A Founder’s Priority is to Maintain Synchrony on the Boat
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Watching my daughter’s rowing team taught me that winning is all about pulling together.
I’ve written a lot about the importance of playbooks as the cornerstone of successful strategies. The playbook is the reservoir for your change-the-world company’s most critical strategic focal points: why you exist, what you do, how you behave as a team, and determining over and over again what is most important–right now.
At small companies, you can cover off on most of these strategic points every 90 days at your quarterly retreats. As I’ve written before, the more you get together every 90 days, by the third or fourth or sixth time, the playbook should be pretty solid.
But there’s one exception to this, which is the all-important understanding of “what’s most important right now,” which is more likely to change every 90 days or so and may change faster still. The goal in the retreat is to get the playbook nailed every 90 days, and then stick to it for 90 days. So one of the things that I nearly require, I wouldn’t say require because it’s not my company, but nearly required for every single one of the companies that were invested in is that they review the playbook in every meeting. I strongly suggest that they start each meeting with a two minute review of the playbook, often asking people around the table to read different sections of it.
So one person reads, the ’why do we exist’ section, we exist to [fill in the blank]. And then somebody else might read the core values, and then somebody else might read the ’what’s most important right now’ for the company. And what this does is it provides context for the meeting and makes sure everything is synchronized around the playbook. So this repetition of reading the playbook in every meeting ensures that everybody in the company — it gets even more important as the company grows — stays synchronized with the decisions that were made at the retreat around what’s most important right now.
And the ‘what’s most important right now,’ which is another way of isolating your top priorities, draws its urgency from the understanding of ‘why do we exist.’ And if you’re not doing what you exist to do, you’re not fulfilling your priorities. And of course, if you’ve studied our strategy map before, the ‘why do we exist’ context is rooted in the founder’s understanding of himself or herself, i.e., ‘knowing thyself.’
‘Know thy customer’ and ‘know thy marketplace’ are two more commandments we review at every retreat. This is marketing 101, in some ways, but unless you connect these strategic parts to the whole, you risk losing sight of the big picture amid all the small details of doing business every day. By connecting them, you create a kind of synchrony. And the bigger the company grows, the more important the synchrony becomes.
The concept of synchrony really hit home when I became familiar with the sport of crew. As I’ve written about before, my daughter was in a crew at Clemson University. She also rowed all the way through junior high school and in high school. I’ve watched more than a few of her meets. And to watch a boat of eight women with a coxswain swinging and rolling through the water is to see a beautiful picture of harmony and fusion among teammates that makes you forget to focus on your own child and lose yourself in the rhythm–indeed, the synchrony that propels the boat.
You don’t think about how hard each person rows because you can’t isolate one person from the others, try as you might!
This is not to say that each rower doesn’t have her own strengths and roles to play. Some focus on balancing the boat, others on direction and still others on power. In other words, they aren’t all just straining at the oar! They are actually doing different things but doing them in absolute synchrony with each other.
As a CEO, I was a huge proponent of requiring my team to make a habit of revisiting our playbook at every meeting. Today, when I lead all the retreats with our current investment companies, we read the playbook first to ensure everybody’s still aligned on it. And even when I lead a monthly strategic meeting, we always start with the playbook. It’s a mantra of sorts we recite to create smoothness and clarity before diving deep into the particulars.
Another benefit to achieving harmony is that it also works to give individuals–the balancers, steering, and power strokers, the opportunity to see where they fit in the company priorities, especially the ‘what’s most important now’ for the boat. For example, if I’m in a marketing meeting as a marketing person, and driving sales is the most important priority, I can see that and see where I connect. If I’m an operations-focused person and know that driving sales is number one, I know that we’ve got to stay in stock! This lifts me out of my daily head down grind to see where I might be able to help another department that relies on me, or that I rely on.
To complete my rowing metaphor, the founder needs to be the one carrying the megaphone and ensuring that everybody is fulfilling their role and staying in sync — the metaphorical coxswain. She sets the pace and points out the places where course correction is needed. Maybe the marketplace is cooking up faster than expected and the boat needs to pick up the pace without careening into a river bank? That’s the coxswain’s job and the founder’s, too.
Maintaining that competitive speed and balance is your job as a founder. It may be your most important job. That’s why you get to hold the megaphone!
Let me know what you’re doing at your change-the-world company to build fast-paced synchrony in your team.
Sincerely,
Rob Craven, scalepassion
Enjoy this article? If you would like to see simple, practical tips in your inbox every week sign up for TwoTip Tuesday to help scale your change-the-world business.
All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!