What you can learn about leadership from Bravo’s “Below Deck”

A good friend and former colleague introduced me to the television experience that is Below Deck, a hit reality series on Bravo that follows the (often dramatic) happenings amongst service crew aboard a private charter yacht. Wealthy guests, beautiful surroundings, young and free-spirited crew members… you get the drift.

The series is unlikely to win any awards for its hard-hitting intellectual discourse, but it’s a fun show and Bravo has done a terrific job with the series. Plus, you’ll have the added benefit of learning the responsibilities of a bosun or second stew aboard a yacht.

Bosuns aside, the show closely follows the team dynamics of ten people who work their rear-ends off in super close quarters to ensure a positive charter experience for each guest.

As we enter the 4th of July holiday, where the entirety of New England rushes to the coastal waters of states like Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island with such ferocity that it seems the country may tip over into the ocean due to the added weight on its shores, a boat was the only appropriate focal point for this week’s newsletter.

And while it’s easy to poke fun at the melodrama of well-tanned deckhands, there actually are lessons of leadership and team performance to be taken from any one of the eight seasons.

Whether you are aboard a yacht or aboard a cubicle, the fundamentals of team performance differ little, and it’s fascinating to hear crew members talk about the dynamics of their working environment because they use almost the exact same vocabulary that we hear from our clients.

“This is a negative place to work,” or “I don’t feel respected by this person,” or “this person is a [insert your favorite curse word].” The crew members are all looking for something specific, for the perfect description of the perfect environment. They want to work in a place that is “positive” or “collaborative” or “respectful” but often want to quit because they believe the boat simply isn’t that type of environment and there’s nothing to be done because it can’t be changed… just like those in an office.

First, the perfect description of the perfect environment does have a name. It’s called psychological safety. Championed in recent years by Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is an interpersonal dynamic where each individual team member feels encouraged and empowered to share ideas and insights proactively, without trepidation or worry about negative judgment or disparagement. It's the secret sauce that makes a company a great place to work. We explore the concept at length in our upcoming book. Psychological safety is the vocabulary word missing when team members talk about their ideal workplace environment.

Second, almost invariably, team members expect psychological safety to be the direct result of leadership. In other words, if the captain sets a psychologically safe tone, then the rest of the boat will magically become psychologically safe as well for the remainder of the charter season. This could not be further from the truth.

Captain Lee, the regular feature across all Below Deck seasons who also seems to have been born with sunglasses on, does in fact create psychological safety amongst his direct reports. Team members are encouraged to share feedback, he speaks with crew members individually in his cabin whenever an incident occurs to ensure their voices are heard, he solicits creative solutions to charter hiccups, he sets clear expectations for communication and collaboration, heck, half of the crew thinks of him as a father-figure.

And so, by watching Below Deck we see arguably the greatest leadership lesson about psychological safety: it is a team dynamic, not a CEO dynamic. That is, psychological safety doesn’t just come from the top. Every single employee, whether it’s the captain or the third stew, has agency in the workplace culture of the ship.

The next time you're watching Bravo, or sitting at work wishing you were watching Bravo, try a reframing exercise. As the teary-eyed crew member rails against the negative culture of the ship, pose an open-ended question: what can that person do differently to improve the culture below deck?

Anchors aweigh.

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Co-authored by David Brendel and Ryan Stelzer, Think Talk Create: Building Workplaces Fit for Humans will be published by the Hachette Book Group under the PublicAffairs imprint on September 21, 2021. Now available for pre-order!