Free diving teaches crucial leadership skills: staying calm under pressure, following core values, and respecting your team. Benoit Dageville, co-founder of Snowflake, demonstrates how these principles apply both underwater and in the tech world. By maintaining composure during challenging moments, leaders can transform potential panic into purposeful action. Trusting teammates and adhering to personal principles becomes a powerful strategy for navigating complex professional landscapes. These lessons show that true leadership is about mental resilience, integrity, and collective strength.

What Leadership Lessons Can We Learn from Free Diving?

Free diving teaches crucial leadership skills: don’t panic, follow your values, and respect your team. By staying calm under pressure, maintaining principles, and trusting teammates, leaders can navigate complex challenges with resilience and purpose.

The Unexpected Parallels: Adrenaline, Databases, and Holding Your Breath

Every so often, someone emerges from the inky depths of tech’s vast ocean and makes you pause mid-sip (in my case, a rather strong Aeropress) to consider: what does it really take to lead when the pressure mounts? Recently, while reviewing the life and work of Benoit Dageville—co-founder and President of Product at Snowflake—I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole. Not, as you might expect, into the arcana of distributed databases or the hyperspectral data lakes he’s helped engineer, but into the silent, high-stakes art of free diving.

Dageville isn’t just a pioneer in cloud data platforms; the man also routinely plunges 20 meters underwater on a single breath. Picture it: the world narrows to a blue hush, your lungs burn, and time dilates until it stops resembling anything on a Gantt chart. I’ll confess, as someone who once panicked during a not-very-deep scuba class off the coast of Cyprus (the Mediterranean, by the way, tastes a bit like nickels and regret), I wondered: what compels a database architect to seek out that kind of solitude? Or perhaps, is it solitude at all?

It turns out Dageville’s approach to both diving and leadership is stitched together by three deceptively simple tenets: don’t panic, follow your values, and respect the team. Sounds straightforward, right? Except, when you’re forty feet below the surface or navigating the labyrinthine politics of a Fortune 500 AI rollout, the stakes are a tad more than academic. There’s no “Ctrl+Z” underwater—just you, your training, and a silence so dense you could mistake it for the inside of a server rack during a power outage.

The Art (and Neuroscience) of Not Panicking

Let’s start with the first principle: don’t panic. For Dageville, panic isn’t just inconvenient—it’s existential. Whether you’re debugging a distributed query that’s inexplicably slow (ugh, been there) or realizing you forgot to exhale before diving deeper, losing your cool almost guarantees disaster. The amygdala doesn’t care if you’re facing a data outage or a rising tide; it just wants to fire off those fight-or-flight signals. But as Dageville points out—echoed in his interviews with The Wall Street Journal and IEEE Spectrum—calm is a skill, not a trait.

I had to stop and ask myself: am I as unflappable as I like to think? (Spoiler: not always.) There was that infamous all-hands when our Salesforce integration decided to take a nap at 3 a.m.—I felt a twinge of panic, then remembered what I’d read about cognitive reframing. A short walk, three deep breaths, and the urge to hurl my keyboard subsided. Strangely, the hum of the office printer became almost soothing, like a metronome urging us onward.

Dageville’s free diving practice, with its quiet rituals and slow, purposeful movements, becomes a metaphorical lodestar for leaders swamped by volatile markets and ever-shifting tech stacks. It’s about training the mind to treat turbulence as instructive rather than catastrophic—a lesson equally vital for Snowflake’s client teams working with hyperscale data as it is for my own small crew at Customertimes. (And yes, sometimes that lesson arrives late, with salt in your hair and humility in your pocket.)

Living Your Values (Even When Nobody’s Watching)

Now, about following your values—it’s more than corporate boilerplate or a slide in some McKinsey report. For Dageville, who holds over 100 patents and spent thirteen years at Oracle refining query optimization algorithms, values are a kind of sonar, guiding decisions when visibility drops to zero. His signing of The Giving Pledge with his wife isn’t just philanthropy; it signals a commitment to impact that outpaces quarterly KPIs.

I recall a meeting—another late night, another pot of coffee—where a client wanted to cut corners on data privacy for the sake of speed. The team was exhausted. I felt the prickly unease of compromise creeping in. Ultimately, we stuck to our principles, risking a tough conversation instead of a future fiasco. Relief, then pride. That’s the thing about values: they make things harder in the short run, but they keep you afloat when storms hit.

Dageville’s approach has seeped into Snowflake’s DNA. Their platform isn’t just technically elegant (though, let’s face it, their decoupled compute-storage architecture is the stuff of CS legend); it’s built on a bedrock of user trust. Trust, like oxygen, is invisible until you run out—and when you do, no amount of technical wizardry can patch the hole.

Team Respect: The Deepest Current

The last pillar, respect the team, is both pragmatic and quietly radical. Free diving may look solitary, but every descent is undergirded by a buddy system—someone watching, ready to pull you up if things get hairy. In software too, the myth of the lone genius is fading, supplanted by a new model where resilient, autonomous teams move faster than any one “hero” coder ever could.

At Snowflake, this manifests as decentralized data domains—teams empowered to own and share their data, not just warehouse it. The results? Faster innovation, less bottlenecking, and a kind of collective buoyancy that’s rare in organizations of that scale. I’ve seen similar magic at Customertimes: toss a thorny Salesforce-to-SAP migration at a cross-functional crew, and given enough psychological safety (and perhaps the promise of decent pastries), they’ll surface with a solution that no soloist could have managed.

Why does this matter? Because leadership, at its heart, is a translation project—turning the ineffable, private lessons of discipline and doubt into shared rituals and reflexes. Every time Dageville surfaces from a dive, lungs burning but spirit intact, he’s enacting a pattern we’d do well to remember: descend together, ascend together.

So next time you’re staring down a crisis—be it a code freeze, a product launch, or just another tempest in a Slack channel—pause. Breathe. Remember the hush of the deep, the quiet presence of your team, and the invisible lines of trust that hold up both. If nothing else, you’ll emerge with clearer lungs and maybe, just maybe, a new respect for the taste of salt and the sound of your own racing heart.

FAQ: Deep Leadership Lessons from Free Diving

What are the key leadership principles Benoit Dageville learned from free diving?

Benoit Dageville’s leadership approach is built on three core principles:
1. Don’t panic under pressure
2. Follow your core values consistently
3. Respect and trust your team

These principles apply both in free diving and in the tech world, helping leaders navigate complex challenges with resilience and purpose.

How does not panicking relate to effective leadership?

Not panicking is a critical skill that involves:
– Training your mind to stay calm during turbulent situations
– Using cognitive reframing to transform potential panic into purposeful action
– Maintaining composure when facing high-stakes challenges
– Recognizing that calmness is a skill that can be developed, not just an innate trait

What role do personal values play in leadership?

Personal values serve as a critical guide in leadership by:
– Providing a consistent framework for decision-making
– Maintaining integrity even when facing difficult choices
– Creating trust within the organization
– Ensuring long-term success over short-term gains
– Demonstrating commitment beyond quarterly performance metrics

How important is team respect in leadership?

Team respect is fundamental to effective leadership through:
– Creating a collaborative environment
– Empowering team members with autonomy
– Building psychological safety
– Developing a collective approach to problem-solving
– Recognizing that no leader succeeds alone

What can tech leaders learn from free diving?

Tech leaders can learn several crucial lessons from free diving:
– Mental resilience under pressure
– The importance of systematic training
– How to maintain focus in challenging environments
– The value of preparation and controlled breathing
– Trusting your skills and your team’s capabilities

How does Benoit Dageville embody these leadership principles at Snowflake?

At Snowflake, Dageville embodies these principles by:
– Developing innovative, trust-based data platforms
– Implementing decentralized data domains
– Encouraging team autonomy
– Maintaining a commitment to user trust
– Leveraging his technical expertise while prioritizing team collaboration
– Signing The Giving Pledge, demonstrating commitment to broader impact beyond business success