Row, Row, Row Your Boat...

It seems like ages since I actually went to see a film in a movie theater.  It's not that I don't enjoy watching movies, it's just so much easier to watch them at home these days.  I do want to see "The Boys in the Boat" based on the book of the same name by Daniel James Brown (which I've written about in a previous post called "Row the Boat").  One of my former CEO's actually purchased copies of the book for the entire senior leadership team, because it provides so many great lessons on leadership.  The story is about the University of Washington rowing team and their quest to compete in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.  As you probably guessed, the success of a rowing team depends to a great extent on how well the group of eight rowers work together and synchronize how they pull on the oars.

"Row the Boat" has become such a common metaphor for leadership and teamwork, largely because it is perfectly captures the sentiments of what is required for a group or team to succeed.  A few months ago, I came across an article in Harvard Business Review by Peter Bregman ("Execution is a people problem, not a strategy problem").  The article's tagline is "A process for getting the right people aligned."  Bregman writes that "however hard it is to devise a smart strategy, it's ten times harder to get people to execute on that strategy...in other words, your organization's biggest strategic challenge isn't strategic thinking - it's strategic acting."  Strategic acting, or execution, depends upon having everyone in the group acting in alignment with each other, i.e. "rowing the boat in the same direction." 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Bregman's figure below is worth at least 10,000!  He perfectly captures the "Row the Boat" sentiment here:

He writes, "To deliver stellar results, people need to be hyperaligned and laser-focused on the highest-impact actions that will drive the organization's most important outcomes."  Bregman outlines a series of steps called the "Big Arrow Process":

Define the "Big Arrow"

First, leaders have to define the "Big Arrow" which Bregman defines as the most important thing that a team or organization has to achieve within the next 12 months in order to drive the strategy forward.  He provides a series of questions that if the answer to each is "yes", then the "Big Arrow" is likely the right one:

    1. Will success in the Big Arrow drive the mission of the larger organization?

    2. Is the Big Arrow supporting, and supported by, your primary business goals?

    3. Will achieving it make a statement to the organization about what's most important?

    4. Will it lead to execution of your strategy?

    5. Is is the appropriate stretch?

    6. Are you excited about it? Do you have an emotional connection to it?

Identify the Highest-impact People

Second, leaders have to identify the individuals within their team or organization who are most essential to achieving the goal, i.e. the ones who will have the highest impact on the "Big Arrow".  These are the key influencers and boundary spanners in the organization whose full engagement will be critical to success.  

Determine the Area(s) of Focus

Third, strategy acting or execution needs to be laser-focused.  There will always be competing priorities, but here leaders need to identify which priority will have the largest impact on achieving the team's or organization's objectives.  

Collect and Review Data

Bregman also emphasizes the importance of coaching, and I agree.  However, leaders need to know what to coach their highest-impact people on.  Here measurement of performance towards achieving the "Big Arrow" is important.  Here, leaders can also use data to identify and then remove obstacles to achieving the goals of the team or organization.  

In a survey of 400 global CEO's published in Harvard Business Review by Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull (see "Why Strategy Execution Unravels - and What to Do About It"), the most commonly cited challenge to executing strategy was lack of alignment (40% of respondents), followed closely by failure to coordinate across units (30% of respondents).  In other words, when organizations don't all row the proverbial boat in the same direction, they end up failing to achieve their goals and objectives.  There's no way that the University of Washington team could have (Spoiler Alert) won an Olympic Gold Medal in 1936 without being aligned or coordinating with each other.  The same, of course, is true for any team or organization.