Extreme sailing offers a unique lens through which to explore leadership and teamwork, and the recent podcast episode featuring Gavin Rees dives into these insights. Fresh from leading the London Business School team to a second-place finish in the 2025-26 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, Gavin discusses the invaluable lessons learned at sea with Pola Lem. His journey, which combined both amateur and experienced sailors, underscores the importance of adaptability, clear communication, and shared goals—essential skills also honed in an MBA program.

Gavin shares how leading a non-professional crew over 40,000 nautical miles mirrors the dynamics of MBA group projects. Both involve individuals from diverse backgrounds coming together to work towards a common objective. Key to their success was setting a clear, unified vision and fostering a supportive culture, much like the leadership training emphasized at London Business School. This experience exemplifies how developing a robust team culture can lead to significant achievements, even when starting with little experience.

Moreover, Gavin’s personal anecdotes reveal the emotional challenges and resilience required in such high-stakes environments. His commitment to pursuing dreams despite self-doubt is a powerful message for MBA students facing their own uncertainties. This blend of personal growth and professional leadership is a testament to the broader lessons business education seeks to impart, reminding us that both at sea and in business, leadership is about navigating challenges with courage and conviction.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

[00:00:03] – Pola

What can sailing, a famously grueling sport, teach us about teamwork and business? I’m Pola Lem, and you’re listening to our podcast, Business Casual. In today’s mini episode, I have skipper Gav Rees with me, who led the London Business School team to the 2nd place overall finish in the 2025-26 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race. Welcome, Gav.

[00:00:30] – Gav

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:33] – Pola

So this was the first time, just a little bit more background, that an educational institution partnered with the Clipper Race as both a team and an education partner. And after 11 months and over 40,000 nautical miles, also 6 continents that you crossed, The LBS crew finished the race second. So, we’ve got a bunch of questions today for you, Gav, about sailing and leadership and tying those 2 concepts together. So, to start off with, you have combined sailing and a corporate career for over 20 years. So, I’m curious, which came first and at which point did you realize that these 2 are actually teaching you many of those same lessons?

[00:01:22] – Gav

Yeah, so I started sailing first, uh, because I was taught by my dad as a youngster, um, and, uh, and I really enjoyed the, the physical and mental challenge of sailing, but also the teamwork that came with that. Um, you know, to sail, uh, yachts, uh, it is a lot easier to work as a team. Um, and so, uh, as I grew up, um, and moved into more of a corporate career, I maintained my, um, my role as a skipper professionally, um, in my holidays and spare time, um, and found that it complemented it massively well. So, uh, yeah, so the sailing definitely came first.

[00:02:02] – Pola

And so as you’ve been skippering, your daughters are actually watching you from home. How hard is that being away for 11 months?

[00:02:12] – Gav

That was really hard. I think, um, before I went away, uh, I had a long conversation with them about what it meant to me as a dream to sail around the world, but also how important it was for me to show them that they should, uh, chase their dreams and, and believe in themselves. Um, I never knew if I could do this. I never had a lot of imposter syndrome, felt that, uh, I was never good enough. I was, uh, one of 10 skippers and the others were mostly very much more experienced than I was. And so it was really important for me to show them that they should be brave and try to live their dreams and give everything a go. But I was lucky enough that they were able to join me in many of the stopovers and their part of the deal was to do some really cool travel around the world. Yeah.

[00:03:03] – Pola

And as you’ve said, you know, you, Have, have been pursuing a career. This is, this was taking a year out. And your crew also, we should say, isn’t professional sailors. This is a non-professional race crew, some of whom have never sailed, right? So that’s quite a big thing. How is leading total novices in, you know, a genuinely dangerous environment different from leading trained professionals when you’re working?

[00:03:36] – Gav

I think there’s a huge amount of overlap. I think, you know, London Business School itself in the MBA that they teach really focus heavily on leadership, culture, and team building. And that was absolutely critical in terms of how we set this up. So as you said, we had, I guess, a total squad, if you like, of 60 within the LBS team. We had around 4 that went all the way around the world, and the others that were in that group would either come and do one or multiple races as we as we made our way around the world. None of the crew knew each other before, or if they did, it was not very well. And as you say, they are all amateur and a third of whom have never sailed before. So, you know, actually setting up the structure with the team before we left, when we all first came together at the crew allocation down in Portsmouth in May, was really, really important for us to identify what our overall goal was, but also to really boil down what that meant for all of us and make sure that we were as aligned as possible in those goals in order for everybody to be bought into it and all pushing in the same direction.

[00:04:48] – Gav

So, you know, I think the overlap is absolutely massive and I was, you know, super proud when we found out about the partnership with London Business School because the two just fit together so well.

[00:04:59] – Pola

Yeah, I mean, it strikes me that in a way what you’re doing is a lot like what MBA students do when they’re thrown together in groups of say 4 or 5 and told to work together on a project, often a real-life project. How did you figure out how to pair those groups of sailors together who would be then sailing together? Was it largely a case of timing or were there some interpersonal dynamics and skills that you selected for?

[00:05:37] – Gav

So they, the crew were allocated to us. So it, it wasn’t a selection process of once they’d been through their training. But once we had them together, it was really important that, as I say, we aligned them in terms of what their expectations and their goals were within the race. I think the other part is that, you know, diversity is absolutely critical in all of this. We had 12 different, or more than 12 different nationalities across the crew. And within that, many, many different experiences and fields and knowledge, some of sailing, some not. But for me, it was really important that we empowered people as much as possible. to own something and to lead something on the boat so that they could contribute and drive towards the final goal, which was to make the boat go faster and for us to be competitive all the way around. And I think that was really critical in terms of how the team bonded together. They all got on really well. We had very little conflict on board the boat. And it was super, super to see because actually, even when some people were finding it hard, the rest of the team would come together and and help them overcome that so that we could all keep performing.

[00:06:53] – Gav

So, yeah, I think that empowerment was really important, that people were allowed to roam their own areas.

[00:07:01] – Pola

Well, it’s good they all got on because you don’t want a mutiny on board, do you, while you’re out at sea? So, you said that one motivation for this is to test and develop your leadership skills under real pressure. I’m curious, what’s one leadership skill you think that is actually quite difficult to develop in a boardroom, which actually really, which you really see developing when you’re out at sea?

[00:07:32] – Gav

Yeah, I guess, I guess we’re really, really lucky that we have a start and an end with this process. And so we do have that team coming together and everybody’s brand new at that point, which I don’t think you do get necessarily in a business sense. Often the team is evolving. It’s very rare you have a clean start and clean finish. But I think aligning and prioritizing what everybody is trying to do is really important. But for me, there’s also how do you really think about sort of being adaptive and very situational with the type of leadership style that you’re using in the right moment? There’s times when on the boat, if we are performing a complicated maneuver or there’s a safety element to what we’re doing, actually I will be quite autocratic in terms of the way that I’m managing that and quite clear on how I want that done. There are other times around decision-making, particularly around tactical decisions. Are we going to sail north into the stronger wind or are we going to try and do a shorter route and stay south? Actually, how do we make that more democratic? How do we share that with the team and let them have their say and view in that decision-making as well?

[00:08:42] – Gav

So for me, trying to be as adaptive and situational in terms of the style that I used was really important. And, you know, I think that’s hopefully has helped me as I take that back to a corporate life.

[00:08:54] – Pola

Interesting. Yeah, I think that’s something that also you hear coming to the fore when students are embarking on projects in their MBA or an MS program and they say, oh, actually, you know, I realized under pressure that I’m this type of leader or I lack, you know, this particular quality or I’m good at this. So, I guess it’s a higher stakes version of that where if you make the wrong mistake, you might wind up bobbling along in the sea. So, you don’t want to do that. Yeah. Was there something that you found surprised you either in your own leadership that you’ve already been talking about? or in the others that you worked with?

[00:09:51] – Gav

I think, I mean, you learn a lot about yourself in terms of resilience over a race of this length. You know, the race itself is 11 months long, as you say, and we do get stopovers between 7 to 10 days. But actually the reality of that is you’re cleaning the boat when you come in, you’re then fixing the boats. We might be lucky enough to host some guests on board or do some corporate trips out. We had a fantastic time down in Uruguay with a number of London Business School alumni who came to see us and had a nice little party on the boat and took us out. But actually very quickly you’re then thinking about the next leg, preparing for that and getting back on. So actually making sure that resilience is really something that you develop. I think the other thing that I certainly learned that I kind of realized relatively early on after things, a couple of stressful things happened, was actually how you can normalize very highly stressful situations quite quickly. And so I think my level of what I would call a stressful situation probably started here. And by the time I finished, I would probably not call something stressful that a lot of people would do.

[00:11:09] – Gav

And actually it was quite an important observation that you know, myself, the first mate, and perhaps some of the more experienced crew would have a situation. And then in the North Atlantic, we got hit by quite a heavy squall while we had a big spinnaker up and the boat got pushed down on her side and was kind of pinned on her side until we got the sails down. Now for us, we knew what we had to do. We waited for people to come up on deck, we pulled the spinnaker down, the boat came back upright, and I said, well, you know, let’s hoist another spinnaker because we are racing. And kind of panning around, there was a good number of the crew who were, you know, pretty eyes open and still dealing with the shock of what had just happened and weren’t quite ready to move on. So actually, that was quite an interesting learning just in terms of, again, that situational leadership. At that point, we had to pause because we had to make sure those people were okay. You know, important that it’s a psychologically safe environment that they can say how they feel, digest it, have a debrief, and then go back to the racing to make sure that we’re getting the best out of those people and we’re taking them with us.

[00:12:09] – Gav

That was, that was quite an interesting learning. Hmm.

[00:12:12] – Pola

How long in that instance did you, did you wind up pausing for in the end? Were there, did, did it take long to, to then get back and sailing again?

[00:12:23] – Gav

Uh, that one was, was relatively quick. Um, there was a longer, I had to do it, pause for a lot longer in the, um, in the South Atlantic, unfortunately. Uh, I had a, an, uh, an incredible first mate, Zoe Longley. Youngster, 27 years old compared to me, and absolutely fantastic sailor. Unfortunately, she broke her leg in an incident in the South Atlantic, and we ended up in a situation where she obviously had a broken leg. There was a spinnaker in the sea. We were sailing backwards down waves because of the way in which the boat had ended up. And so that was a considerably more stressful situation, and that took a lot longer for people to to digest that. We had to— we sat down, we got everyone up on deck, we had a proper crew debrief around what had happened, why it happened, also then what we’re going to do next about it. And again, for me, there was a little bit of, you know, a bit of democratic leadership here to say, right, what do you all want? You know, we know our goal is to race, but is everybody ready to do that?

[00:13:25] – Gav

Or actually, do we want to have a couple more hours where we take it a little bit easier? We can have a cup of tea, you know, if people want to talk more, they can do. So yeah, that was another interesting incident.

[00:13:35] – Pola

As you say, higher, much higher stakes than you usually get in a typical company making decisions. If you were to have a group of LBS students or faculty drop down next to you and observe a leg of the race, what’s the one moment that you would want them to see?

[00:13:58] – Gav

I think what springs to mind is when we are dealing with really difficult situations. And, you know, the thing I’m most proud of, of the whole race is the individuals that we had on the boat. The crew that we had were absolutely phenomenal. And it really came to a fore when things got tough. You could see them pulling together as a team because they were all aligned on the goal that they wanted. They wanted to look after each other. And make sure that we were safe. And then, you know, after that they wanted to make sure that we were fast. And so, you know, difficult times, we would get tangled with a spinnaker or a spinnaker might rip and fall in the water. And that would require, you know, in the early hours, people that have not had very much sleep being woken up, pulling the spinnaker back on board. And then we had a couple of people, one in particular who was our sail repair lead. And so she, who had never done any sail repair before we left Portsmouth, would get out a sewing machine and the spinnakers would literally fill the boat down below and she would stitch them back up, you know, not sleeping until it was done so that we could keep that spinnaker hoisted as much as possible.

[00:15:09] – Gav

And so, you know, those moments when people come together and there’s, you know, people are really tired, they’re cold, they’re wet, they’ve, you know, they’re losing out on their sleep. There was no little sniping at people. Well, you’ve had 2 hours more sleep than me. I hadn’t had my dinner, or there was none of that. And people would say, right, you know, how do you, how are you feeling? If you need to get some rest, you get some rest. I’ll go down in a bit. And I think, you know, that’s the bit I think I’m, you know, most proud of. They were, you know, a phenomenal crew.

[00:15:37] – Pola

That’s great. I mean, in a way you could see that going exactly the opposite way. So it really comes down, I think, to leadership fostering that sort of environment where people are actively helpful. That’s a good lesson for our core audience here, I think, too, as they go into an MBA. You know, it’s a cliché that crisis is a really revealing time for character. And after 20-plus years now combining both business and sailing, Do you actually believe that, or is it more that crisis really reveals preparation?

[00:16:22] – Gav

Yeah, I think, you know, you don’t necessarily wish for a crisis, and certainly in those terms, but I think you do often see, you know, what your team’s made of in those times. And, you know, whether it’s crisis or whether it’s a changeable situation, you know, and something unpredictable is happening, you know, then I think that is where the team get tested and you can see whether they’re kind of aligned on what they’re trying to achieve. When I got them all together, I set out and I sort of said to them that we were going to have our winning formula, which was that safety multiplied by standards was what was going to equal our success. And it was something that I repeated all the way through because obviously we would have new crew that would come and join us at different stopovers. So that everybody knew that safety was first and foremost. We would make sure that people were safe on the boat and that, you know, we would never do anything to compromise that and we would always strive to improve that all the way around. And that’s both physical and mental in terms of psychological safety.

[00:17:21] – Gav

And then the second part of that was just individual standards that we all did the very best that we could do in whatever it was that we were doing, whether we were cooking dinner, whether we were hoisting a spinnaker, whether we were helming, Um, and, and what that meant was that there was, um, you know, everybody was aligned to that and there was never any blame culture. So if something went wrong because somebody had done something wrong, you never heard, oh, you shouldn’t have done that because now we’ve got a ripped spinnaker. And, um, actually it was a, it was a great environment where people would say, you know what, it doesn’t matter. You know, we all make mistakes. Let’s, let’s, let’s work out how we’re going to sort it out and move forward. So, um, so that those crisis, yeah, I think, um, I think they can be quite revealing, and I think it really tests the preparation that you’ve put into it beforehand to see what then the output is in those moments.

[00:18:13] – Pola

One final, I think, question for you, Gav. What’s a piece of conventional leadership advice, that sort of kind that you’d hear in an MBA classroom, that you think falls apart the moment that you’re mid-Atlantic or in a storm?

[00:18:29] – Gav

Oh, that’s a difficult question. Um, I think it’s, I think it’s as much around the resilience and, and, but also around, I think maybe, maybe it’s something around trusting your team and empowering the team. I think there were a lot of times when, um, you know, it was important that I let them lead, um, and that I had passed on that leadership. Um, when we left, you know, one of our core, um, values was to make sure that we trained everybody up as much as possible so that it might mean that we were slower at the start because we had people steering the boat that weren’t as good at steering as some of the others. But over a long leg, what it meant was that towards the end of the leg, they were very good at steering and we had more people to steer and therefore others could get more rest and we were more effective. And so I think, you know, that then allowed us to empower people to do their jobs and I would trust them to do it. I wouldn’t go around checking on people and I probably needed to, to begin with while they were learning, but, you know, very quickly it was important that they did that and then they had their own pride in what they were doing and what they were achieving as well through that leadership.

[00:19:33] – Gav

So, yeah, empowering them as much as possible was critical for us.

[00:19:38] – Pola

And sounds like it worked in the long run. Right. Well, thank you so much, Gav, for coming on. It’s, as I say, not maybe the most typical episode of Business Casual that we’ve done, but I think these lessons of leadership and in these, this high-stakes environment of sailing will be of real interest, hopefully, to our audience. So thanks again for coming on.

[00:20:04] – Gav

Thank you very much for having me. It’s been great fun.