The greatest energy loss can potentially come from simply struggling with your own self-confidence

Interview byJolanda Bouman

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According to Knut Frostad, having high self-awareness is crucial for any leader, in business and on board. A good understanding of your strengths and weaknesses and being open about them improves your collaboration with others, increases your confidence and helps you perform better overall.

SELF-AWARENESS‘In my days at business school, I learnt a long list of characteristics that a good leader has to possess. And all I thought was: how can I ever meet all those demands? In my opinion, the most important skill of all for a leader is self-awareness. Knowing yourself - who you are, what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, how you communicate, how you affect other people and how others affect you.

It’s impossible to pretend to be someone else when you’re a leader, especially on a boat where everyone is close to you all the time. You’re kind of naked. You all wear the same clothes, nobody knows how

Knut Frostad CEO of the Volvo Ocean Race

Leaders must have high self- awareness

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much you earn, what car you drive, how neat your office is, you have no privileges. There’s nothing to hide behind. The only thing that’s left is you, your personality. What you’re doing right now. If you make a mistake, everyone sees it. If you’re happy, sad or irritated, people notice immediately. But when you’re aware of yourself and open about it, this improves a working relationship enormously. For example, I once had to team up with a successful leader of a big company who had the reputation of being quite arrogant. During our first meeting, he said: “We have to work together and I know I can come across as arrogant, but I’m working on it. Tell me when I cross the line.” He was self-aware! I never had any trouble with him after he told me that. Problems arise when you are arrogant and unaware of it.

I tend to quantify my day in energy levels. You start the morning fully charged and throughout the day you use energy. Ideally, all of it is spent on achieving the company’s goals. However, in reality some of the energy will be lost on misunder-standings, personal agendas, lack of listening, alignments and other interpersonal issues that all come from lacking self awareness.

The greatest energy loss can poten-tially come from simply struggling with your own self-confidence.

I believe that being more self-aware and accepting and even liking ‘what you see in the mirror’ can make a huge difference to any manager.

I’d also always recommend self-awareness training and coaching. This is a never-ending journey we can all only get better at. It’s the best way to build real and lasting self-confidence.’

THE RIGHT DECISIONS AT THE RIGHT TIME‘Ultimately, successful management teams can be identified as those which are able to make good decisions quickly and that normally comes from self-confidence.

The job of the skipper on board is to make responsible decisions at the right time and this can happen any time during the day. Sometimes once a day, sometimes twenty times a day. When you’re winning, such decisions are easier because winning builds your confidence. But it’s good decision making when you are losing and in high stress situations that separates the best from the rest. You need a leader who knows how to manage stress in dangerous situations. A good skipper keeps calm and isn’t affect-ed even in dangerous and really stressful situations.

The worst you can do is not make a decision at all or take too much time over it. That definitely affects the faith people have in you as their leader, both offshore and onshore, and it certainly affects the results. On a boat the effect of not making a decision is very measureable. Every six hours we get position reports telling us how well we are doing. In normal business, we don’t get measured that often, so you can survive longer without making

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INTERVIEW KNUT FROSTAD

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decisions until they are really forced on you.

Again being self-aware also helps you obtain better support to make good decisions quickly. The more you know about yourself, the better you can complement yourself by including the right people in decision making. For example, my right hand, Tom Touber (COO), and I are quite different in some specific areas we’ve identified. He’s great at planning, while I’m more creative and strategic. Without him, I would definitely struggle with my timelines. With him, I can make sure we keep on track for the overall strategic objectives. Self-awareness in that situation ensures that I appreciate this difference rather than being frustrated by it.

Another side of self-awareness is motivation. Knowing what motivates you and your teammates. Nine months is an incredibly long time to stay 100% motivated and deliver a high performance. Certainlythere’s nothing in the boat itself that will drive your motivation when you need it. The only thing left is the result. But you need something other than just the result to drive you and the team through difficult times.

There’s hardly time to recover between the legs and we need to know as much as we can about what drives us so you can surround yourself with things that give you energy, whatever that is. It can be anything, but if you’re not aware of it, it’s nothing. As an example, for me, being able to be outdoors for just a short while every day is

critical to my motivation and I focus and plan to make sure that happens as much as possible. Also knowing what drives and motivates others on board is equally important. CONFIDENCE‘The first time I was skipper in the Volvo Ocean Race, I was very young, 29 years old. It was my biggest school ever. You’re being tested, you make mistakes and there’s a lot of pressure. Everybody looks at you and expects results. Naturally we didn’t win all the time. When you lose, there are two possibilities for a leader: you become stronger or weaker.

When you look in the mirror and see your strengths and weakness-es, you have to like the package. But are you still able to like what you see when your boat ranks 7th place? If you start to doubt yourself at that point, you lose confidence and grow weaker. It’s impossible to grow if you start questioning your-self and start focusing on what went wrong. What can I improve? That’s what you have to ask your-self. As long as you make progress on that journey, you will make changes. Not changing will not help you survive for long unless you’re winning straight out of the blocks.

During the race, the reality is that you have to compete with excep-tionally good teams and leaders who can all deliver a world-class performance. You can easily establish a parallel with markets on which all companies perform well. Except for the fact that the

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difference in results is often less clear because no ranking is published every six hours.

Let me illustrate that. Once during the Volvo Ocean Race, three boats finished within two minutes of each other after crossing the Southern Ocean all the way from New Zealand. One boat went from fourth to second place, just a few hundred metres from the finish line. Another went from second to fourth place. Does that make the skipper that ended up in 4th place a bad leader or a poor professional sailor? Thereality is that all the teams were just exceptionally good, but one of them had to finish in fourth place and if you’re good enough, it will be down to very, very small details. Obviously, the team that went from second to fourth place had a very tough debriefing the morning after. Then you need to keep things in perspective. If you don’t, yourself-confidence takes a big hit for the wrong reasons and you only have ten days to recover before you start the next leg.

Often I get asked: “What is the toughest part of the Volvo Ocean Race?” For me, that’s an easy question to answer. The constant pressure to perform combined with being constantly measured, the world-class competitors and then the enormous number of challenges you have to overcome such as storms, potential breakages and sleep deprivation. It’s a tough leader’s cocktail, but you normally emerge with a self-awareness that will help you in any decision making and any relationship later on in life.’

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