A Leader’s Guide to Working Together, Forming Deep Relationships, and Achieving Business Success

We are told that success is about strategy. Or innovation. Or just plain luck. Executive coach and author Whit Mitchell learned that success actually comes from your ability to work together and form deep relationships. Whit first learned this lesson when coaching crew at Dartmouth in the early 80’s. Twenty-five years later, Whit was delighted to find that everyone he coached on that team went on to phenomenal success. Working in Sync is the story of these 11 amazing men and the lessons we can learn from their success.

A Discussion with Whit Mitchell, Author of Working in Sync

Q: Tell us a little about the “working in sync” concept and how it applies not just to crew, but also to leadership within a business or organization.

Whit: If you take a look at the front cover of the Working in Sync book, you’ll see a picture of the oars moving into the water. If you can get a crew to be most effective with their work with each other and the oars are going into and out of the water at the same time, then the boat’s going to move very smoothly down the river. With a lot of hard work, energy and humility behind the oar, you’re going to be able to beat the competition every single time.

So the concept of working in sync, similar to rowing, is about figuring out how to take the talents, the skills, the behavior, the expertise, the number of years working in a certain industry and put them together so that there is a give and take on everyone’s part in order to move the boat as efficiently and effectively and as quickly down the course as you can.

When a leader can make changes that impact the team and the team moves faster down the course, everybody benefits. It is my passion to help teams “work in sync” and to help people achieve more than they ever thought possible.

Q: What inspired you to write Working in Sync?

Whit: I think the reason or the “aha” for the book was the evening that the members of the Dartmouth crew all came back for their 25th reunion. As I made my way around the table with each of the athletes that night, I was struck with the enormity of their accomplishments in their personal and professional lives. Each one reconnected with me in a very genuine way and told stories not just about how they’d worked as the one of the top executives  of  their company, but about how they’d impacted thousands or millions of people in Africa or Asia or India or New York City, or about how as a venture capitalist they’d helped companies achieve greatness that had helped millions of other people, or about how as a physician they’d helped to make a difference in peoples’ lives through brain surgery or orthopedics.

There was no egotistical behavior – they were very humble, and as I heard each athlete’s story I was struck by how they were able to connect some of their own experiences and events that occurred while rowing at Dartmouth in the early 80’s together to some of the lessons learned as they went on to medical school, for example. “I was up for 24 hours and thought it was the hardest thing I’d ever done,” said one of the guys, “but then I remembered back to the day that we rowed 20 miles in the sleet and cold and my hands were bloody and my back was stiff, and in comparison to how hard that was, it was nothing. And that helped pull me through the rest of my shift that night.”

So the book is about how each member of the team has been able to take little pieces of those experiences and stories in sport and apply them to not only their business lives, but into their personal lives, too – into their marriages and personal relationships and into the upbringing of their children.

It’s not a book about rowing; it is a book about college rowers and their personal and professional experiences and how they’ve applied the lessons learned 30 years ago out on the water to their work in business today.

Q: How can the concepts and stories within this book be used to help an organization function more effectively?

Whit: What is wonderful is that each of the 11 stories in this book contains a common theme about leadership, along with tangible exercises and action steps for applying the themes to help your own team “work in sync.” The chapters are set up so that you’ll find out about the success of the individual who is featured in each chapter. You’ll find out what they learned in the sport of rowing. And then you’ll also find out about how these lessons have been applied to their business success in real life. At the end of each chapter I take the leadership theme we’re discussing and give some ways in which someone could take that lesson or that theme and apply it as a leader in their team presently, similar to the kind of work that I do in my coaching, so that an organization can take this book and utilize the actionable concepts within their own organization.

Maybe the team could read a different chapter of the book in order to apply it to something in their work, and then each month discuss what it would take in order to actually apply the lessons and insights to their intact teams. They could also use it as a training course where an internal HR facilitator could work with an intact team over an 8-week period of time utilizing the different learnings in a seminar or workshop setting.

The book could be used for recruiting, training and developing their employees. Recruiters could send a book out to a prospective executive to give them some better understanding of the culture within the organization. So there are numerous ways in which leaders can take the information from the end of each chapter and apply it.

Q: What are some of the key actionable things that people will learn from reading this book?

Whit: Let me give you two examples from the book with some practical tips on what you could do to apply them to your organization.

One of the chapters in the book centers around accountability and how leaders need to be more mindful of helping their teams set up boundaries and measures for personal accountability rather than relying on leaders to hold them accountable. Leaders need to create an environment that’s safe where people can create their own levels of accountability and then set up their own accountability measures (actions or time-tables, etc.) with rewards or consequences for accomplishing what they agreed to do.

So what I’ve done for the readers in that particular chapter is I’ve given them some specific steps that they can apply toward helping their direct reports and teammates to become more accountable.

Another important actionable concept in the book is self-awareness. Sam Kinney states that, “The leading cause of death of executives is lack of self awareness.” And I would say that lack of self-awareness could be around their own behaviors, their intent, and their impact on the people that report to them.

Sam learned and practiced asking for feedback as a freshman oarsman at Dartmouth. He tells how self-awareness helped him build a culture to drive the products to market, and he was extremely successful in his efforts. What he realized was that he needed to find out from the people reporting to him their perceptions and observations of him in his leadership role. And once he uncovered those perceptions he was able to make some behavioral changes that had a significant impact on the team’s ability to perform at a high level. They felt safe that they could give him feedback and realized that Sam was actually listening to the feedback. His direct reports learned that Sam acted on the feedback, and it also was a two-way street in that he felt like he could come back and give them the kind of feedback that they needed to become more self aware as well.

Actionable steps around self-awareness might include organizing a group of people around you that you regularly interact with to come together and give you a 360-degree view of your behavior and impact. It could also involve bringing somebody in – an outside consultant or coach – to actually speak with all the people that you work most closely with to get their observations of your leadership behaviors and the impact of your behaviors in the workplace.

So those are just a few of the actionable ways a reader can apply the concepts of the book to his or her own life or business. Visit WorkingInSyncBook.com to purchase the book or to read more about it.