Hardship : Leadership in Hardship contexts

Abstract: When difficulties appear concerning the environment and the social relationships in teams, leading others become very interesting as well as challenging. I am sharing in this research an understanding of the concept of hardship in order to point out a main leadership issue, which is to lead others in extreme situations. It is a new and innovative approach of leadership within the business area based on the literature and completed by sailors’ experiences of hardship.Offshore sailors have the use to handle hardship situations alone as well as in crews, and they cannot avoid it when they are far away from the coasts. Thus when a problem occurs they must fix it themselves. During offshore races and expeditions, sailors have to deal with teams issues and cannot quit for going back home. Thereby, a boat, which is going to sail for few months without stop, is a real laboratory of leadership and social relationships.The starting point of this approach concerns the art of leading oneself, which represents a prerogative for a great leadership in extreme conditions. Indeed when a leader loses his or her self-control in extremes situations, he or she will probably not be able to lead others. Thus, in order to illustrate the literature approach to this concept, this thesis has been completed with an auto-ethnographical approach. I as a sailor have experimented hardship alone on my boat during some offshore sailing trips. I present an analysis of these experiences to explain the issues of leading oneself in such conditions. Thanks to the participation of some sailors experts in hardship, I illustrate the possibility to lead others in hardship context with the inspiration of their experiences. It is possible to lead others in very extremes conditions, and offshore sailors that I called hardship experts could represent a real inspiration to leaders, for a real and great leadership.