Should a Captain row alongside the Crew?
Years ago, I spent some time on the water. My in-laws had a boat and we would go out into Tampa Bay and explore the channels, islands, from Tampa and St Petersburg down to Sarasota. I also worked as a boat designer and when I wasn’t working in the engineering office, prototype shop or on the factory floor, I was on a boat in the water checking and testing boats in development during sea trials or performing ergonomic and usability studies. Besides being a great experience for a designer at the beginning of his career, its easy to find lessons that can be taken from time spent on a boat and applied to everyday business situations. Have you come across any of these situations in your current or previous jobs?
There's a good reason why the captain of a ship doesn’t row alongside the crew. The Captain serves many valuable functions on a boat and in the workplace. A captain that rows with the crew, causes the performance of the entire ship to suffer in many ways.
Setting Course and getting there
At the very least, if a manager is not setting clear objectives and directing all on board to move in the same direction, the manager has failed with this most fundamental task. But this is not enough of course. What if the manager makes the objective perfectly clear, but there's no buy-in? The work will not be exceptional. What about an unrealistic timeline? Nobody takes it seriously. How about no timeline at all? The boat drifts and moves slightly to this way or that, depending on the current or the results of a few rowers, but nothing significant ever happens.
What if the objective and timeline are clear and realistic, but keep changing? The workers race the vessel to one location only to be stopped halfway and then they race in a new direction, and then back again, over and over, never actually going anywhere entirely. Workers eventually get burned up, feeling like their energies are wasted. We’ve all heard on more than one occasion, “why work so hard when the direction will change tomorrow anyway?”
The Rowing Captain
It’s quite common for managers to have their hands-on direct project work, but this comes at a cost. Managers are humans first, and this often means that they fall in love with one particular solution that they personally worked on, losing objectivity. Other times, they miss the bigger picture and get trapped in the minutia of details that project work often requires, causing managerial missteps and lack of attention where it's needed.
A good manager/captain monitors the internal and external environment and quickly pivots as needed. There will be obstacles in the path, needing to be spotted. If the captain is not staying alert, not looking what's immediately in front of the boat as well as what’s ahead a few hundred meters and beyond, they might be wasting their efforts or worse, hit an obstacle that could sink the ship, as in competitive threats, internal weaknesses, market shifts, consumer preference changes, etc.
Productivity and Morale
Let’s not forget about the ship itself. Occasionally it takes on water or has another problem, so regular attentiveness to the working condition of the physical vessel is also critical for the survival and performance of the vessel. This translates to making sure the workplace and tools are not just adequate but dialed in for optimal performance as far as resources allow. This has to be monitored and adjusted or productivity suffers. A common negative effect of a work environment that is not carefully tuned, is low morale and poor worker attitudes. It's easy to pour on more work, send emails on weekends and never give your crew a break, but this comes at a cost. Rest and time away from the job enable top performance on the job. No recovery time is a failed model. Nothing wrong with working hard, and in fact many people, including myself, find great joy in hard work, but eventually, everyone needs to recover, and a manager needs to monitor this carefully or she will lose her best workers.
Another way to kill morale is for a manager to not trust her co-workers and support staff, causing her to step outside every time an important conversation comes up or causing her to make each decision independently. A great manager includes contributors on decisions without losing control, so that good workers who take pride in their work feel a sense of belonging, relevance, importance, and even joy, creating buy-in and support for the chosen decisions. A manager that openly distrusts or berates his workers or others in the company creates an environment of distrust and bad feelings.
I could go on…perhaps I will in the next blog post but first, does anyone have firsthand experience with a rowing captain? Perhaps you are the rowing captain and can offer some counterpoint?
