Rachael Robertson shares with Dr. Tracey Jones how to handle such a situation by looking back on her experience leading a year-long expedition to Antarctica. She explains how important it is for leaders to set work boundaries, play the mentor role and learn from the team, and be an effective head without imposing values. Rachael also dissects the concept of "No Triangles" and underlines the importance of communication in solving conflicts.
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Rachael Robertson – Leaders On Leadership
Our guest is Rachael Robertson. Rachael is the author of a bestselling book titled Leading on the Edge, which is an account of her leading a yearlong scientific expedition to Antarctica. She is a world-renowned expert in leading under extreme circumstances. You're going to love this interview.
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I am excited to welcome Rachael Robertson to our show. You're going to love her story and her perspective. Rachael is the author of the bestselling book Leading on the Edge, which is an account of her leading a yearlong expedition to Antarctica. She has delivered over 1,500 keynote presentations remotely and in-person around the world on topics of leadership and teamwork. Her book Respect Trumps Harmony is out. Talk about leading in extreme environments. Rachael, thank you so much for being our guest on the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
You're welcome. I got my PhD in leadership and I studied crisis leadership. To hear and see what's going on in the world, I'm like, “What I did study is applicable.” To bring somebody like you on, first of all, tell our audience where you're from and also how you wound up leading an expedition to Antarctica for a year.
It’s extraordinary. As I'm speaking to you, I'm in Melbourne, Australia, at the bottom of Australia, the South. I'd love to say going to Antarctica was this brilliant career move or a strategic move but it wasn't. It was purely that I saw the job advertised in the newspaper. I'm flicking through the newspaper and I saw a penguin and that's what caught my eye because it's a bit weird in the careers section. When I looked at the advertisement, I noticed that they were recruiting for personal attributes so things like resilience, empathy and integrity. I thought that was a brilliant way to recruit for leadership qualities and you can teach the technical.
My brilliant plan was to apply for the job until I got to the interview stage so I could find out what the questions they were using and I could copy those questions and bring them back to my role because I wanted to recruit for the same thing. I never wanted this job. I wanted to know how you recruit for resilience and empathy. I applied for the job. After I've applied, I find out they don't have a job interview. They have a week-long boot camp in the central highlands of Australia. I end up in this boot camp myself and thirteen men competing for this job. They rang and offered it to me. I thought, “I'd rather regret what I did than regret what I didn't do.” That's how I ended up there. It was purely an opportunity. I thought I'd rather do it and go, “What have you done?” than not do it and spend the rest of my life looking back going, “What would have happened if I'd done that expedition?” It was an opportunity that came my way.
I'm like you. I can handle failure, but I can't handle regret. It’s like me going into the military. I never thought I would but I thought, “I'll apply and I'll show up.” It’s better to go and find out it's not for me than to wonder all my life. What did you do at the boot camp? Did you find out then? I know people who get down to Antarctica are primarily researchers. Is that what you were part of? Were you sponsored by somebody? Were you collecting data on something? What were you doing there?
The thing that fascinated me the most, and you'll appreciate this with your experience and background, I didn't get this until I got the job, that leadership skills and capability can cross over any industry or sector. I went in applying for the job thinking I know nothing about Antarctic research or science. I didn't even know there was a science called glaciology. I had never heard of glaciology. I thought, “They're never going to employ me.” I was also managing a team of tradespeople so we do any construction work in Antarctica. It's the same with the United States Antarctic Program. All the nations are the same.
We can only do construction work in summer and summer is balmy, probably 10 degrees Celsius so it's not warm at all. I thought, “There's no way I'll get this job,” because I know nothing about construction. I've never worked with diesel mechanics or carpenters. I know nothing about science. What I now realize in hindsight is leadership is transferable. Those skills were transferable so I'm not managing a science program. I'm managing people. I had to know enough about the research to make decisions around resourcing but my main job as the leader was to manage the people. In summer, we had 120 people at the station, which is quite a small station.
The American station has up to 1,000 people over the summer. One hundred twenty is quite small. They go home in February and a little group of eighteen of us remained behind. We’re there purely to maintain the station to keep it running until the next summer. My role is different. In summer, it's busy. There are 24 hours of daylight. It's fun, exciting, and things are happening. Winter, which is nine months. It's dark 24 hours a day and it's cold. We can't go outside. We're stuck with each other. You can't come home ever under any circumstances. We can't get out so you're stuck there. My role then becomes a lot more around leading morale, teamwork and building a culture where we can speak up and deal with issues. It's quite a fascinating role in summer and winter, but completely by accident.
How many people were there in the winter? Is 120 is the max capacity that you had in the summer when it was most active?
That's it and eighteen of us. It’s myself and seventeen others.
Was it like the military where you do a one-year remote tour and you have to go home or could you come back after you went home? This fascinates me.
It's fascinating because Australia and the US are the same because of mental health considerations. We do one-year terms, a one-year stint, you come back and you must have some time home. There are other nations like China and Russia where they can sometimes do 2 or 3 years on the ice, which is extraordinary. They're also quite different, their backgrounds. I remember I was talking to the Russian and Chinese station leaders. They were from a defense background so mostly submarines or submariners because we're used to that confinement.
They were gobsmacked when they met me as a female. They'd never met a female station leader and I was young. I was 35 years old and I also didn't have any background in that. I had a corporate background. I was managing a call center so it was quite extraordinary. They were quite amused that I'd come from this different background and I was this young tertiary-educated female. I was quite opposite to them. It's a fascinating place.
This is a great point for our leaders reading. Leadership skills are transferable. I know when I got out of the military, I thought, “Who's going to have me run their flight line and their fighter jets?” It doesn't matter. I went into semiconductor, defense contracting, and publishing. I lived all over the world. If you can work with people, stay on budget, on time, and on schedule, the world is your oyster.
You can do whatever you want. You said one of my all-time favorite words, resiliency and trust. I'm not sure which I love better. I love them both. What did they ask? This is the other question leaders always asked me, “No matter how good of a leader you are, if you don't hire the right people, it doesn't matter.” When they brought you through the process that you wanted to get the insider trading info on what they asked you, what did they ask you? How did they get somebody like you versus somebody that looked more qualified on paper? How did you do it?
I asked the same question. There were people who wanted the job a lot more than I did and I said, “Why did you pick me?” They said, “It’s because we believe in your leadership philosophy.” My philosophy is that leadership is about creating more leaders. It's not about creating more followers. Particularly with your Gen Y and Gen Z cohort, if you charge out the front and say, “Follow me,” they won't. Contemporary leadership is about creating more leaders.
In the boot camp what they do to test for resilience and empathy is put you in a situation where you need to demonstrate it. In the boot camp, we start at 7:00 AM and we work until 11:00 PM. You're sharing a little cabin with three other people. You're sharing a bathroom. You've got no privacy and you're under intense pressure and physical pressure. We do a lot of physical work. You do public speaking. You do a lot of written assessments. It's a constant assessment with the panel around the room watching you. You need to be resilient.
In terms of empathy, they had one exercise where we needed to choose which value was the most important to us. We stand up and convince the other thirteen applicants why your value was more important than theirs. There were things like empathy, innovation, hardworking, loyalty, and you had to convince the others. Straightaway, I thought, “I don't have that right to convince you. If you've picked loyalty, then I have no right to tell you that your value is wrong. That's your value.”
That's your conviction.
Coping With Teammates: Leaders must use the probationary period wisely and test them for the qualities they are looking for.
I stood up and said, “I've picked integrity for this reason. I respect that you've picked loyalty. However, for me, integrity is number one for this reason.” However, some of the other applicants took it to the extreme and got aggressive. They said, “You can't say loyalty is number one. That's ridiculous.” That was the moment the penny dropped for me. I had this moment where I went, “That's how you recruit for resiliency.” You put them in the situation so it was never about values. It was about having the empathy and the integrity to say, “I believe this. However, I respect that you believe that,” and demonstrating that empathy.
I’m like, “That's how you do it.” For leaders reading, who can't afford to get everyone together for a boot camp or haven't got the opportunity, what you can do is most jobs have a period at the first 2 or 3 months where you're on probation, or you're on a trial period. If they don't work out, you can let them go then and there without any issue. That's the time where you need to turn up the heat, where you need to test them for resilience and for empathy.
We don't tend to do that. We tend to be lovely. We tend to show them where the best coffee is, where to go for lunch, and we're lovely. Six months down the track, we find out this person has no resilience. They're in a sales environment. They're crying all the time. They can't cope with it. We should have known that two months in so we could have said to them, “You're not a good fit.” What I say to leaders is to use that probationary period wisely and test them for whatever the qualities that you need. Test them then and now.
There's that simple little ten-question questionnaire, SES, Self-Efficacy Scale where you ask them. It's your resiliency, confidence and adaptive capacity. If something goes wrong, or you get pushback, are you an orchid or are you a dandelion? Can you exist in Antarctica or the minute somebody opens the door, are you going to wither up and freeze? That is wild. That's how they did that. As you're watching this, they viewed it more as a competition. Sometimes as leadership we get in this sword-fighting thing, but that's not what they were looking for. They were looking at leaders competing against leaders. What they were hiring for was leadership, which is nothing about the leader, but what you bring out in other people in the team.
Even in one of the activities, we had to be a mentor to someone who we were competing with. That's an extraordinary situation to find yourself in where I’m mentoring you and I might notice something in your behavior, the way you’re acting, or your response. As a mentor and as a leader, I will let you know that. The other half of you is thinking, “I'm competing against Tracey. Maybe I'll let her go on and keep doing that because it looks better for me.” That's what they're doing. They’re looking for leadership behavior. Things like dealing with conflict.
You're tested for all of that stuff because they can't help you once you're down there, you're on your own. They need to make sure they've got the right person. Because of the nature of the role and nature of the community down there, the leader can't leave. It's critical that the leader is the right person because they set the tone and they create the culture down there. If you get the wrong leader, which has happened, if you get the wrong person in, it's difficult and a horrible year for everybody concerned. They recruit for leadership behavior and they look for people who can demonstrate that behavior. You forget about that. After a few days, you completely forget that the panel is sitting there taking notes, watching you and you revert to what your natural type is because you can’t pretend.
When you're under pressure, they always say what's inside you comes out when you get squeezed. That's why it's beneath the surface. That's fascinating that the team saw this because everybody says, “We hire for character.” Nobody ever does it. Few people do it, which is why we have such a horrific turnover. Did you get to have input into any of your followers to see if people resonated with your leadership style? You can be the greatest leader in the world, but did they put the participants or your co-leaders or team members through the same test too to make sure that they had that intrinsic resiliency too? Did everybody go through this vetting process?
It's an extraordinary process. I had no input whatsoever to my team, which blew me away. I thought that I would have some input or say in who would be on my expedition team but no. I’ve been given seventeen people and told me, “Make it work. Seventeen random individuals turn them into a team. By the way, your life depends on your teamwork. Knock yourself out.” It's fascinating, the trades team, the electricians, plumbers, and carpenters have a 24-hour selection center.
What we do there, we're worried about alcohol. We're worried about people drinking, misogynist and racist. We bring them all together and we try to get them relaxed so we can see the true self which happens every time. Every time someone will have a couple of alcoholic drinks, their guard goes down and you see the real person. The reason we do that is we can't manage that behavior or that performance in Antarctica. I can't give you a letter of warning, I can't sack you, or send you home so we need to weed those people out. We need to get them out before we go to Antarctica.
They have a 24-hour selection process. The difficult thing is with the scientists because a scientist is such a specialized skill. There is equipment down there that I had a guess there's one thing called a light imaging detecting and ranging system and that is probably about 12 or 13 people on this planet who can operate that equipment. You're stuck with the scientists. The interesting thing about that is we have a note called a No Idiot Policy. We don't want idiots. We don't want people who don’t know how it works. About 50% of the selection criteria for the trades team is your technical ability. You need to be top of your game.
We don't have a hardware shop that you can go to for spare parts. You have to be the best of the best. You could be the best tradesperson in the entire country, but if you're hard to live with, we don't want you. It's equally weighted that the number one thing we look for in our trades team and the rest of the expedition team is self-awareness, and the ability to know how you affect other people, and when other people are affecting you. You need to remove yourself. You need to feel, “I'm getting a bit agitated here or a bit anxious. I need to remove myself from the situation.” That's what we look for in the expedition team members. That self-awareness is important.
There are a lot of traits of EQ, but in my mind, we always had this discussion of, is self-awareness or self-discipline the most important EQ training? It’s like, “If you aren't aware, you can't discipline yourself.” Self-awareness. The sun rises and sets. We're going to talk about you building trust. If you've broken trust, you’ve got to at least be self-aware enough to own your part of it. That’s why organizations get fragmented and never get restored because people refuse or either willfully ignorant or woefully ignorant. Who knows which one it is? Let's get talking. I want to hear your leadership because you paid a serious price. Are you ever going to go back? Did you do this for only one year?
I did and a lot of people reading will understand this. I did one year. I was invited back, but I wouldn't do it again. It wasn't because I didn't love it. There were times that were horrible and I wanted to come home but overall, I loved it. It changed my life. The reason I wouldn't do it again is because the leadership scrutiny that you're under is intense. Every leader, if you're at the moment running a team, if you're a business owner, for example, people's mortgages depend on you employing them and you keeping the business together or you're managing a big team in a corporate or wherever. Even in a volunteer group when you're the leader, people are looking to you for support and optimism. I had to do that, but I had to do it 24 hours a day every day for a year.
There was not one second where I could take off the leadership hat and say, “I'm not going to be the leader now. I'm going to sit back and read a book.” Because no matter where I went or what I did, there were people knocking on my bedroom door or coming up to me while I was trying to have lunch. I had to manage that boundary. I learned the hard way that it was up to me to manage that particular boundary. The scrutiny and I would have a sleep-in, lie-in on a Sunday morning. We don't work on a Sunday morning so I might sleep in until 9:00. I'd come downstairs for breakfast and the whole community would comment and say, “Boss, you had a sleep-in.” I'm like, “Pretend I'm not here.”
Even so much that one time in March 2020, and I've forgotten about this, but I got a sore throat and the doctor diagnosed it as tonsillitis. A bit of penicillin and I’ll be fine in a few days. The entire community made me a get-well card and brought food to my room. That scrutiny and being watched where I set the meals, who I sat next to, I couldn't have friends, I couldn't have favorites, even when I wasn't feeling it myself when I was homesick and I was feeling a bit vulnerable, I needed to be acutely aware of that. Because that would pick up on that vibe that I was down or I was a bit flat. I had to take myself away until I could get myself back up again. The 24-hour day nature with not a single hour off is exhausting.
Let other people have the opportunity to play that role. What an incredible thing. It's like going to war. When we got called up for the first Gulf War and went away 24/7. That was an incredible experience and the more people that can experience this, they understand leadership. You were talking about that everybody's looking at you and you are different. Fraternization, you're here and they're here. Talk to me about loneliness. My dad said, “When you're a leader, you want people to support you and care for you but there's implicit loneliness that a leader wears when they put on the mantle of leadership.” Can you share with me what that meant to you in this environment? Even back in normalcy, what would you encourage other leaders going through this? It is a fact of leadership, loneliness.
Isn’t it? I'm thrilled that you're so across that because I talk to young leaders, and particularly young leaders in that first leadership role. When they've gone from being one of the team and that first leadership role, they think, “I'm still one of the guys and one of the team.” I have to say, no. “I haven't changed and nothing's changed.” Everything has changed because as soon as you're in a leadership role, everything you say has extra volume. It's that leadership shadow that you cast that everything you say has extra volume. There's no off the cuff comments. You can't make an off the cuff comment, it gets repeated and it gets taken as fact because of your role. You're the leader.
With the loneliness stuff, I raise it with young leaders. I say, “Leadership is lonely. You need to be aware of that and you need to think about how you'll handle that.” For me, it was a couple of things. One of the things that helped me was I was the second woman to lead a team at Davis Station, which is my station. I had dinner with the first woman and I asked her that same question. I said, “How did you look after yourself and avoid that loneliness?” She said to me, “I kept a diary.” I'm like, “Who's got time for that?” I thought, “She knows what she's talking about. She's done this.” I trusted that and her experience.
I kept this journal and I didn't realize it would ever become a book. I wrote it more to get the emotion out because I would write and it wasn't like, “Dear, Diary. Today, we went and photographed penguins.” It was, “This person is driving me crazy.” It meant that I slept better. I came back to that resilience. I've got the emotion out and slept better. In terms of loneliness, the only thing I had to keep me from being lonely was my friendship with one of the other station leaders. He was about 600 miles away from me so he was a long way away from me. I could never see him but I could pick up the phone. He was one of the other Australian leaders. We have three stations down there. He was down at one of the other stations. I could pick up the phone and talk to him.
His name is Graham. I would talk to him and I would say, “Graham, they're fighting about who put the milk jug back into the refrigerator without milking it.” He’d say, “We had that fight last week. This week, they're fighting about who made up the orange juice concentrate incorrectly.” It was such a relief to think it's not my leadership, it's human nature in this environment. That peer support is what stopped me from being lonely. If I didn't have that, I don't know where I would be now because I couldn't talk to anyone at the station.
I had no friends. I couldn't be friends with one and not another. I had to befriend all of them or none of them. Having a peer who knew what I was going through and hand on heart, he was the only person on the planet who knew what I was going through because I was going through the same thing. Having one person who gets it, understands and you can talk to is the one most powerful and important tool I had to get, and I have it to this day, to stop the loneliness because someone gets it. They get it.
Coping With Teammates: Everything a leader says has extra volume. It's that leadership shadow cast on everything.
I love how you talked about the leadership shadow, and how even after you walk out of a room, in the wake of what you said or did being there, they're still talking about it, “She said. The boss said this,” or whatever. You’ve got to own that. I love how you said that. I love peer support. You need that one patron, advocate, and one person. I tell people that even if it's 1, 2 or 3 is great, but you’ve got to have one. You have to have at least one and if you don't have one, one will be brought to you or you'll move into a place where you'll find one but nobody can do it alone. You also brought up how you can't share with the troops when you're down. You want to show that you're a human being, but not that human because they don't need to hear or see that side of it.
It's difficult. We had a plane crash. We had a bolt sheered of the landing gear and it stranded four of my people 300 miles away. I had to manage the search and rescue for these people or potentially they would die. In my head was like, “I don't know what to do here. I have never led a search and rescue. Let alone in Antarctica.” This happened in summer when I had 120 people at the station. If I went out to the team, and they said, “What's happening? What's going on?” I said, “I don't know. I've never done this before.” It doesn't instill confidence. Even with my body language, I had to be poised and calm. I had to instill confidence and choose my words carefully.
I had to say, “I have concerns for these people.” If I had said, “I'm worried about these people,” worry is a different word to concern when the leader says it. I had to say, “I'm concerned about these people. I'm confident we'll get them back.” We did after five days, but it taught me a lot about how people look to the leader and they pick up your cues. As you're saying that, if you come in frazzled or panicking, they'll pick up on that. Even if you're not feeling it, if you come in poised and calm and say, “We're trained for this,” which we were we're, “We'll get them back. We're talking to them on the satellite phone. They're okay and they've got ten days’ worth of food onboard. They'll be fine.” That instilled the confidence in the rest of the community that they thought, “We've got this in hand. That's okay.” Inside my head, my head was like, “I have no idea. I’m out of my depth,” but I was the leader so the buck stops with me. I hate to pull my socks up and get in there.
It was you, the technicians, the workers, and your team members. You had no intermediary like a second command or right-hand man or woman. It was you and the workforce?
I had one and that was the only selection choice I made. I got to choose my deputy and that was interesting. I got advice from my mentor and I took it that I picked the exact opposite to me. As a young woman who is tertiary educated, I chose an older man who was on the tool. He was an electrician. We had nothing in common because he was twenty years older than me so the taste in music and films, we had nothing in common. I chose him as opposed to someone who was my generation and we had lots of fun together. We got along well because I needed to have that contrast. I needed the team to know if they're not comfortable talking to me about they might feel more comfortable talking to Howard about this. Howard was my deputy and it was the best decision I ever made because he was so loyal.
He was loyal to me and his judgment in what to raise to me versus what to sort out himself was brilliant. Never once did something happen where I had to say, “I needed to know about that.” I wouldn't have done it, except that a mentor had said to me, “If you pick someone similar to you, it's same old, same old. You need some diversity.” I pick someone who’s the opposite. I never would have done it but now I tell people to do it. Surround yourself with people who are different.
Thank you and I'm glad I pushed into that because a lot of times we're like, “We have at least that one person on our team who gets us.” You relied on him for certain things, but you still had great boundaries. You couldn’t call him and say, “Can you believe Joe's complaining about the orange juice?” There’s none of that because that's gossiping about your co-team members. I bring that up because I know I, as a leader, have been guilty of that. We as leaders, sometimes we get our core group, and we all huddle and talk about the workers. That’s not cool either. There’s nothing healthy about that.
The number one tool I use to keep me and the team resilient is a tool called No Triangles. No Triangles simply means I don't speak to you about Tracey. If I have something to say about Tracey, I go directly to Tracey. It changed my life because the team would come to me doing that whinging and that complaining, “Did you hear what he did?” I always say, “Would you like me to speak to him? Is that what you're telling me?” They said, “No, I'm letting you know.” I was so exhausted from these conversations. I'd sit there and think I know I need to go and see my good people and tell them you're doing great because we all know you need to keep great people. If you want to retain your talent, you need to let them know you're doing great. I didn't have the energy. I was so tired and burnt out from these conversations constantly.
One time, the person said to me and they were complaining. I said out loud, “If you don't speak to him, and I don't speak to him, he's never going to know. You and I will have this conversation next week.” In my head, I've gone, “I'm here for 52 weeks, I'll have this conversation 52 times and that's one of them. There are seventeen of them.” I said, “Let's do this No Triangle.” I got the whole team together and I said, “Let's try and build a bit of trust and respect in this team. Let's have direct conversations. Let's have No Triangles. Put your hand up if you agree.” Everyone's hand went up.
It meant the next time someone came to me and tried to do that gossiping, I could say, “Hang on. I saw you put your hand up and you committed to No Triangles. Why are you talking to me about it? Why aren't you talking to him about it?” It saved my sanity. We've done research on this, which is the second book I've released. We've gone back to 200 teams across the private sector, public sector, schools, hospitals, defense, volunteer groups and I wanted to quantify No Triangles. These are 200 teams that have already implemented No Triangles and 100% of them said, “No Triangles builds respect, and it builds and improves morale.”
The other fascinating thing is 89% of them said it frees up my time and energy and in a third of cases up to one hour a day.” Imagine an extra hour a day that you've not spent listening to these gossiping and moaning conversations that go nowhere. It’s part of my own resilience and keeping myself strong with creating a culture where the team would talk to each other. Honestly, I wish I had done this years ago when I started out in the workforce. It changed my life. It’s so simple.
Dave Ramsey, and I heard this from him, he's going to be on a later podcast. He's a money guy in the States but he had that too. It wasn't his organization. It may not be his but he said, “If you were caught doing that or you did that, you weren't part of the team anymore.” They realize it was so damaging. They'd say go talk to somebody else but some people have a real hard time with this and it infects the team. I never heard it being called No Triangle but I love that. That’s Conflict Resolution 101. Go to the person and have a discussion with that.
You talked about how that saves on the adult babysitting. Leadership gets a bad rap because people go, “I don't want to babysit adults.” Otherwise, you listen to them grouse about each other all the time. The second price is weariness and you've already hit on how you partition that up. Talk to me about weariness, though in not being able to see the sun. You lose the sense of all time. How did you stay physically and physiologically in the game there in that part of the world?
I learned that the hard way. That’s what I was thinking about earlier. I thought that to be a good leader meant if my people need me, I’m there, it's that simple. They would knock on my bedroom door at 10:00 PM. They’d see the light shining under the door and I'd call out, “Yeah.” They'd open the door and they'd say, “You're reading your book.” I'd say, “It's okay. I'll put a jacket on. I'll come outside. That's fine.” After six weeks, I thought, “I can't do this. I can't be available to you people 24 hours a day for a year. It will destroy me.”
For the next time it happens, they interrupted my breakfast to get me to sign a permission slip to let them go and photograph penguins or something. I looked at it and I said, “Guys, this isn't urgent. I need to have my breakfast. How about I have my breakfast and I'll meet you in my office let's say in fifteen minutes? How does that sound?” Once I put the boundary there, they respected it but prior to that, I had no boundaries so they would come to me all the time and I would respond. I talked to people now. That's why a lot of us are loving working at home at the moment but when you're in an office environment, and people say, “Tracey, have you got a minute?” It's never a minute.
It’s that constant interruption of, “Have you got a minute?” We're too afraid to say, “No, I don't right now.” I've learned the hard way. You need to manage that. If you don't have time, you need to say, “I'm on a deadline for this. I need to get this report to the board or the chief executive by 3:00. Can you come back at 3:15?” If you say, “Sure,” that person thinks sure you've got time. You need to say not now. I'm not saying no. I'm saying not now. Part of the weariness was two things. It was managing my own boundaries so the team wouldn't come to me all the time. They knew that when I was in my bedroom, that's my private place, my private space unless it's urgent, please don't disturb me because I need that mental respite. I need that break from leading you guys. I need some time off.
The other thing was devolving leadership. It’s having no triangles, but it’s equally saying to the team, “I expect you all to demonstrate leadership.” It's a behavior, it's not a title. I didn't feel as overwhelmed as, “I'm the font of all knowledge or I'm the leader, I make every decision.” I made the important decisions but I said to the team, “I expect you all to demonstrate leadership. If you've got a great idea, I want to hear it. If you see something that needs to be done, you do something about it. That's leadership.”
I had to get strategic around that weariness because I picked it up six weeks in that this is not sustainable for a year. I cannot do this for twelve months, because I won't have anything left in the tank. It’s like the old days when we used to fly on airplanes. The cabin crew did an emergency presentation and they say to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help those people around you. That's leadership. If I wasn't looking after myself, if I wasn't putting the oxygen mask on myself, I had no way of helping the people around me. I learned that the hard way. It was only after I started to feel burnt out that I thought, “I need to do something here, make a few decisions, and put in a few tools and structures to support myself.” Only I can do that. No one would tap me on the shoulder and tell me to do that. I had to do that myself as every leader does.
For leaders reading out there, what you hit on was the self-regulating teams and that is the highest functioning of a team. Yes, you are there. Leaders are needed but so are autonomous, highly functioning, highly critical thinking teams because you're there in the event of. They should be able to self-regulate and do a lot of that.
I had to be explicit about that, which intrigued me. I've worked in the leadership space, like you have, for a long time so for me, it was second nature that I needed the team to show leadership. If you want innovation and some creative ideas, you need everyone to speak up and contribute. Whereas I was working with a lot of tradesmen. There was one woman so there’s one trades woman and the rest of the tradesmen who'd never had any leadership training, teamwork training, or any corporate training whatsoever.
They left school at the age of 13 or 14 and did an apprenticeship and became successful business owners. They run their own businesses but never had any formal leadership training. They had never heard the idea that leadership is a behavior. It's not a title. It's an attitude. Just because you have to delete the word leader in your title doesn't make you a leader. I had to say those words, because it was quite new for them that they had never heard that and I had to speak those words and say, “That's my expectation and I expect all of you, if you see something broken, do something about it. If something needs fixing, do it, fix it, do something about it.”
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For the leaders, if you are tired and rundown, be clear on the expectation. Even in a marriage if you're upset with your spouse because you feel like they're not doing something, be clear in your expectation. If you need to give to help, be clear. We're not mind readers. Be clear on where you expect the boundaries and like you pointed out, Rachael, they will respect that but all they need to know is what are the lines of demarcation that I need to follow. If we don't say it, they're not mind readers. They don't know what's going on.
It's the same and I hear people all the time saying, “The boss will ring me at night,” particularly sales teams out and about in their territories. They say, “The boss rings my phone at 9:30 PM and it's not urgent. I say, “Do you answer the phone?” They say, “Yeah.” I go, “There you go. You need to put the boundary there. They're not mind readers. If you're always available, and you're always responding to emails at home within fifteen minutes, or you're answering the phone every time someone calls you, the expectation is you're fine with it because if you weren't fine with that, you'd say something. You're spot on. They're not mind readers.
You may be okay with that. My dad would sleep three hours a night. He would pick up the phone at 2:00 AM, 5:00 AM, or whatever in the morning, and people would be like, “Charlie.” He did that because he loved that but not all of us are coded that way. If you like to do it, do it and your boss may think you like to do it because you keep responding. Do them the favor of letting them know, “I'm turning the phone off at this.” My co-leader Leah did that because she knows I’ll answer the phone. I don't care if it's 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM. She shuts off the work that gets channeled up my cell phone and blocks it off. It doesn't come on after work hours. I'm glad she did because I would jump up in the middle of the night and got up. I'm used to that stuff.
Thank you for sharing your insights on weariness. The next one is abandonment. My dad always called abandonment as we need to stop thinking about what we like and want to think about in favor of what we need and ought to think about. You’ve got this hyper-focus crystallized because of the context that you were in. I'm sure even in that environment where everybody's so all-in and so confined, how did you keep everybody focused and on point? Maybe there were different people that wanted to try different things? Did any of that happen?
That's where the idea that Respect Trumps Harmony came from. We had a lot of conflicts that I didn't expect things like the reason why people work in Antarctica. There are three broad groups and it's the same for all of the seventeen countries or nations that have teams there. There's a group that will go there as I did for the experience. What an amazing experience. Few people ever get to live in Antarctica. A lot of people will visit as a tourist, but they will never get to live there in winter. They'll never see the southern lights, the Aurora Australis, the beautiful lights in the sky. For me, it was an experience. There’s a cohort that will go to get away. They're in a situation that they want to get out of, whether it's a family, a life situation, or a relationship, and they're not sure how to get out. It's similar to the defense. A lot of people will join the defense because it's a better option than what they’ve got.
It sounds like the military. See the world. Get out of jail.
They see it as an opportunity. That's the second group. The third group is there for the money because it's a well-paid job. It needs to be well paid. Otherwise, people wouldn't do it. If they paid you peanuts, no one would do it. It caused a lot of conflicts so the people who were there for the experience would say, “I can't believe those people have not even left the station once. They haven't photographed any of the wildlife. They've got no interest in Antarctica. Why are they here?” They are there for the money because you can make a six-figure sum at your bank and you save it because you've got no outgoing expenses. Everything's paid for. If you want to save a lump sum of money for a deposit for a house, it's a fast way to save money. It's not easy, it's fast.
That caused conflict so I had to chime in and say, “It doesn't matter. Respect trumps harmony. You don't need to agree with why they are here. You need to respect that's their choice. They're entitled to do that.” I never predicted that would be a challenge for me. Keeping them all because we're there for Antarctic science so our overarching expedition goal is Antarctic science. Everything we do is contributing to science. I had to find a way on how to explain that to the plumber? We make the water through reverse osmosis. We take all the salt out from the salt water and that's our drinking water and that's their job.
How do I connect them to this higher purpose of this lofty goal around climate change, science, geology, and seismology when they make the drinking water? I had to find a way to connect the two because we had to know why we're here. We're giving up so many things we love. We're giving up the people we love, going to watch live sport, playing with our dog, or reading a newspaper. Everything you love is gone so I had to hook them all into that common goal. I spent a lot of time, a lot of effort and energy in doing that so every single person could tell you what every other person on the team contributed to the overarching goal. That built, not only respect but a bit of pride in the team. The accountability wasn't with me to deliver on this program. The accountability was with all of us, the eighteen of us to deliver on the program, but I'd spent a lot of effort. It didn't happen organically and it didn't happen overnight. It took me months of constant work to get them hooked on the overarching goal.
When you say respect their choice, do you think there needs to be harmony?
I chose the word, trump carefully knowing that the situation in the US is your president. Even the word, trump now has a different connotation. My publisher said, “Are you sure you want to use that word because it might polarize people? Some will love it and some will hate it.” I said, “There's no other word that captures what I'm trying to say.” They said, “What about beats?” I said, “No.” Respect doesn't beat harmony. Harmony is important. Everyone wants harmony. No one wants to go to work where it's divisive and people are angry and they don't like each other.
I said, “What I'm suggesting is that when you have harmony over respect, what happens is things go underground, people turn a blind eye to bad behavior. People ignore bullying. People with mental health issues won't put their hands up and say, “I'm struggling.” I said, “When you have to choose between the two, it's like a deck of cards. When you have to choose between the two, you choose respect. Respect will trump harmony.” I also said, “They're both important, but one if you have to choose one is more important.” The world would be a lot better place if more of us could understand. We don't have to agree with your political ideals or opinions.
I don't have to agree with what sporting team you support or what music you listen to. You don't have to convince me. I respect it. That's your taste, belief, values and that's who you are. I respect that. I'm not going to try and change you to make you be like me. I had a completely different team. I recognized early on at our Get to Know You Barbecue, the first time we'd ever met, that some of my team would not like each other. They had nothing in common. They didn't like each other and they still don't.
I took that off the table and I said, “I don't expect you'll love each other. I don't expect you'll even like each other. However, I do expect you will treat each other with respect.” That's where it came from. It’s that mantra, “Respect trumps harmony.” I used it every day. At least once a day, I would say, “Respect trumps harmony. Go and tell them what you think,” or “Respect trumps harmony, I'm not going to buy into that argument. I'm not going to get involved. You sort that out.”
When you're in an environment like that, a lot of the research will say, “Agreeableness and EQ don’t even matter because you're there and it's like going to war. It doesn't matter if we like each other. We're going into combat together. Shut up and let's all go fight the fight together.” Being in the military, we would have these peacekeeping UN missions. It was a fake peace because all you did was say, “Don't hit each other.” That's not doing anything. I always go back to the Bible. Jesus didn't say, “Blessed are the peacekeepers.” It’s, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” That means we respect one another. We're transparent. We agree to disagree. Peacemaking is when I may not like you, but I'm going to respect you. That's the big breakdown in it that if we can’t agree to disagree, I'm more stressed out about that than the Coronavirus to be honest with you because once you get into that, you get into dictatorships and totalitarian groups. It’s quite scary.
Wouldn't it be a better place if we got to that of what you're talking about and to that point? I said all the time if you read any online news and you look at the comments, and there's so much vitriol. People get angry at each other and it's like, “You don't have to agree with me. I don't have to agree with you. We just have to respect each other.” I see in corporate life where there is a focus on harmony so where there's a team that says, “We're like a big happy family. We love each other. We have no conflict.” Those are the meetings and I've been in thousands of them. They're the meetings where people will sit in the meeting, nod their heads, smile and they'll say yes.” They walk out and they have the meeting after the meeting where they say, “That will never work. That's not going to work.”
What's wrong with the culture that the people can't speak up in a meeting, offer a difference of opinion and respectfully say, “I've got experience. We tried that in another team I worked with and it didn't work,” or “We tried a product like that and didn't take off because of this reason.” Have a conflicting view and a difference of opinion, but do it respectfully and play the ball, not the person. You're attacking the ball. You're not attacking the person. You're attacking the idea. We get so caught up in this zero-sum game. It's either this or this. No, it's both. I don't have to agree with you.
You hit the nail on the head. When you respect someone what that means is, and it was a Robert Louis Stevenson quote, “The test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing constructs in your brain at the same time and not have your head blow up.” That's the way Tracey said it. In other words, that takes cognitive higher ordering thinking. Respect means, “I see it. You see me, I'm okay with that.” When you get into harmony or feelings, that's your reptilian. That's where you get people and I'm like, “That is so lazy because you're not thinking. You're reacting and emoting.” In teams, how you feel seldom has what to do with, “Yes, we want to be empathetic.” First of all, it breaks down the whole emotional thing and we become feral cats and dogs ripping into each other or we go out of the room and sabotage. I've seen terrible things happen after you looked at me and said, “I'll do whatever you want. I've got your back,” here comes the knife right in the back and it's crazy.
One of the things with No Triangles is it took me two months to embed in the culture and the reason it took so long is I had to coach my team on how to take the emotion out exactly what you're saying. How do you take the emotion out of these conversations? We developed this little thing. It's called a LADAR, a Language Radar. It's like a sonar ping. There are words like Everyone, No one, Always, and Never. Whenever you hear those words, it's like a little sonar ping going off in your brain. Your brain should stop and go ping.
My team would never come to me and say, “Everyone thinks it's a bad idea because,” “Ping,” and I challenge everyone, “Not Tracey and not Rachael so it's not everyone, it's you.” It’s the same with Always. If you say to someone that you always do something and you are always late for work, the minute Always is out of your mouth, they'll say, “Last Tuesday, I was 30 minutes early.” They only need to find one example to prove it's not always. It's the same with Never. If you say never, they only need one example and disprove your whole theory. That's when it becomes emotional because it's natural if someone says to you, you always do something, or you never do something. Your natural reaction is to find an exception to that and that's why it becomes emotional.
If you can take the emotion out and deal with facts so the fact is, you're due here at work at 9:00 AM. The fact is, you arrived at 9:15 AM. That's a fact you can't argue with. The important part for me as the leader and I never anticipated this would be my role. I invested heavily in coaching my team on how to have the difficult conversation to take the emotion out. That's why it took so long to embed No Triangles in the culture because it's an absolute skill having those conversations. Often what happens is when we try it once at home with our partners, it goes pear-shaped, it becomes volatile and emotional so you think, “I won't raise that topic ever again.” Dealing with the facts and taking out the emotion means you can have that conversation and it's not personal. People walk away and it's not personal because you're dealing with facts and data. That was another little nifty tool that we created down there, our Language Radar.
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Those were your words. You call them LADAR. I have my trigger words. Somebody will laugh because we all access each other's emails. There's a certain word that somebody uses and the word is disappoint. For our readers, please don't send me an email and say something disappointed you because, to me, that's one of those trigger words. I can't stand that word. It's like, “Fine. If I'm such a failure to you, you could go someplace else.”
I love that you said two months because they say it’s at least 40 days for something to start forming a new pattern. It was 60 days that it took you with No Triangles. I am sure they took that away from them after having that imprinted and embedded in them for a year, they came out different people as a result of that because our society works so against that. You get to comment on people you don't know, about things that have no business to you talking about and be ugly. The triangle’s not crazy.
As the leader, I'd always done the triangles thinking it's my team. They're venting and letting off steam. My job is to listen to it and now I was complicit in that by listening. I thought that I was doing the right thing. I thought they needed someone to vent to and it’s not. You are saying that it's okay to complain about somebody else behind their back when that is so disrespectful. Whether that person decides to change their behavior or not, that's their choice. Out of respect, they need to be consulted first. You need to talk to them first before you go on blab and chat with anyone else because that's disrespectful.
My team when we did have that plane crash. I always say there are teams that have built on harmony when they're under pressure when a team who's all chipper and happy and we're all this facade of harmony. When that team is put under pressure, they will shut up under pressure. They don't have the skills and resilience to cope with challenges and pressure. My team was brilliant under pressure, but it was never because we all liked each other. It was because we had a bedrock and a foundation of respect.
We genuinely respected each person and we respected their contribution. We didn't necessarily like them. Some of them were great friends. By and large, we would work with colleagues who had to live in each other's house. You're sharing a house with your work colleagues, which is full-on. It did take a long time to embed that. I've taken it back now. I've got a son and I'm teaching him No Triangle. No Triangles, the other part of it is that answer shopping. If someone asks you a request, you say no, and they go around your back or they go over your head, they shop around and they ask that same request of different people until they get the answer that they want. We know when I do it, it works because you've said no and they found someone above you who’ll say yes.
My son gets in more trouble for answer shopping than he does for whatever that original request was. He might say, “Mom, can I have the iPad?” I'll say, “Have you asked your father?” He'll say, “Yes.” I'll say, “What did dad say?” He said, “Dad said no.” He'll get in trouble for that. I said, “No triangles. You can't go answer shopping. If one of your parents says no, that's no.” The other part of the No Triangles is that answer shopping and it's rife. It's a political thing that people do to get what they want. They do it as kids, they grow into adults, and they do it at work. If you're the leader, it is so disempowering and dysfunctional. You'll never forget it. You will never get over it if that has happened to you.
If you're in an organization, they allow it to go on. That's jumping the chain. That's where you got to work for leaders that respect your decision. It’s like, “Tracey, this time, I agree to let him.” When you said disempowered, I've had that. I've probably done it to people too. Leadership is an absolute learning process. I love that you keep saying respect. We drill down on respect because it's all about trust and without trust, they didn't feel like they even lived for a year out there. You’ve got to trust that the right people are going to have the right water. Otherwise, you might drink something or somebody might not keep the facility running. Trust is important in your environment and it's important in all of our environments.
It is. Simple things like we have little quad bikes, a little four-wheeled motorbikes down there and that's how we get around because we can't drive a car down. There are no roads so that's how we get around. If somebody has taken that quad bike out and there's some fault with it, maybe the demister isn't working on the helmet that you wear. It's heated so it doesn't fog up and you can see where you're going. If somebody has taken that out and realized, “It's fogging up,” and you can't lift the visor. If you lift the visor, you've got minus 32 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures or even more in the winter. The wind hitting you on the head and that's diabolical.
If someone has used that helmet, it's faulty, they put it back on the hook, you go out of the station on your little bike. You've got your helmet on. Suddenly, you realize the visor isn't working and you're 20 miles from the station before you realized someone could die from that. That’s one person who didn't show the leadership of saying, “This is faulty. I can't fix it because I'm not the mechanic, but I will bring it to the attention of the mechanics. Meanwhile, I'll put a tag on it to say that it's faulty or I'll place it somewhere out of sight so someone doesn't accidentally pick it up.” It’s all of those things so we had to trust each other. We had to trust that the person who's used that equipment before you returned it in great condition and working condition. I'm safe because a mistake like that is absolutely deadly.
The last one that we talked about and you have alluded to it. All these things are all threaded through. The funny thing about leadership is it's all threaded through. Imagine that. You talked about having that lofty goal, the three types of groups that went out to Antarctica. You talked about a lofty goal. The last point my dad brought up was called vision. His perspective of vision wasn't like, you see things like you're a Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or Oprah, but it’s seeing what needs to be done and doing it. A lot of people will talk about stuff, but not ever put any skin in the game or suit up. How did you set the vision? You guys had your research that was pretty defined, but you talked about the lofty goal you set for people. How else did you keep people on point with the vision or inspire them?
The vision for me in winter, when there's nothing interesting going on its 24 hours of darkness. There's a blizzard and it’s boring. It's like being in lockdown for nine months except you're with colleagues so you're in lockdown with people that you don't even know at the time. The vision for me was simple. It was how do I create a culture where people will speak up and deal with issues directly because my big fear was someone exploding with anger. Someone getting so frustrated and so built up that they explode with anger because I had no way to deal with that.
There was no police force. There are no disciplinary measures. I’m it. Equally, with mental health, someone spiraling with depression, someone stewing on something and getting more and more depressed. I didn't have a psychologist or psychiatrist on the team so I’m it. My vision was, how do I create this robust, resilient team that functions at a high level? We raise issues and talk about issues. We deal with them, we sort them, we put them to bed and we move on.
The story that highlights that is one I call the Bacon War. People say, “Is that a metaphor?” I said, “No, it was a Bacon War. It was a fight about whether the bacon should be cooked soft or crispy.” Three of the team wanted me to call a meeting to decide should the bacon be soft or crispy. When I got to the bottom of it, I found out that the relationship between these two teams had broken down over the use of a vehicle. One team, the diesel mechanics and the plumbers. The plumbers thought the diesel mechanics were deliberately cooking the bacon the opposite way to irritate them.
I realized that this has nothing to do with bacon. It's manifested in the bacon, but they're feeling disrespected.” I started to identify all of these little behaviors, the thorn in the side of a team. They irritate people and it's because they're a symptom of a deeper issue and the deeper issue is a lack of respect. Every day I'm in lockdown. It's people leaving wet towels on the floor and I hear it all the time. When you're in lockdown, little things will drive you nuts. People say, “It's a wet towel.” No, it's not a wet towel. It's disrespectful because it implies that my time is more important than your time.
It's the same when you're sharing a vehicle or a car. Someone takes it out and they don't put gas in it. They bring it back in and it's empty, and you're running late. You jump in that car and you realize, “I need to go and get gas. I need to go to the station and get gas.” That's disrespectful because what it implies is my time is more important than the next person. I've always wondered why these little things drive us crazy and now I know, it's because they're the symptom and the deeper issue is the lack of respect.
My vision for the team was, we need to raise these little things and not flick them off as a small thing and not say, “It’s only a little thing.” Is it a little thing or is it a symptom of a deeper issue that I need to deal with and we all need to deal with? That was the vision for the team. I wanted them to speak up, step up, and to deal with stuff as it happened as grown-ups, professionals, colleagues and move on. Put it to bed and move on. I had no capacity or ability to deal with the alternative because I was everything. I was it.
There was no one else for nine months. I didn't feel like I was skilled enough to deal with significant mental health issues or if someone had a violent episode. There's no one there. That was the vision. Let's deal with it. Let's sort it. Let's solve the Bacon Wars and now's a good time as people are coming out of isolation and returning to workplaces. Every one of us will think of one little thing that's happening in the team at work and it might be people who are constantly late for meetings or people who are playing on their phones when you're presenting.
There's a whole heap of them and I've done research on it. It's funny. They're different all around the world. They're different things in different countries but they're the same philosophy. They're little things that irritate people. For leaders, this is our leadership legacy moment. As we return from isolation and get back to workplaces slowly, it's a leadership legacy moment and as leaders, how we lead our teams for the next period will leave a lasting impression for a long time. It's a great opportunity to think about what worked in this team that we love and we'll keep and what didn't work.
What are the Bacon Wars, and the little things? Let's get rid of them? What are these little things we picked up during isolation? Little rituals that we might have had that will retain going forward and now is the time to draw the line in the sand. Reset the values and recalibrate the team and go, “From this day forward, this is what's going to change.” Solve those Bacon Wars because coming out of isolation is going to be difficult and challenging, for leaders in particular, but now is the time to deal with it. It's a circuit breaker, we can deal with these issues now.
You get to reset stuff that may have been so entrenched before and never would have happened. I love that you took the perspective of vision and said, “We already know what we're here to do.” That's when people are like, “What's your vision?” I'm like, “Everybody knows my vision.” It was my dad's vision and now it's my vision. I love that you talked about it too. Vision is not focusing on the end goal, but getting rid of the stuff that's going to trip you off up in route to the end goal. That's so important because it always used to baffle me. I’m like, “I never got hung up but it’s the obstacles that irritated me.”
I don't mind charging up. I'll pick a vision. I'll have 100 visions, but I love that you said that everybody pretty much knows what they're down there to do and what they're getting paid to do. They signed up for that and this is it. They don't get to all of a sudden go, “I'm here to see if there are aliens on the South Pole.” You don't get to veer off and mission drift. There are a lot of things that could prevent people from achieving the end goal. That's a brilliant insight, Rachael.
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It was a necessity. They say, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” and it was. It was that self-awareness of reflecting on my own leadership. When things went wrong, and I made a lot of decisions that were wrong, it would have been easy for me to ascribe that behavior to cabin fever to say, “They’re suffering from cabin fever.” I had to be brutally self-aware of myself and almost like standing on a balcony looking down watching myself. There were times where I had to go, “No, that's not cabin fever. That's you.”
One time, I consulted the whole team on a simple thing. It was about the music that was being played. Someone decided they wanted sports. They want to live stream a sporting game. People said, “No, we play music. We don't play sports.” Instead of making a decision, I consulted with all of them, “What do you think? What do you reckon?” It became the biggest issue to hit Antarctica in many years. I'm scratching my head. I'm going, “What's going on?” Initially, I said, “It’s cabin fever. We've been together for six months, they've all gone a bit crazy.” It was only through reflecting in my journal and being brutally self-aware that I realized it’s not Cabin Fever, that's you. You did that. The reason everyone has an opinion is because you asked everybody their opinion.
The reason this has dragged on for five days when you could have sorted it in five minutes is that you elevated it, escalated it, and turned it into a much bigger issue than it needed to be because you were too democratic and collaborative. I'd always thought there was no danger in that. I thought that you can't over collaborate. You can't be overly democratic. You can get everyone's opinion. I now know that sometimes it is wrong. Sometimes you're paid to make a decision. Make the decision and if you consult widely with everyone, it slows things down. It's like throwing fuel on a fire and it makes it this big issue that you could have put out when it was tiny. All of the things I learned was because I had to. I had no one tapping me on the shoulder saying, “Rachael, you've got that wrong. I had to sit there and ponder and think, “Why did that person behave the way they did, and did I have any role in that?” Sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn't because I had to.
I'm speaking to a group on trust and you hit on it. The number one thing is we all make mistakes. We all make a faux pas, lose people's trust, burn our social capital, or whatever but the greatest thing to gain it back is to own your part of it and acknowledge it. Put yourself in place and say, “It wasn't my intent.” I don't care what your intent was. This is how it landed so own it.” You got that experience out there. It's everybody else's fault, but my fault kind of thing. How incredible that you were up there and got that. You were open to it, you were humble enough and self-aware enough that you could let it land on you and say, “No wonder they hired you.”
It was funny because I had many moments of self-doubt, which a lot of leaders do. A lot of times, particularly in the early months, where I thought I'm out of my depth and I don't know about the science. I'm managing technical specialists when I don't have that technical expertise myself, and I'm sure lots of leaders reading will have felt that at some time. What I had to keep saying to myself was, “They chose me.” It was a lengthy selection process that went for over six months so it included phone interviews, reference checks, and the boot camp.
I have to say that I was on the 58th expedition. This team of people and their predecessors have been recruiting for this role for many years. They know what they're looking for and I had to say if they chose me, and watching me around the clock for a week, they knew me, there was no way to hide, they knew my leadership style and they chose me. I had to use that to give me the confidence to go. They know what they're on about so you must be able to do this and keep saying it. That was probably the big lesson I learned, the two big lessons and it's a good place to finish. The first big lesson I learned were leadership skills are transferable.
The other big lesson I learned was to be an inspiring leader. I thought to be inspiring was personality. I thought you had to be like Richard Branson. You had to be this big extrovert personality, and I'm an introvert. I thought, “There’s no way I can be inspiring.” My performance review was conducted by a psychologist who met privately with each of my people and got feedback so it's brutal. It's a third-party performance review. She gets the feedback and she gives it to me. I said, “What did they tell you? What did they say?” She said, “They found you inspiring.” I said, “What is that? Is it that because I worked sixteen hours a day or is it that I managed this plane crash?”
She said, “No. Sharon mentioned that you knew the names and hometowns of all 120 people on your station over the summer. Patrick mentioned his son had a school concert and you saw him in the morning and you said, ‘Patrick, did you phone home last night? How did Locklin's concert go?’ Ellen mentioned he was on kitchen duty, and he's mopping the floors at 8:00 PM. You came in to get a cup of tea and you put some chairs up to help him out. You didn't speak to him, you helped him out.” I said, “That's what they told you.”
I'm thinking, I didn't have to work sixteen-hour days. What it taught me was, my team didn't rank me as a good leader because I delivered a program on time on a budget, or I maintain the safety of 120. They figured that's my job. What I was paid for. What stood out for them with it were these moments. In the words of the wonderful Maya Angelou, “People don't remember what you say or do. They remember how you make them feel great.” It blew me away that if I want to be an inspiring leader, it's not about charisma or personality. If you've got that, then you're lucky. If you're a little bit more introverted, you can still be an inspiring leader because that's what people want. They want to feel valued and they want the moments where you make them feel valued. It blew me away and that was the number one thing about leadership in twelve months.
When I did my PhD, I was studying the crisis leader that pulled this merger that’s gone south. When people reflect on it, that is the same thing. They said it was a female leader. She’s caring, kept her cool, stayed in touch with us, let us know it was going to be okay. I'm like, “That’s what sticks in people's minds.” You solidified that.
It blew me away. Here I'm doing the typical leadership stuff. I'm working the long hours. I had a roster. It was an Excel spreadsheet, throughout rosters, which is the first time anyone had done this in Antarctica so I had that transparency. There was none of that squabbling around all because we had to do all the hospitality duties. We don't have hospitality workers down there. Things like vacuuming the carpet or washing the windows, we all have to take turns doing that, and that's the same for all of the nations.
To put some transparency around that rather than having this whispering of, “Tracey's only vacuumed once in the last month and I've done it three times.” I had a spreadsheet front and center where everyone could look at it and see exactly. I thought that was brilliant. The team didn't even mention it because they figured that was my job. They mentioned all these little moments and it truly was they did not remember those things. They didn't remember what I said or what I did. They remembered how I made them feel and it was that simple and it blew me away that it is that simple. People don't remember what you say or do they remember how you make them feel.
That encourages leaders that may feel that they're out of their technical element. They land into something and they're like, “I don't even know what these guys are talking about.” Leadership is something different than that. It's not that capability because you've got people on your team to go ahead and do that. It's bringing out the best in them to get that one goal met. Anything else, Rachael, that you want to share with us? Those are an incredible last two lessons on top of the other 200 lessons you gave us.
A shout out to leaders at the moment to look after each other. Leadership is in the community. It's in the home and it's in the workplace. For leaders at the moment, it's exhausting to have that poise, particularly with young children, if you have young children, and to read the headlines around the world and to have that. We don't know how this will end, but we need to be strong. We need to know people are looking to us for confidence and optimism. Look after each other and find yourself. We've come back to the start of that loneliness that you're talking about. Find a peer, find that one person that you can talk to. I'm available too if you want someone to talk to on the other side of the world or in a completely different time zone but I'm more than happy for people to shoot me a message. I'm here to listen and talk, because leaders in particular at the moment need to look after each other.
We do. We need to stick together. That's why we're doing this. I thank you for pouring into these leaders. How do people connect with you, Rachael, get your book, hear more about you, reach out to you to speak, or do a virtual presentation?
I would love to do some virtual presentations. I've had to set up my own broadcast studio because we can't fly anywhere. The delightful thing is I get to work in the United States and Europe because Australia is so far away that I often turn down work internationally because of the travel. It's three days of travel for me to get to London. It's fourteen hours on a plane to LA and another five hours to the East Coast. Doing virtual presentations is great. Absolutely drop me a line. My website is my name, RachaelRobertson.com and you can find me there. The books are there. There's a lot of free material there around implementing No Triangles or some ten steps for difficult conversations. There's a whole heap of resources there that are available to anyone. I'd love to hear from people. I’ll be thrilled.
Rachael, thank you, again for your incredible lessons on extreme leadership. All leadership is extreme because we're dealing with people. You unpacked it in a way that you can figure it out. Thank you for the tips and I look forward to reading this again and again. I can't thank you enough.
Thank you so much for having me.
You're welcome, Rachael. To our tremendous leadership readers out there, thank you so much. Be sure and hit subscribe and like. Be sure and contact Rachael. Follow her and get her book. Thanks so much for reading. Have a tremendous day.
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About Rachael Robertson
After 15 years leading diverse and remote teams and business units, I took the jump and lead the 58th annual expedition to the edge of the world: Antarctica. It was a tough, gruelling and exhausting year, but ultimately extremely rewarding and fruitful.
The intensity of this leadership role, where the leader is on-duty all day, every day, for 12 months with no respite, gave me the opportunity to road test my leadership ideas the hard way - without the luxury of peers, a desk or high-speed broadband! It was a "leadership laboratory" in the most extreme, hostile environment on Earth.
I present real leadership. Real stories and real insights - the highs and lows and the ups and downs of being an authentic leader.
My work is in response to a massively growing demand in the business world to get real, practical tools backed up by solid theory from someone who has actually led, and led successfully.
So, how do you lead diverse teams that seem to have no obvious common ground?
How do you motivate people to do the really hard tasks?
What happens when a crisis occurs and all eyes are on you?
I draw on incredible and often hilarious examples of what authentic leadership looks like, in a world where most classic leadership theory doesn't apply .
Since returning from Antarctica, I have spoken at over 1500 national and international conferences and events with clients drawn from all industries and sectors including mining, pharmaceutical, construction, health, education, finance, hospitality and retail.