Team-building keynote kicks off Emerson Exchange

Adventure athlete Robyn Benincasa addresses the 2017 Emerson Exchange attendees.

Adventure athlete Robyn Benincasa addresses the 2017 Emerson Exchange attendees.

“Powering Collaboration” is the theme of this year’s Emerson Global Users Exchange,  held Oct. 2 to 6 in Minneapolis. When it comes to collaboration stories, just about any adventure-racing athlete can share teamwork examples all day.

That was the case with the keynote speech from world-champion adventure racer and San Diego firefighter Robyn Benincasa. Robyn is also a three-time kayak Guinness World Record holder and has completed the Ironman triathlon ten times. It’s likely that her most significant accomplishment is establishing the Project Athena Foundation, an organization that “encourages women who have endured life-altering medical setbacks to unleash the adventurer within and complete the journey of a lifetime—whether it’s to climb Kilimanjaro, cross the finish line of an Ironman triathlon, or fall into the arms of a proud family member at the end of a local 5k run.” The Project Athena Foundation earned her recognition as a 2014 CNN Hero

Benincasa’s presentation, “Building World Class Teams: The Essential Elements of Extreme Team Performance,” was a multimedia adventure that “visually and viscerally imparts the mindset that allows teams to adapt, overcome, and wine as one against all odds.”

Benincasa broke her presentation into four factors that drive team building:

• Total commitment
  • involves planning, purpose, perseverance, and preparation.
  • “Commitment starts when the fun stops.”
• Adversity management in which team builders
  • see challenges, not roadblocks
  • are ruled by the hope of success, not the fear of failure
  • accept and embrace adversity as a chance to learn and excel
  • never let the pursuit of perfection hinder progress.

“You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don’t give up.—Chuck Yeager

• “We thinking” team builders:
  • choose a goal that can’t be accomplished alone
  • organize work so that everyone “suffers” equally
  • view all problems as “ours”
  • seek synergy everywhere.

“The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best but my best eleven.—Vince Lombardi

• Ownership of the project:
  • hire the inspired, inspire the hired
  • discover core needs
  • ask for input (people embrace what they create)
  • value unique competencies.

Motivation is for now inspiration is forever.

Kinetic leadership is all about team builders who are change leaders and employ various leadership styles:

• Pacesetting
• Coaching
• Authoritative
• Coercive
• Affiliative
• Democratic

Allow for leadership by strengths, not titles. “Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.”