A Japanese/Vietnamese Student In the foreign waters of New Zealand, Captaining a ship of 40 valuable lives. And Yes, I was in charge of Sailing this ginormous ship for 2880 minutes.
So, how did I get myself into this situation? I was on a sailing voyage full of High School Seniors who had previous sailing experience or were National Boy Scouts, and they, for some reason, thought that voting for me to be Captain so I was responsible for their lives was a good idea. In the previous 8 days, they must have seen something in the only foreign boy with no sailing experience that they would trust me.
Anyway, this story isn’t about how I got the opportunity but what I learned from this rare opportunity.
The TLDR to my learnings, if you don’t want to read the rest of this experience, was:
a. There is a particular way of leading a group of strong personalities with high expertise.
b. When emergencies arise, you just have to make decisions quickly and deal with them.
a. There is a particular way of leading a group of strong personalities with high expertise.
I believe effective leadership is very situational, and no particular style is correct. Charisma isn’t something you can practice; not everyone can be a strong-willed commander. I prefer to think of leadership as a puzzle. It is putting pieces together so that the stakeholders’ goals involved match, people are doing what they enjoy, and your people have significant trust in you to make a calm, logical decision. In my situation, my first Job as captain was to align everyone’s goals. I preached why we were all here; we gave up our New Year gatherings to experience something fulfilling. We were here to do challenges that would make us better people. Aligning our vision was crucial on our ship because the arrogant and experienced students suddenly became passionate and helpful managers. We then proceeded to do something the supervisor captain had never seen before in his 10 years running the program. The SILENT JIBE.
It requires everyone to coordinate to maneuver the masts simultaneously in order to catch the wind. I assigned 4 sub-leaders and sent out the decided hand signals as the wind was ready, BAM BAM BAM, just like that, we completed the first SILENT JIBE in Spirit of New Zealand history. This JIBE was the crucial turning point in our journey, as it instilled massive confidence in all of our members, breaking down barriers between skill levels and personalities. People thought I was ridiculous for suggesting this idea, but no one made fun of me after we succeeded. I guess when you have a group of EGOs, you have to set the goal even higher to keep these people challenged while taking the group's overall performance to the next level.
b. When emergencies arise, you just have to make decisions quickly and deal with them.
As it happens with everything else in life, things just have to turn south as soon as we start out good. The waves started getting super rocky, and the crew became seasick. People were dropping like flies, and after a few minutes, half of the crew were at the front of the ship trying to recover. Then suddenly, one of our lifeboats fly into the ocean. I took 2 seconds to process what happened……
I scream at the available crew to control the front two masts so we can make a hard right U-turn. We spend about 15 minutes in the rocky waters trying to hook the boat to pull it back up to our ship. This was definitely not on the menu when I initially planned the day. But I just reacted to the moment, and things turned out to be just fine. As the day passed, more members gradually recovered, and we reached our final destination. We ran into another situation near the end where we had to tightly navigate between ships trying to get into the harbor. Still, at this point of the day, I had seen so much that I could coordinate and build a quick strategy without any struggle.
My greatest achievement was not winning a math competition, hackathon, or pitch contest, but it was this very experience because I learned how to navigate challenging situations on the fly and bring people together.
For reference, here is a note from one of the evaluators:
