When We Row Together
Fresh off my first experience watching the National Youth Rowing Championship in Florida, I found myself marveling at the magic on a boat with nine kids. The success of a boat depends on the complete trust, synchronization and cohesion of all rowers and the coxswain.
Each has a distinct role. The cox steers and calls out changes to pace. The rowers in different positions have specific roles, like ensuring smooth speed transitions, adding power and balancing the boat.
Watching from the bank, I never guessed the complexity underneath it all. All I saw was the smooth motion of the oars and the boats gliding gracefully on the water.
A high-performing leadership team works much the same way. A few years ago, four of us, two marketing co-leaders and two HR co-leaders, met in a small room at LaGuardia airport, facing a dysfunctional, co-located brand team spanning two organizations with two different cultures, and facing three critical product launches with little runway.
We started with trust. this took facilitated, sometimes difficult conversations, which surfaced real issues and built psychological safety. Co-created alignment followed, with shared purpose, goals and strategy. Some tough talent decisions were necessary. With trust, talent and alignment in place, we launched three brands successfully over three years. A far cry from where we started.
What made this magic happen? No models, no frameworks. Just some tried and tested methods from my experience in the corporate world.
Trust
This is the foundation for a high-performing team, built daily through intent, behaviors and actions. It shows up in two dimensions.
Competence trust is the confidence that each team member will do their part and their strengths will fill each other’s gaps. A leader builds this by ensuring the right talent is in each role, with clear expectations and upheld standards, sometimes requiring difficult talent decisions.
Relational trust is the reward for time invested in celebrating success, processing failure, and getting to know the person behind the profile. This requires leaders to model vulnerability and facilitate constructive conflict, however uncomfortable.
Conflict management is the thorniest part. Useful strategies include creating psychological safety, clarifying non-negotiables, stepping back from zero-sum thinking, and staying curious about the relationship.
Alignment
Built on trust, the starting point for a high-performing team is alignment on purpose (the why), goal (the what), and strategy (the how).
Alignment doesn’t mean consensus. It means everyone felt heard, all viewpoints were debated, and everyone committed to one path forward, even those who disagreed with parts of it. Team goals take priority over individual ones, and when friction arises, members raise it transparently in the interest of the whole team.
Building this requires making space for dialogue, providing direction when discussions go down rabbit holes, and surfacing opinions before they become divisive. A clear protocol and a neutral facilitator help, so the burden doesn’t fall entirely on the leader.
My go-to questions: Why are we here, and who is our work in service of? How does our purpose translate into results and ranked goals? What milestones, in what timeframe, will get us there and what could shift them?
Agility
A strategy lays down a path, but the journey is full of unexpected turns. Agile teams sense when the plan isn’t working, improvise, take calculated risks, fail fast, and treat obstacles as information. Like the gliding boat, this looks effortless from the outside. Except, it isn’t.
The single most defining move a leader can make is building decision-making capability. This is how:
Co-create a clear protocol, including, who’s involved in which decisions, how stakeholder input gets in at the right time, and who makes the final call when views differ. In strong teams, that isn’t always the leader.
Define what good data looks like. It should be transparent and equally accessible to all stakeholders, with a fast method for gathering input and a way to gauge both short and long-term impact.
Make space for real discussion. This means protected time, not a rushed approval, a facilitated conversation where every angle gets aired, built on a foundation of trust that makes honesty possible.
Have a plan to communicate decisions. Most pivots fail not from poor decisions but poor communication. Every decision should trace back to the team’s purpose, goals and strategy. Each leader, at every level, needs to be prepared to own the message, not just relay it. Effectively communicating with the network of stakeholders, especially those who may experience negative fallouts, is critical. Without that preparation cascading down and across, buy-in breaks and execution stalls.
Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Accountability
You see it when team members hold themselves and each other to their actions, behaviors and results, not just when a leader is watching. Everyone feels empowered to act as a leader. Ownership of outcomes is shared, not siloed.
It’s easy to spot and hard to build, because real accountability means a peer challenging a peer, not just a leader challenging a report. That takes courage.
It starts with a leader who models self-accountability and empowers the team to own outcomes, including the uncomfortable ones.
The defining move is coaching team members through the accountability conversations they’re avoiding. These are the difficult ones with peers, not just managers. This rarely comes naturally. Leaders and coaches help by role-playing the conversation, finding authentic language that doesn’t feel like a script, and having the person’s back once they’ve taken the risk.
Resilience
Resilience is what takes a team to the finish line. Like trust, it’s best built when things are going well, not cobbled together mid-crisis.
The biggest mistake organizations and leaders make is ignoring the difficult work of building resilience into the systems and instead treating it as an individual responsibility. No amount of mindfulness classes and yoga sessions can compensate for systemic resilience-eroding factors like lack of goal clarity, task overload and untenable spans of control. Real resilience must be built into the system itself.
A resilient team shows up consistently, puts in the work on the hardest days, and bounces back from setbacks with full commitment. It’s the ability to absorb challenges and adapt.
Leaders build this structurally using diversified skill sets, some capacity slack to absorb the unexpected, thought-partners and project-partners who can fill a temporary gaps, and effective delegation so no single person is a point of failure.
To build process resilience, leaders and coaches can hold scenario planning sessions to anticipate disruptions, run debriefs after every milestone to capture learning, and develop a shared team language for stress and struggle, one that can be used openly, without judgment.
Teams are like individuals. They become high-performing when leaders and coaches equip them well. When we row together, we travel far and fast.