In 2005 Rachael Roberston led the 58th Australian expedition to Antarctica.  At the time she was just 34 years old – one of the youngest to ever lead an expedition and the second female.

The expedition was to last a year. It tested Robertson on all fronts as she led a team through extreme cold, isolation and months of darkness. Upon her return, Robertson chronicled her experiences in a book Leading From the Edge and has since established herself as a world-renowned expert in leadership. Her latest work, Respect Trumps Harmony expands on the lessons she learned in Antarctica, a place she refers to as ‘the leadership laboratory‘.

You can read an excerpt below from her on how to implement her policy of ‘no triangles’.

CHAPTER 8: IMPLEMENTING NO TRIANGLES

 Integrity is critical to a team’s success, and the lack of it unquestionably leads to poor performance. Teams and organisations need simple ways to encourage the right behaviours and the tools to call out behaviours that are counterproductive. One simple teamwork tool can increase staff productivity by up to 40 per cent.

Though the impact of this behaviour varies across industries, what is resoundingly true across all businesses is that spending time in ‘triangle’ conversations is both time-consuming and exhausting,

especially for leaders.

Leaders should be allocating their time to the actions that have the most impact on the business’s bottom line, and right at the top of this list is retaining talent. That means spending time with your best performers and making sure their contribution is valued. Any leader who is caught up in the repetitive loop of ‘triangle’ conversations simply won’t have the time or energy to acknowledge their best contributors.

Leaders lose their way when they attach more importance to team harmony than integrity and respect. This is when leaders spend their time listening to staff vent or complain about their colleagues, with no real determination to solve the problem. These leaders just want to keep the peace, which is dangerous.

My expedition team in Antarctica was incredibly diverse across many measures, including age, gender, religion, profession and cultural background, so it was unrealistic to imagine we would all live together for an entire year as best friends. It simply wouldn’t happen, and I didn’t expect it to. Rather, as leader, my expectation was we would always treat each other with integrity and respect.

When a team focuses on harmony as its main goal, several things happen. Firstly, any bullying or harassment will persist; it just goes underground. People won’t raise the issue because they don’t want to be the person who rocks the harmony boat. So they keep quiet. The job of the leader is to deal with these issues as and when they arise. Being seen to manage the issues, rather than sweep them under the carpet for the sake of team unity, is critical.

Secondly, when you focus on harmony and minimise any differences, you are unlikely to generate innovation. You cannot innovate when everyone is focused on agreeing! People won’t air a different opinion or a conflicting view, or engage in robust debate, because, again, they don’t want to upset the harmonious balance. The role of a leader in this situation is to canvass different ideas and encourage discussion of all options — in other words, find the best outcome or solution from a wide range of diverse people with different levels of experience.

Thirdly, and most importantly, when a team focuses on harmony, to the exclusion of all else, people can get hurt, both physically or mentally, which exposes the business to additional risk. People turn a blind eye to someone acting unsafely, for example not following the correct safety protocols, because they don’t want to upset the status quo. They want to keep the peace.

Research shows that in workplaces where safety is paramount (for example, in mining, resources, utilities, manufacturing and construction) the most critical inhibitor to people stepping in to put a stop to unsafe activities is the need to feel included. If for any reason a person feels excluded or not part of the team, they will not get involved in safety leadership. This happens wherever a culture of harmony and homogeneity prevails over a culture of integrity and respect. In these workplaces especially, people need to feel included and respected. Not loved, just respected. And the leader sets the tone by stepping in and managing the issue, every time.

Similarly, if the focus is on a happy and harmonious team, where everything is great, people are less likely to admit to any unhappiness. If everyone else feels great, then they best keep quiet about not feeling the same way.

Lastly, people often walk away from unethical behaviour. Even if they know the behaviour is wrong, and will end up significantly damaging the business, they choose to ignore it because they believe that keeping the peace is the greater good. In recent history many financial institutions around the world have collapsed under the weight of the unethical behaviour of a small group of staff. It’s certain that other people in the business were aware of what was going on, but instead of intervening or reporting the behaviour, they chose to look away — with devastating consequences.

A team built on harmony alone is an illusion that will crumble under pressure.

A few years back a company I worked for organised all my travel and accommodation requirements for a series of their events. One day they made a significant error, booking me to speak at two different events, 1200 kilometres apart, within 12 hours. A robust team would have identified the mistake and called a few people into a room to brainstorm possible solutions. But this team emphasised a culture of harmony over one of respect (that is, dealing with issues), which meant the young staffer who’d made the mistake rang me from a mobile phone in the car park in tears, trying to convey the error without any colleagues finding out. This behaviour could in part be attributed to pride and wanting to do a great job, but, knowing the team as well as I did, I knew the bigger issue was a fear of admitting they’d made a mistake, thereby upsetting the team dynamic.

My Antarctic team were fantastic in a crisis. When we had to manage the search and rescue following the plane crash, the team worked incredibly well under pressure. Given that we were to be together for over a year, with no way to get away from each other, I recognised from the start how important it was to build a resilient culture where people would speak up and address issues directly and not let them fester.

My role as leader was to model that behaviour, and it started with the principle of no triangles. I was always willing to step in and resolve an issue between staff — but only after they had first tried to sort it out for themselves. And I simply couldn’t be seen, or heard, complaining about one of the team or about head office, even if only letting off steam, because such behaviour is disrespectful and the leader sets the tone for the rest of the team.

In Antarctica, we created a strong, adaptable and high-performing team, not because we all loved each other, but because our culture of integrity and respect ensured we learned to respect each other’s contribution to the team.

Rachael Robertson is an Antarctic expedition leader, Australia’s most in-demand female speaker, executive advisor and best-selling author. She has just released her latest book, Respect Trumps Harmony. Rachael has worked with 1,500 organisations internationally, including PWC, Telstra, Westpac and CBA, imparting her evidence-based leadership tools. To learn more, or to buy Respect Trumps Harmony, visit https://www.rachaelrobertson.com.au/.

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