5 EXPERT TIPS

FREDDIE CARR ON CREW DYNAMICS

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From big boats to Extreme 40s, David 'Freddie' Carr has been a lynchpin of close-knit and super-successful crews. He shares tips on team dynamics with Andy Rice.

During the buildup to the 2024 America's Cup, inside the INEOS Britannia team we came up with a set of team values that we ran our daily lives by," says Freddie Carr. “Whether you're competing in the America's Cup or the Hamble Winter Series, I think there's a set of core values that can really help bring crews together.”

If you've been sailing together for a while those values can develop organically. But if you're still only getting to know each other, it's helpful to define those values early on in the campaign.

Freddie believes the British team's rate of improvement throughout AC37 was in part due to the team's buy-in to a set of values that they'd defined about six months before the competition began in Barcelona.

Here are Freddie's five best tips for creating a bombproof team dynamic born out of strong shared values.

1 FEEDBACK AND HONESTY

It's good to have your team values written down and commonly shared and understood, particularly when you're about to go into a tricky debrief or conversation where somebody might need to be critical of somebody else. One of our values is that feedback is for the greater goal, which is to make the boat go faster. That gets everyone into a place where constructive feedback and honesty is much easier to share.

We were also encouraged to speak up and to 'swim against the tide'. When you're in a meeting with a lot of strong individuals, it's easy for someone to lead the conversation, after which it can get harder and harder for someone to take the opposite point of view. So we actively encouraged people to throw in an alternative viewpoint, and we called that 'swimming against the tide'.

It's really useful for avoiding a team lapsing into 'group think'.

2 LEARN FASTER