Teamwork, the Everest Way
The first Singaporean women to reach the summit of Everest used a
framework that defines effective teams.
There were no Olympic medals up
for grabs when Sim Yi Hui and Jane Lee, the co-founders of the Singapore
Women’s Everest team set out to recruit team members to climb the world’s
tallest mountain in 2004. “When we first formed the team my goal was just to
climb the mountain. It was really a pure passion to want to climb”, Sim
Yi Hui told me on stage at the recent FT Family Business Forum Asia.
Little did she know at the time
but her goal would get a lot bigger. Once the newspapers caught wind of Yi
Hui’s dream, she and her team members became the “Singapore Women’s Everest
Climbing team”, the first group of Singaporean women to attempt to reach the
summit of the mountain. The nation was watching and expectations were rising.
To cope with the enormity of
their mission, the team developed a highly fluid, yet effective way of
operating, which was crucial to their success. It comprised of four key
practices which are widely considered to define team effectiveness; the GRPI
framework (Goals, Roles and Responsibilities, Process and Procedures and
Interpersonal Relationships), from Richard Beckhard’s 1972 study, “Optimising
Team Building Efforts”.
The GRPI model focuses the leader
and team first and foremost on concrete goals. In 2007 Noel Tichy, an American
management expert, found that 80 percent of team conflicts were the result of
unclear goals. Agreeing on shared goals is therefore the highest priority. The
next most important factors are roles and responsibilities, processes and
procedures and relationships.
Shared goals
Yi Hui’s team was very clear
about its goal right from the beginning, which was a humble one considering the
scale of its ambition. The six women from the equator knew that the freezing
climb would push them to their limits so their main aim was to put just one
team member on the summit. They were all prepared that they might not be the
one to plant the flag.
They also set expectations; each
team member had to commit four years to the endeavour. This meant putting off
big life decisions such as getting married, which one of them duly did.
They also pledged to go together.
When funds were lacking, meaning only two of them could go, they delayed the
climb, which was originally scheduled for 2008, for another year to gather more
sponsors.
The Singapore team’s shared goal
also aided shared decision-making. “There were a lot of times when we disagreed
with decisions made and also because of different personalities, but we will
always go back to the goal, which is that we want to get up the mountain safely
and come down. If you put that goal as the overarching thing to look at,
then it makes decision-making a lot easier,” she added.
Clear roles
Yi Hui was joined by a mixed bag
of team members; from a Major in the Singapore Armed Forces, to a
pharmaceutical sales rep, all of whom were different ages.
Yi Hui and Jane weren’t the
oldest (Jane was actually the youngest), nor the most experienced or even the
most physically ready. Unconventional in most places, especially so in Asia,
but their team made all decisions together and leveraged each other’s skills
from the beginning.
For example, Joanne Soo became
the team mentor because of her background running her own outdoor adventure
training company. A veteran leader of trekking and mountaineering expeditions,
having led teams to Mount Damavand in Iran and Mouth Halla and DeChongBong in
Korea, it was a natural role.
The team quickly discovered that
Peh Gee, the Singapore Army Major, was strongest in communications and ensuring
order, so she was assigned to look after all equipment, especially
communications kit like satellite phones and cameras.
Plucky processes
“We realised that in such a
stressful environment you need to have certain fixed processes, and the daily
debrief was one of them. So, every day we will always gather in the tent
to talk about what happened in the course of the day and if there are certain
things we needed to sort out we would be able to discuss and make any decisions
based on the discussions.”
Such clear processes and group
decision-making meant the team had to make one very difficult decision in the
interest of achieving the goal. Yi Hui was diagnosed with costochondritis (an
inflammation of the sternum) during the climb, which gave her an increasing
amount of chest pain the higher she pushed up the mountain. Fearing she
wouldn’t make it and become a burden to her teammates, she made the hard
decision to return to camp and let the others push to the top, which they duly
did. In the end, five of them made it to the summit, far surpassing the
original goal anyway.
Relationships matter
How members of a team interact
with each other is critical to mutual trust and respect. The leader’s style
also influences the interaction of the whole group. Yi Hui as a
co-leader was also called the “merry-maker” for her good humoured approach to
difficult situations and Jane was a driven and tenacious go-getter, who the
team saw as a natural leader. Both of them, however, instilled very open
communication in the team and together, imbued it with a mixed sense of
seriousness and fun. Their team was not defined by a typical hierarchy.
While hierarchy is said to
improve a team, it can also undermine it. In research conducted by my
colleague Roderick Swaab which looked at 5,104 group
expeditions to the Himalayas over the past 100 years, he found that
hierarchically-oriented teams climbing Everest had a higher chance of reaching
the summit, but such teams had more climbers die on the way up. The less
hierarchical ones had a lower chance of success, but a higher chance of coming
back alive. One of his paper’s key pieces of advice is to ensure that teams
have a safe environment to speak out, which defined the less hierarchical
teams, something Yi Hui’s team did very well.
The closeness of the team endured
victory too. “The most touching moment was when my teammate, she reached the
summit and the first thing she said, it was not, ‘Oh, I am at the top,’ or, ‘I
have made it.’ The first thing she said to me was, ‘Yi Hui, this is for
you.’”
The importance of having a shared
goal was central to the team’s success. Leaving someone behind, even one of the
team leaders, was not something the team took lightly, but it was necessary for
the overarching goal, which was not only for one of them to reach the summit,
but for all of them to come home safely.
Randel Carlock is a Senior Affiliate
Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise and the Berghmans
Lhoist Chaired Professor in Entrepreneurial Leadership at INSEAD. He was
the first academic director of the Wendel Centre
for Family Enterprise and is the director of The Family Enterprise Challenge, an Executive Education
programme for family business leaders.
Read more at http://knowledge.insead.edu/blog/insead-blog/teamwork-the-everest-way-5007?utm_source=INSEAD+Knowledge&utm_campaign=a7be941e10-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_11_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e079141ebb-a7be941e10-249840429#ftMZGpjOC3VT6tBr.99
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