The Worst Row Ever
INSIGHTS INTO EXECUTIVE TEAMWORK FROM A SUMMER HOBBY
One Wednesday morning late this summer, eight first-year rowers showed up for practice. Perfect conditions. Calm water. No new people in the boat. We'd been rowing together all season, some of us winning races in various combinations. We knew what we were doing. Or so we thought.
That row was terrible. Everything was hard. Nothing clicked. The boat felt heavy, unstable, unresponsive – like we were dragging it through mud rather than slicing through water. When we finally pulled in, exhausted and frustrated, most of the boat agreed: that might have been the worst row we'd ever had together.
How could that be? We'd built the skills. We understood the technique. We'd proven we could do this work at a high (if not elite) level. But none of that individual competence mattered when we couldn't synchronize it.
This is the insight that's been nagging at me all summer as I've learned to row. I signed up thinking it would be a pleasant way to be on the water, maybe get some exercise, enjoy some peaceful mornings. What I discovered instead was one of the most sophisticated lessons in team dynamics I've encountered in nearly two decades of consulting work with executive teams.
Because the parallels are inescapable. Executive teams are rowing shells. And most of them have no idea how much effort they're wasting.
What Rowing Taught Me About Executive Teams
If you're short on time, here are the core lessons:
High performance requires instability. Rowing shells built for speed sacrifice comfort. You can have a stable team or a great team, but rarely both.
Individual competence doesn't equal team effectiveness. Eight skilled rowers can produce a terrible row. Capability without synchronization is wasted effort.
Mastery takes longer than you think. Seven years to be good at rowing. How long should your executive team expect to take?
You can't see where you're going. Team members face backwards in the boat, trusting the cox for guidance and navigation. The dependency runs both ways.
Team effectiveness = capacity - waste. Most teams obsess over building capacity while ignoring the waste that comes from poor synchronization.
Learning never stops. Growth requires mirrors who show you what you can't see, immersion in uncomfortable situations, and deliberate attention to how you work together.
Now, let me show you what each of these actually means.
I Didn't Know What I Was Signing Up For
I'm not a team sports person. Never have been. I get self-conscious about letting people down, about being the weak link, about holding everyone back. If I'd known how team-dependent rowing actually was, I probably would have been too timid to sign up.
But I didn't know. From the outside, rowing looks solitary. Individual athletes, each in their own rowing lane, doing their own repetitive motion. Sure, there are other people in the boat, but it seems straightforward enough: just match what everyone else is doing. How hard could that be?
Turns out, extraordinarily hard. The first hint came when we stepped into a shell for the first time. The squeals. The gasps. The white-knuckled grip on the gunnels. Because rowing shells are nothing like normal boats.
Every boat I've ever been in — fishing boats, ski boats, pontoons – is designed for stability. Flat bottoms. Deep keels. They sacrifice speed for steadiness because they have other purposes: holding still while you fish, pulling skiers without tipping, letting people wander around with drinks in hand.
Rowing shells are designed exclusively for speed. That means no flat spots, no stabilizing keels, nothing that would create drag. Everything is rounded. The bottom of the boat comes to a single point. Everything else is balancing around that one precise location.
For new rowers, this is terrifying. We spent the first six weeks with half the boat tasked exclusively with "setting" — holding oars flat on the water like training wheels — because you can't learn rowing technique when you're too anxious to breathe. And the anxiety makes it worse. When you clench up, trying to hold yourself steady, you actually destabilize the boat further.
It seems crazy when you’re starting out, but rowing shells are built this way intentionally. The lack of stability is a design choice. They're unstable because stability costs speed. The engineers who designed these boats made a deliberate tradeoff.
Executive teams face the same choice, though most don't realize they're making it. You can have a stable team – one where everyone knows their lane, stays in it, doesn't rock the boat. Where harmony is prioritized over performance, where avoiding conflict matters more than having the hard conversations. These teams feel comfortable. They rarely tip. They also rarely get great results.
Or you can have a high-performing team – one that's built for speed but requires constant attention to balance. Where the lack of built-in stability demands that everyone pay attention to everyone else. Where small misalignments compound quickly if left unchecked. Where the whole thing can tip if people aren't synchronized.
Most executive teams want the performance of a racing shell while maintaining the comfort level of a pontoon boat. That's not how it works.
Seven Years to Be Good
My rowing coach told us early on: "You might start to be good at this in seven years."
When she said it, I laughed – the nervous laugh of someone who's just realized they've vastly underestimated what they've gotten into. Seven years felt simultaneously absurd (it's just rowing!) and perfectly reasonable (given how hard this was turning out to be).
The timeline makes sense once you understand the layers of learning required. First, there's the technical work: the biomechanics of the rowing stroke, the hundreds of small adjustments your body needs to make, the precise timing and positioning. You can understand the mechanics intellectually in a few practices. Getting your body to actually execute them takes years.
Then there's the mental game. Rowing requires intense focus despite – or perhaps because of – its repetitive nature. Over a long race, you're doing the same motion hundreds of times. Your mind wants to wander. Your muscles want to take shortcuts. Maintaining technical precision while exhausted, while in pain, while your brain is screaming at you to stop is its own skill set entirely.
But the hardest layer, the one that takes longest to develop, is the team synchronization. Because you're not just learning to row well. You're learning to row in perfect coordination with seven other people, in an unstable boat, while none of you can see where you're going.
The Backwards-Facing Problem
In a rowing shell, eight people face the stern, watching where they've been rather than where they're going. Only one person – the coxswain – faces forward and can see the course ahead.
This means rowers must trust completely. The cox calls the course, names the pace, makes strategic decisions about when to sprint and when to conserve energy. Rowers execute, relying entirely on someone else to navigate.
When the cox is good – when they know the course, read the race well, communicate clearly – this works beautifully. When the cox misspeaks or isn't very good (which happened frequently: we were also all learning to cox), it's extraordinarily disorienting. You're working hard, trusting someone else to steer, and suddenly you're not sure if you should keep following or... what? Override them? Slow down? The uncertainty itself becomes destabilizing.
Great coxswains know this. They talk to the crew before each race to understand what each rower needs. Some crews want constant updates and encouragement. Others prefer quiet focus with only essential information. The best coxes learn to read their particular crew and adjust their communication accordingly.
On top of that, the dependency runs both ways. The cox can't see what's behind them. They depend on a designated rower to report what's coming from behind, how close competitors are, whether they're gaining or losing ground. And, while the rowers are listening to the cox, they’re actually following the person in front of them, who’s following the person in front of them, all the way up to the stroke seat. The cox can bark instructions, but the stroke is setting the pace.
Positional authority sits with the cox. But, operational control lives with the rowers. Neither can succeed without the other.
This should sound familiar. CEOs have positional authority, but operational control lives elsewhere. Your "stroke seats" – the change agents who actually set the rhythm of your organization – are the ones determining whether you move fast or slow, whether you're synchronized or fighting each other. You might be calling strategy from the front of the boat, but you're dependent on people you can't directly see to execute it. And they're dependent on you to navigate toward something worth rowing toward.
Most executives spend enormous energy trying to see everything, control everything, ensure perfect execution through oversight and authority. They're trying to face forwards in a boat that's designed for them to face backwards. It doesn't work. It can't work.
What works is building the trust and communication systems that let everyone perform their roles with confidence that others are performing theirs. It's accepting that you can't see everything and don't need to. It's recognizing that the dependency goes both ways – and that's actually the source of the team's strength, not its vulnerability.
Team Effectiveness Equals Capacity Minus Waste
When executive teams try to improve performance, they almost always focus on capacity building. Hire smarter people. Invest in better systems. Clarify roles and accountabilities. Improve decision-making frameworks. All of this matters – you need the raw capability.
But there’s something missing:
Team Effectiveness = Team Capacity - Team Waste
That waste term comes from poor synchronization. From people rowing at slightly different cadences. From misaligned priorities that have everyone pulling in nearly-but-not-quite the same direction. From communication gaps with the same words meaning different things to different people. From duplicated effort, conflicting initiatives, decisions that get relitigated endlessly because they were never really made in the first place.
I’ve lived it on the water: a mediocre team that's fully synchronized will outperform a team of superstars who are bleeding effort in uncoordinated ways. Every time.
The problem is that the waste is nearly invisible from outside the boat. When you watch elite rowing crews, all you see is smooth, powerful, synchronized motion. You don't see the years of practice it took to eliminate the waste. You don't see the thousands of small adjustments happening in real time to maintain that synchronization. You just see the result: a fast boat.
So when we try to build fast boats in business, we assume the hard part is getting the right people with the right capabilities. We don't realize that the actual hard part is eliminating the waste that comes from poor synchronization.
That "worst row ever" that one Wednesday was a case study in poor synchronization. We had all the capacity we needed. Eight experienced rowers. Good conditions. Solid technique. But, no synchronization. Maybe someone's timing was slightly off. Maybe the stroke rate was wrong for that particular combination of people. Maybe subtle technique differences that work fine individually created compound problems when we tried to row together.
The capacity was there. The waste ate it all.
Continuous Learning Never Stops
Rowing’s seven-year timeline has me wondering, how many executive teams are still learning and developing, versus how many have plateaued without realizing it?
Most people stop learning the moment they leave formal education. They accumulate experience, sure. They get better at executing familiar patterns. But genuine learning – the kind that changes how you see and operate in the world – largely stops.
It doesn't have to.
There's always more to learn. Always more nuance to master, more layers of complexity to understand, more capacity to develop. The question isn't whether you need to keep learning. The question is whether you're creating the conditions for that learning:
Do you have mirrors? People who can show you what you can't see from your position in the boat. Not yes-people who tell you what you want to hear. Not critics who tear you down without offering insight. But people who can reflect your blind spots with enough precision that you can actually adjust. My rowing coach does this constantly – she sees things from the launch that we could never see from inside the shell. What's your organization's equivalent? Who's in the launch, watching your team dynamics from outside?
Are you immersed in situations that force growth? Or are you having the same comfortable conversations in the same familiar patterns, expecting different results? Growth requires discomfort. My crew could row comfortably in stable, training boats forever and never develop the skills required for racing shells. Sometimes you have to step into the unstable boat and accept that you're going to feel incompetent for a while.
Are you attending to the team dynamics or just the strategy? Most executives spend 90% of their time on what to do and 10% on how to work together. Then they wonder why great strategies die in poorly synchronized teams. My coaches don't just teach us rowing technique. They’re constantly adjusting our positions, changing our partners, putting different combinations in boats to see what works. They’re paying as much attention to how we work together as to whether we're executing the stroke correctly.
Executive teams need the same attention. The synchronization doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't emerge naturally just because you have smart people in the boat. It requires deliberate practice, constant adjustment, and someone paying attention to the team dynamics with the same rigor you pay to the strategy.
Still Terrible, Still Learning
I'm one season into learning to row. I've won a race (okay, it was a small race, but still). I can execute a decent stroke most of the time. I understand what good rowing feels like, even if I can't always produce it.
I'm still terrible at this.
And I'm going to keep doing it. Because there's something deeply satisfying about the learning itself, about feeling yourself get slightly better at something genuinely difficult, about being part of a team that's trying to figure out how to move together.
The parallels to executive team work keep coming. I suspect they'll keep coming for years – probably right around the time I start to be good at rowing, which is to say: a while yet.
But here's what I know for certain: your executive team is in a boat. The question isn't whether you're rowing – you are, you're always rowing. The question is how much of that effort is actually moving the boat forward, and how much is getting lost to poor synchronization.
Most teams have no idea. They're working hard, they're exhausted from the effort, and they're not moving nearly as fast as they should be.
Maybe it's time to pay attention to the waste.
