Who Is Sailing The Ship?

There is a deck, where somebody decides where the ship is going. And there is below deck, where the rowing happens. Both jobs are real and both have to be done. The problem is that in most owner-managed businesses the person who should be on deck is below it, rowing harder than anybody, and nobody has been at the wheel for a long time.

The picture is old and slightly unfashionable, and it has survived because owners recognise themselves in it within about four seconds.

What are the two jobs?

On deck

Four things, and they are all yours. Where this business is going and by when. What you are deliberately not doing, which is the half of strategy owners skip. Who is in the boat — who you hire, who you develop, who you part company with. And what is coming over the horizon: a client that has gone quiet, a cost about to move, a supplier who has become a single point of failure.

Below deck

The work itself. Quoting, fixing, chasing, delivering. It is skilled, it is necessary, and it is almost certainly what you are best at in the building, because it is what you did before you owned anything. Rowing is honest work and somebody has to do it. Past a certain size, it stops being your work.

Why do owners end up below deck?

Not laziness, and not ignorance. Four fairly good reasons.

It is where the competence is. You are demonstrably excellent at the rowing. On deck you are an amateur, and nobody enjoys being an amateur in their own business.

It has immediate feedback. Fix a job and somebody thanks you today. Set a three-year direction and nothing happens at all for months, and possibly ever, if you never revisit it.

It is measurable. You can count what you did. On-deck work refuses to produce a tidy list at five o'clock, which for a certain kind of owner is close to unbearable.

And it is a legitimate hiding place. Below-deck work is the socially acceptable way to avoid the harder questions, because you were busy — and you genuinely were, and everybody could see it.

Underneath all four sits one structural fact. Below-deck work always has a deadline attached. On-deck work never does. Given a diary and no discipline, the work with deadlines wins every single week.

The ship still moves

Here is the part owners underestimate. 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 these people are hostile, and none of them are steering towards anywhere you would have chosen. A business with nobody on deck does not drift into failure. It drifts into a shape its owner never picked and cannot easily sell.

The compounding version is worse. 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 a single sentence — a margin floor, and a limit on how much of your turnover any one client may hold — and that sentence would have turned a two-year problem into a two-minute conversation.

How to use it this month

• Split last week honestly. Take your diary and mark each block on deck or below deck. Owners are usually surprised by how little on-deck time survives contact with a week, because it feels like more.
• Put one deck watch in the diary. Two hours, the same slot every week, before the week fills. Not a meeting, not with anybody, out of the inbox. Treat it exactly as you would treat a customer appointment you would be embarrassed to cancel.
• Write the destination in one sentence. Where this business is in three years, in numbers. If you cannot write it, you have found what the first deck watch is for.
• 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. Fifteen minutes, 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

Agreeing with all of this, booking a strategy day in January, coming out with a decent plan, and then rowing for the following fifty-one weeks. An annual visit to the deck is a ritual, not governance. The ship needs somebody watching the weather every week, not an away day and a laminated document.

The second is the 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.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how much of last month did you spend genuinely 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 honest 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 one simple thing: 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.