I had the privilege last month to participate as a member of Team Canada in the 2024 IVF World Sprints Outrigger Championship in Hilo, Hawaii. The year leading up to this 2-week, multi-race event was filled with strenuous, physical training both on and off the water. But that was just the start. Working to efficiently build two cohesive 6-person teams with athletes was an obstacle on its own. With each member as diverse from each other as the construction and brand of our paddles, we were facing rough waters before even getting in our paddles up.
To be considered for the Canadian National Team (Team Canada), you either; a) need to prove your speed and strength by competing in time trials with your 6-person team, or b) compete in the time trials yourself, assuming you don’t have a team yet, and get placed on a team with 5 other individual solo paddlers who also “made the cut.” From December to August this year, the two V6 teams I was on had only a few opportunities to get together, which is not only a challenge from a technical perspective, but also from a teaming standpoint. For context, V6 sprint races contain turns which require lots of practice and skill, typically perfected over years of routine practice. In the end, we came together to practice only once as a full team before we set out for the international competition in Hawaii.
Considering our lack of time spent together, our performance in Hawaii was decent, despite the pre-hurricane ocean swells and course challenges that left us feeling slightly discombobulated. In the end, a few of us hung back and analyzed our performance, noting that there was a distinct absence of synergy between teammates. Successful outrigger teams are no different than successful work teams. Without having lived experiences that build trust in each other you can’t have healthy conflict, and without healthy conflict it’s nearly impossible to have commitment to a common goal. While we all had a vision of winning our races, we didn’t have the synchronization of our individual strengths and weaknesses to understand how best to overcome our opponents.
We were all individually strong paddlers. However, Due to the combined absence of knowing each others’ strengths and weaknesses, building a synthesized intuition on how to correct a timing issue in the boat, and ability to push each other to perform without t completely breaking each others’ spirit, we found ourselves unable to challenge our own beliefs about what a team should be.
The bottom line is this: Creating successful teams takes more than just putting together a group of talented individuals and expecting them to perform like a well-oiled machine. Without giving them the time and tools to create trust, to understand how they can best leverage each other’s strengths, to feel safe to challenge each other…you can’t expect them to perform anywhere near their collective best.
How many ad hoc/project/agile teams have you been a part of that worked well? How about the ones that didn’t? I’d love to hear your stories. Until then, Paddles Up!
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