Competence Under Fire
Leadership lessons from the Rose-Noëlle.
Over the weekend I watched a video that completely absorbed me. It tells the true story of four men who spent 119 days adrift on an upside‑down trimaran in the Southern Ocean after their boat, the Rose‑Noëlle, capsized in a storm in June 1989.
What makes the account extraordinary is not only the sheer determination required for physical survival, but how extreme conditions strip leadership down to its essence.
You can watch the full video here: Declared Dead at Sea — Then They Came Back | The Rose‑Noëlle Story
Full credit to the creator, Be The Captain (James Evenson), who drew on primary materials including unpublished memoir pages, letters, and clippings shared by the captain, John Glennie, to tell a version that is messier, more human, and far more instructive than the polished legend.
Setting the Scene
John Glennie spent 19 years hand‑building the Rose‑Noëlle, naming it after a woman he loved who had died years earlier. In June 1989 he set out from New Zealand with three relatively inexperienced crew members bound for Tonga. Four days later, a massive wave flipped the boat.
The men found themselves living in a cramped, inverted cabin roughly the size of a mattress, with limited food and water, no functioning distress beacon after the first week, and the Southern Ocean for company.
They were eventually declared dead, mourned by their families, and written off. When they finally washed ashore on Great Barrier Island after 119 days, some authorities suspected a hoax. Scientific evidence, which included barnacle growth, weather data, and drift patterns, later vindicated them completely.
Redefining True Leadership
From the moment the boat went over, the crew largely blamed Glennie. As one survivor later wrote, leadership evaporated. No one called him “captain” for the next four months. Titles, hierarchy, and authority disappeared in the cramped, cold darkness.
But competence did not.
Glennie repeatedly dove into the flooded cabin to retrieve food, gear, soda, and spices. He surfaced so hypothermic that the very men who resented him had to huddle against him to keep him warm. He built rain‑catchment systems. He navigated by plane contrails when instruments were gone. He maintained the systems that kept them alive when gratitude was thin and patience and hope had long worn out.
As the video puts it:
“Leadership isn’t a badge. It’s diving in the water over and over, becoming hypothermic even when everybody is ungrateful.”
In most organizations, we treat leadership as a title or a position on the org chart.
The Rose‑Noëlle strips that illusion away. When conditions became extreme, people stopped following the person with the title and started following the person who is still competent, still acting, and still solving problems.
Lessons for Leaders
Attitude will steady you or sink you. One crew member noted repeatedly that attitude was everything. In extreme conditions, small choices about how to interpret scarcity, discomfort, and conflict determined whether the group fractured or held together long enough to reach land. The same is true in organizations. Mindset matters. Leaders who frame adversity constructively create stability; those who amplify fear or frustration accelerate the breakdown.
Creative competence beats rigid plans. Formal navigation was impossible. They improvised with whatever the environment offered, from barnacles that turned the hull into a floating reef attracting fish, plane contrails for rough positioning, and patient observation of currents that defied the existing, and normal, chart patterns. In organizational life, rigid plans often fail under pressure. Leaders who stay observant, resourceful, and adaptive can find solutions to situations that were never anticipated.
Systems give back what leaders put into it. Glennie’s boat kept the crew alive because he had cared for it relentlessly. Even upside down, it remained structurally sound enough to protect them. Organizations work the same way. A well‑maintained system with sound culture, processes, relationships, and governance, becomes a stabilizing force in hard times. A neglected one becomes a liability that magnifies risk when pressure hits.
Authority can vanish; responsibility cannot. Glennie lost the title and the deference. He never lost the obligation to keep the group alive. In organizations, formal authority may shift, erode, or disappear during crisis or transition. But responsibility to act, to steady the team, and to solve problems remains. That is the truest definition of leadership.
Why This Matters Today
Most of us will never face 119 days on an inverted hull with our colleagues. But we will face situations when titles are no longer respected. For example, when a project collapses, a team fractures, a crisis hits, or when a crisis of confidence occurs and staff start looking for whoever is most useful.
In these situations, competence, action and responsibility take over, and true leadership is redefined.
I highly recommend watching the full video. It is one of the most compelling examinations of leadership under pressure I have encountered in a long time.
And then ask yourself, if my title disappeared, what would remain? Would I still be a leader?
