Who Is Sailing The Ship?

On deck, somebody decides where the ship is going; below deck, the rowing happens. Both jobs have to be done. In many owner-managed businesses the person who should be on deck is below it, rowing harder than anybody.

What are the two jobs?

On deck

The on-deck job has four parts, all of them yours: where the business is going and by when; what you are deliberately not doing; who is in the boat, meaning who you hire, develop and part company with; and what is coming over the horizon, such as a client that has gone quiet, a cost about to move, or a supplier who has become a single point of failure.

Below deck

Below deck is the work itself: quoting, fixing, chasing, delivering. It is skilled and necessary, and it is often what you are best at, because it is what you did before you owned anything. Past a certain size, it stops being your work.

Why do owners end up below deck?

There are four reasons.

It is where the competence is. You are demonstrably excellent at the rowing. On deck you are less practised.

It has immediate feedback. Fix a job and somebody thanks you today. Set a three-year direction and nothing happens at all for months.

It is measurable. You can count what you did. On-deck work does not produce a tidy list at five o'clock.

It is also a place to hide: being busy below deck is an acceptable way to avoid the harder questions.

Below-deck work always has a deadline attached and on-deck work does not, so without a fixed slot the work with deadlines wins every week.

The ship still moves

Nothing dramatic happens when you go below deck. The business does not stop. It carries on, quite successfully, in whatever direction the current happens to be running.

In practice the direction gets set by whoever shouts loudest: the biggest customer because they are the biggest, the busiest department because it is the busiest, the most recent complaint, the most persistent salesman. None of them is steering towards anywhere you would have chosen, and the business drifts into a shape its owner never picked and cannot easily sell.

A margin you would normally decline gets accepted because there is capacity this month. Two people get hired to service it. Production reorganises around a schedule you never chose. A better-margin customer starts complaining about lead times and eventually leaves. Every individual decision was defensible; every one was taken below deck, at speed, without reference to a destination, because there was not one. An hour on deck beforehand would have produced one rule, a margin floor and a limit on how much of your turnover any one client may hold, and the decision would have been quick.

How to use it this month

• Split last week. Take your diary and mark each block on deck or below deck.
• Put one deck watch in the diary. Book two hours, the same slot every week, before the week fills, on your own and out of the inbox. Treat it as you would a customer appointment.
• Write the destination in one sentence. State where this business will be in three years, in numbers. If you cannot write it, use the first deck watch to write it.
• Write your say-no list: three things you will not take on any more — a type of client, a type of job, a margin floor. Put it where the team can see it, because that is what turns a preference into a rule.
• Name one thing you will stop rowing and hand it over properly this month, with the standard written down.
• Do a horizon scan. Spend fifteen minutes on four questions. Which client has gone quiet? Which cost is about to move? Which single person or supplier would hurt most if they left? What has a competitor started doing that we have been ignoring?

The mistakes to watch for

The first mistake is booking a strategy day in January, coming out with a decent plan, and then rowing for the following fifty-one weeks. The deck needs somebody on it every week.

The second is waiting for a condition. “I will get on deck once we have hired an operations manager.” That moment never arrives, because below-deck work expands to fill whatever capacity you create. The hire does not free you up unless you have already decided what you will do with the time and put it in the diary first.

Questions to ask yourself

• Out of 10, how much of last month did you spend on deck?
• If you asked three people in your business where it is heading, how similar would the answers be?
• What is the business drifting towards right now that you would not have chosen on purpose?
• What are you rowing that somebody else could row, and what is the reason you have not handed it over?

This sits at the centre of the governance work in Leadership Coaching. In a small business governance means somebody is on deck, on a schedule, with the authority to change course. Read it with The 10 Departments, which shows what the rowing is hiding, and Team Development, which explains why the work you hand over dips before it improves. The full set is in the Mindsets library.