Row in the Same Direction

5 min readOct 31, 2020

One of my favorite quotes is from the introduction of Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team:

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

I didn’t fully understand or appreciate that saying until my daughters started rowing in high school. Just like rowing, for an organization to be successful, it takes hard work, teamwork, and communication.

2018 Upper Arlington Highschool Girl’s Freshman 8+

Rowing is Hard Work

Rowing is a very physically intense sport. The Boys In The Boat by Daniel James Brown describes rowing as “extraordinary beauty preceded by brutal punishment.” Rowing uses almost every muscle of the body and “takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back… in about six minutes” without any time-outs to catch your breath or grab a drink of water. Due to the quick build-up of lactic acid, “muscles often begin to scream in agony almost from the outset of a race and continue screaming until the very end.”

Rowing is Teamwork

Because of the physical toll, rowing builds and requires extreme teamwork. All the rowers have to be in-sync. All eight oars must hit the water at the same time. The rowers depend on their “crewmates to perform almost flawlessly with each and every pull of the oar.” The leader of the boat, the coxswain, must set the pace of the boat to reserve enough energy for the final sprint where most races are lost or won. My daughter told me that it is in those last few seconds of the race that you are tired, and you are ready to give up, but then you look up and see everyone rowing for you, and that is when you stop rowing for yourself and start rowing for the team.

Brown says that the most important quality of a rower is “the ability to disregard his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in the wake of his shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the other boys in the boat.” “When working well, the entire boat operates like a well-lubricated machine, with every rower serving as a vital link in a chain that powers that machine forward, somewhat like a bicycle chain.”

Rowing is Communication

The coxswain is the leader of the boat and is the only one with a good view of the competition. They communicate with the other rowers using a CoxBox, which consists of a microphone and a speaker near each rower so they can hear the coxswain. During the race, the coxswain is setting the pace of the boat and motivating the rowers.

My daughter’s freshman 8+ made it to the final round of the 2018 SRAA Nationals. In the video below, they are lane 6 (furthest from the camera), and you can see they were in the lead at about two and a half minutes into the race. Their CoxBox went out, and the coxswain was no longer able to communicate with the rowers. In about 45 seconds, you can see them go from first to sixth place. When they were not able to communicate, they were not able to row together. There are only seconds between first place and last place, and their time in the final was about 10 seconds slower than their other two races at Nationals. Overall they did well and were excited to get 6th place at Nationals out of 24 freshman girls teams.

Video of the 2018 SRAA Championship: Girl’s Freshman 8+ — Final

Business is Similar

Without clarity and over communication from leadership, it is nearly impossible for teams to perform well over a long period. Gino Wickman in Traction asks, “Are your staff all rowing in the same direction? Chances are they’re not. Some are rowing to the right, some are rowing to the left, and some probably aren’t rowing at all. If you met individually with each of your employees and asked them what the company’s vision was, you’d likely get a range of different answers.”

In The Advantage, Lencioni explains four disciplines that produce a competitive advantage from organizational health:

Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
Create Clarity
Overcommunicate Clarity
Reinforce Clarity

Lencioni says, “When an organization’s leaders are cohesive, when they are unambiguously aligned around a common set of answers to a few critical questions, when they communicate those answers again and again and again, and when they put effective processes in place to reinforce those answers, they create an environment in which success is almost impossible to prevent.” It’s providing clarity because everyone knows the plan and knows how they help contribute to the plan.

Business is Hard Work

It is not easy, and whenever dealing with people, it is hard work. In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni says that “building a strong team is both possible and remarkably simple. But it is painfully difficult.” It is simple, but not easy. It takes hard work to stay focused on what’s most important and then correctly communicate that plan.

Business is Teamwork

It takes everyone working as a team to execute your goals. This is where creating clarity is crucial. Everyone needs to know the most critical objective and how they contribute to that goal. A thematic goal, also called a rallying cry or wildly important goal (WIG), can unite everyone in the organization. This helps everyone in the organization get aligned rowing in the same direction. In Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, Lencioni says, “The key is to rally the entire leadership team — and this, everyone else in the organization — around a single purpose for a given period of time, while simultaneously continuing to operate the company to plan.”

Business is Communication

Once the leadership team creates clarity, it is important to overcommunicate and reinforce clarity. This can be difficult because as your organization grows, the way you communicate has to change. You communicate and share information much differently at five people versus 50, 500, or even 5,000. Just how rowers need to hear the focus from the coxswain, everyone in the organization needs to hear the priorities from their CEO over and over again. Rober Iger, CEO of Disney in The Ride of a Lifetime says “You have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly… [the] messaging is simple: This is where we want to be. This is how we’re going to get there.”

For any team to be successful, it takes hard work, teamwork, and communication.