Day: November 16, 2016

I took up crew rowing in an 8-oared shell at age 50 with a local community club here in my hometown. One thing I learned quickly is that we must each trust one another to do our jobs — and with perfect timing — or the boat simply won’t go fast, or worse, won’t go at all.

This has become the perfect team metaphor for me. Rowing relies more on the perfect cohesion of a team than any other sport. In a game like football or basketball, one star player can carry an otherwise mediocre team to victory, but that’s not so in rowing. No single rower can make the boat go faster by himself, but it only takes one rower being just the tiniest bit off to slow it down a lot. The same thing goes for your company’s leadership team.

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