‘Below Deck’ boat captain Sandy Yawn shares the secret to assembling a dream team

Captain Sandy Yawn, a 30-year seafaring veteran and one of the stars of the hit reality show Below Deck, dispensed a raft of leadership advice from her career manning some of the most opulent vessels, both on and off camera. When it comes to building teams, Yawn said, the main priority is someone’s temperament as much as their qualifications. 

“I hire for character,” Yawn said during a live interview at the Fortune COO Summit in Middleburg, Va., on Tuesday. 

Below Deck is a reality show that follows the harried crews on luxury yachts as they service wealthy—and sometimes high-maintenance—travelers on vacation. As the captain, Yawn is in charge of the boat and the safety of its passengers. Over the course of the series she’s developed a reputation as a fair but tough boss, who fires staff on camera when they routinely make missteps without improvement. She also has a penchant for encouraging women to pursue leadership roles in the typically male-dominated yachting industry. 

While the expertise needed to captain a ship can be learned over the years, someone’s disposition is innate to who they are, explained Yawn. “You can’t train someone to have good character,” she said. 

Working in reality television has made hiring people of worthy character more complicated, as many prospective applicants to Below Deck are drawn to the glitz and glamour of show business. But Yawn cautioned that crew members on a yacht have a responsibility to keep passengers safe. “With Below Deck I get these people, I think they just want to be on TV,” she said. 

But when deckhands and stewards on the show demonstrate a commitment to the job itself, she changes her tune. “They realize that this is actually a career that television isn’t, and that’s what I invest in them,” she said. “To me, if I can change someone’s life here in one season, then I’ve done my job.”

Yawn cited two examples of Below Deck crewmates—Malia White and João Franco—whose progress she was particularly proud of. During his run on the show, Franco was cast as one of the series’ many villains for his rude treatment of the other deckhands and stews. Yawn said she was proud of him for now captaining his own ship. Meanwhile, White had shown leadership potential but wasn’t interested in pursuing such roles, instead preferring to go back to her previous life as a scuba diving instructor in Hawaii, said Yawn. That is, until White surprised Yawn for the better. Now “she’s going for her master mariner, which is a bigger license than mine,” Yawn said onstage. 

When offering some of her leadership advice to the audience of mostly chief operating officers, Yawn focused on the need to recruit high-quality talent by paying them handsomely. “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys,” Yawn quipped. 

When criticizing poor employees, Yawn took aim at a familiar target: Gen Z. Like many managers, Yawn expressed frustration that Gen Z was overly sensitive to being disciplined. 

“They don’t want to work,” Yawn said. “They want to get paid this, they want that. But on a boat there’s really nowhere else to go, so they just have to do it.”