Humphrey WaltersLeadership Relay’s second interview is with Humphrey Walters. Humphrey has had a long and varied career. He started his own Leadership and Management business and later employed over 2000 people in locations all around the world. Following this, Humphrey completed ‘The World’s toughest around the World Yacht Race’. He later was an important part in establishing the culture within England’s World Cup Winning Rugby team. He has also worked with The British Lions, Chelsea Football Club and JCB. He has had experience of the Olympic Games and Formula One. Humphrey also talks about the lessons learnt from when he spent time with legendary American Football Coach, VInce Lombardi. In part one of this fascinating interview, we find out about Humphrey’s earlier business career before discovering the lessons we can learn from the ‘World’s Toughest Yacht Race’. Leadership Relay would like to thank Humphrey for generously giving up his time to share his gripping experiences. As a leader in a Primary School, I also really appreciated how Humphrey was able to link his experiences to the times he has spent in schools. Thank you Humphrey. We hope you enjoy the interview as much as us! |
The Interview
LR- Can you briefly tell me about your earlier career and some of the important leadership lessons you learnt?
HW- In my early career, I had to go to university in Canada because I couldn’t get into university in the UK in those days. Then I got a job and hated it. I thought to myself if I work hard, I might get my boss's job and then I thought I don't want my boss’s job - I think it’s awful! I then thought, if I put up with that for a bit, then I’d get his boss’s job and then I thought I don’t want that either! I asked myself what I was doing there and thought there must be something better than this? I had no money and I thought the most important thing was to get into something where I was enjoying it, somewhere where I was using my skills and getting fulfillment- that is what most people want.
It’s really interesting, I’ve taken part with Team GB in 2 Olympic Games and when I talk to people; rugby players, athletes, swimmers, all people who are world class, I ask them ‘what got you going at 14, 15, 16 or 17?’ In every single case, they told me about somebody in their background who told them they were useless; they were too thick, they’d never make it. We call it a ‘blast from the past’ and the winners use that as rocket fuel. That’s what happened to me. People said to me you won’t get promoted and this that and the other and what do you do? You turn around and say ‘one day, I will show you’. That’s the negative bit, that’s the bit that gets you going to want to prove the judgement that someone had made on you was wrong. At the time they made the judgement, you have no means of proving them wrong.
The more positive way of looking at it is something I call ‘the pull to the future’. I suddenly realised the power of role models and I say this to children ‘whatever you do, go out and find role models and take notice of what they say.’ Role models have been an incredibly important part of my life. When people say to me, ‘leaders are born not made’ that is complete nonsense. Leaders are definitely made because what we do, what we all do, is we pick up stuff from people we admire i.e role models and we incorporate this into ourselves.
I’m currently looking at a copse of trees, 37 trees in total at the moment. Each one of those trees I’ve planted to recognise somebody who has helped me in my life. It’s incredibly important not to have a short memory. I look at these trees and I walk through them and I remember the people and without them, sometimes giving me a kick up the backside, sometimes saying ‘have you thought of doing this?’ or I’ve watched them, then I wouldn’t have had the life I’ve had.
The pull to the future is really based on role-models. The really interesting thing is whenever I talk to people that I admire, they will always say ‘well I learnt that from so and so’. They didn’t dream it up themselves. They always acknowledge that somebody taught them this or told them that. Unless you are prepared to be positive and open, you’ll miss all this stuff. I started a Leadership,management and training business only because I didn’t want my boss’s job.
All I wanted to do was to have the freedom to take my own risks and stand by them, good or bad, and go for it. Funnily enough, I didn’t find it that difficult because 23 years later when I left the business I’d built, I had 2000 people working for me in 7 countries. They created their own momentum and that was the whole point. Leadership is about making sure that people get over the ‘blasts from the pasts’ and criticism they’ve had. I built my business in a period of redundancies when others had to say to people ‘sorry you’re not wanted anymore.’ Imagine what that is like at 40 years old when you’ve put in 20 years of loyalty.
Suddenly I was able to give them an opportunity and then what happens is they are incredibly loyal to you and that is what makes it easy in a sense. You are able to take people at low points where they have been rejected and give them an opportunity and you get performance, loyalty and all of the things we want. Money doesn’t do that. It’s all about a sense of belonging.
LR - What was your motivation for wanting to take part in the yacht race?
HW- I realised after 22 years in the business that I wasn't doing what I was good at and what I was enjoying. I was looking at spreadsheets and numbers and I'm rubbish at that.
In the 1960s I did a year at Harvard and my prof in Harvard said ‘you’ve got to have a vision and have dreams - dream a lot and believe you can do them’. So dreaming lots is very important. He said ‘don't be a talker, be a doer.’ What you’ve got to do, if you’re talking about team building and leadership, which is what I was doing, then you’ve got to be someone who has done it otherwise you are just a hot air merchant. That's why I decided to do the yacht race. I said to myself I may have built a business for sure, but I need something better than that. I need something that encompasses all the things that great leaders have to understand and know about.
I also realised that the world was becoming much more complex and unpredictable. I mean, goodness me, look at where we are now (Corona Virus) who would have predicted that 4 months ago. If you have dreams, opportunities pop out of the woodwork. I wanted to find an opportunity that would test my leadership skills in an unpredictable environment. All of a sudden on the television screen came the opportunity to sail around the world in the World’s Toughest Yacht Race.
There were 14 yachts and there were 14 people on each yacht. I’d never sailed before in my life and I thought I can’t believe that somebody has plonked this solution right in front of me. I went around in 96-97. It was the most astonishing adventure, it was unbelievable. It was a learning environment, I didn't go to learn to sail, which I did, or to eat rubbish food, which I did, or be too cold and wet. All of those things were irrelevant as part of my dream of putting myself on the line so that I could talk from experience. The early career wasn't about goal setting or setting targets and all of that. They are mechanics of running a business, but if you haven't got a business you don't need all of that stuff. What you need is the dream and the passion and the vision to go for it. That’s the starting point.
LR - It just goes to show how open minded you are, to see that opportunity and think that that fits in with your dream and where you need to go. What important lessons did you learn that can be transferred to other organisations?
HW-I obviously learnt a great deal about sailing, but the most important thing was all about the interpersonal stuff and the impact of leadership. I wasn’t the leader. It was the first time in my life when I wasn't in charge. Lots of people said to me ‘oh, you’ll hate that because you’ve been a boss for so many years?’ I said ‘you must be joking? I’m delighted that somebody else is leading.’ I understood, from my experiences of leadership, that my role was sort of lower deck shop steward. I was the oldest on the boat and my role was to help the skipper. If there was bad behaviour I’d have a quiet word and say ‘look, we don’t do that.’ I didn't have to do that on the boat.
My job was to ensure that we all got on really well. We had 5 different nationalities, all sorts of ages, all sorts of reasons for being there - this is worse than a business because in a business, by and large, people are there because they know the sector and understand the business. When you put 14 people who have never worked together, male and female, how do you get them all together? That’s what I was interested in. It was like an aquatic Coronation Street. We sailed the wrong way around the world. That means you are going against the currents, winds and tides, so you are going ‘uphill’. Our boat wasn’t flat; it was at a 45 degree angle. That cuts the living space in half because you always live on the high side.
LR - Did I read that all of the yachts were identical as well?
HW- Yes, they were all the same spec, right down to the spoons. It was what we call a match race. It was 35,000 miles and took 11 months. The thing that I really learnt which I then took into the rugby team, alongside lessons from my business origins, is the fact that what is so critical when you put a bunch of people together is that you don't have to concentrate on their job, they know how to do that. In my case, all of the people that worked for me, they knew more than I did.
If you think about football, which I've been involved in, most of the people I've met, are usually coaches because they were injured and couldn't play anymore or they weren’t good enough - obviously there are a few exceptions to that. At Chelsea, where I’ve been for 15 years, we can't teach a premier league player much about the technical side of football because the game moves so fast. The great coaches' jobs are to remind the players how good they are, step in when their discipline has faltered and to make sure that they work for each other. It’s not complex if you keep your mind simple.
Our skipper was Navy trained and he made me realise how brilliant our armed forces are. Before we started the race we should have put all the boat together as we had to do that. The skipper said ‘no, that’s a task, let’s start with the team.’ He took us off to a house in Dartmoor and for 2 days we worked out all sorts of things to do with the interpersonal side, we focused on what we wanted to achieve. I thought I was going to be doing a case study on leadership, but I wasn't.
The most important thing I learnt from the Yacht race was followship. It’s twice as important as leadership. People realised that if you want good leaders, who need good followers. Let’s take teachers, I've said to kids when I’ve talked to them, ‘what are your teachers like?’ and you get the usual responses ‘ummm, oh they’re rubbish’ then I say to them,’well there are 20-30 of you, the culture and atmosphere of the classroom is down to you. You’re in charge and you can make your teachers brilliant. If you work hard, are polite and show a bit of interest, you will see how great the teacher gets.’ It’s all about the degree to which you support the leader.
We had a set of rules and the most important thing was punctuality. I learnt that from an American Football Coach called Vince Lombardi. I went to the Green Bay Packers on a case study from Harvard. In the important final in American Football, The Super Bowl, the teams now play for the Lombardi Trophy. He was amazing. He took a bit of a joke side, The Green Bay Packers, and built them into a Championship Winning team. He got people to work hard for him. One of the rules he had was Lombardi Time. Lombardi Time means you are always 15 minutes early for everything. Another of his sayings was ‘Mental Alertness is the secret to success.’ I’m rarely seen on time when I go into a business and people always come with great excuses, but I don’t care because they are in a fluster and I’m not so who’s winning right from the start? That is so critical.
The other interesting thing he said to me was ‘do you want to be trusted by the people you deal with?’ and I said ‘of course I do, it's fundamental to have somebody to trust you and it would be terrible for somebody to say I don’t trust you.’ He said ‘how can you trust somebody who can’t even be bothered to turn up on time? I am fanatically punctual. You phoned up exactly on the dot which is what I expected. Our boat was called Ocean Rover so we had Rover time. So you had to be there at least 5 minutes before the shift change over.
Another thing we had was called ‘pass the bread roll’. We had these quirky titles. What that meant was, it would be very easy to sit down and grab your bread roll and whatever you wanted in it and look after yourself. You would have really wanted to go to bed because you hadn’t had enough sleep. The culture we built was that before you reached for something, you looked across the table at one of your mates and said ‘would you like a bread roll?’ In other words, before you looked after yourself, you looked at your mates and said ‘are you okay? Can I do something for you?’ We called that ‘pass the bread roll’ and it’s really important because your mates matter.
The other thing I learnt was to have a personal discipline and that means if you say you’re going to do something, you do it. We never checked upon anybody. We were in a very dangerous environment where things could happen in a flash. If somebody doesn’t do what they say, something could break, but we never checked. I worked in Formula 1 and I brought in that discipline and said ‘we’re not going to have meetings where we check up on people because they should keep you informed about where they are.’ You need to know when people put up their hand to say ‘I'm going to do that’ that they will do it.
LR - I heard something quite interesting recently. It was on a Podcast and it was something Sir Clive Woodward had said and it was something along the lines of ‘the true test of a culture is when the leader or the manager isn’t around.' So you might be fine on the treadmill when the manager or head coach is there, but what happens when they’re not. I thought that was an interesting spin on it.
HW - Absolutely, we had a set of rules and we had them pinned up and after a while, we didn't need them. Interestingly, down here where I am, we have a reunion every year and we’re the only boat that does and it has become an annual event. We get up to around 60 people and there are kids running around and there are husbands and wives. We have a marquee and I don’t have to do anything. People just do stuff, put the tables out, lay the tables and it’s amazing because they slip back into the culture that we had where we don't have to ask for things to be done. Our ambition was to make sure that the leader didn't have to get out of his bunk because we wanted him to trust us implicitly. He knew that we could handle everything and that if we were in trouble, we’d come and ask for advice.
The last thing I learnt was that the leader has to be a fun loving and fun bringing person. In other words, they never take themselves too seriously and are always up for a laugh. We had a phrase - it’s serious on top (top deck) but fun down below. That means it was important to work hard when working, but very important to have fun when you’re not on watch so when it it’s your turn to go back up on deck, you’re re-energised.
All the great schools I've been to are fun loving. I’ve learnt so much from visiting schools. If I may say, teachers are incredible human beings. When I talk to teachers they are passionate and they say ‘will it work for the children?’ I'm a business person and we cared about our customers, but the difference is, we touched their wallet. In other words, there was something in it for us. You teachers touch their soul and it’s very different. The 2nd reason why you are remarkable is when you talk to a business person, and ask them to think of people they’ve been fond of in their life, people who have helped them, people who have touched their life, every single person will put down the name of a teacher.
My parents are doctors and I think, to a degree, it’s the same thing. They cared desperately about their patients. You can see it now with the NHS how remarkable our nurses and everybody are, our cleaners, everybody and teachers are the same. I’ve said to teachers, you’re in the memory of everybody you’ve taught. Don't forget the impact you’ve had. I often say to the business people ‘how many of you went back and say thank you?’ And it’s zero. I ask ‘how do you think these people keep dealing with all the things they have to deal with in the classroom and they never get a thanks. Can you imagine? You rely on that in your careers and they never get it.’ They're remarkable. They maintain amazing levels of professionalism with no thanks.
That brings me back to the lessons I learnt. A group of people thrust together who will be friends for life. It’s not about sailing. It’s about survival. It’s about making sure that everybody feels part of it. We don’t wait for the leader to do that. It’s our job to notice things being done right and saying ‘thanks I noticed you did that, I appreciated that.’ That should be all the way through the crew.
We hope you enjoyed Part 1 of our fascinating interview with Humphrey. Please join us for Part 2 where Humphrey discusses his experiences in building the culture, alongside Sir Clive Woodward, of the elite England Rugby team who triumphed in the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
If you would like to find out more about Humphrey and the work he does you can visit his website at https://www.humphreywalters.com/