How to Get Your Team Rowing in the Same Direction

Jonno White

Jun 22, 2018

8 min read

Updated: Aug 3

Aerial view of a rowing eight with every oar striking the water in unison at dawn.

By Jonno White, leadership consultant, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and author of Step Up or Step Out. Through Clarity, I help leaders, executive teams and schools get clear on purpose, identity and priorities so their people pull in one direction. Reviewed and updated as of August 2026.

How do you get your team rowing in the same direction?

Get your team rowing in the same direction by answering five questions together: when you meet, why you exist, who you are, where you are going and who is not rowing. Alignment comes from repeating those answers until every person can say them the same way, then holding each other to them.

Key takeaways

Alignment is a clarity problem rather than an effort problem, and the fix is repetition rather than a new structure. The five questions cover meeting rhythm, purpose, values, the single most important priority and accountability, in that order. Most teams stall on the fifth question, so decide who names the gap before you need them to.

What this guide adds

Most articles on team alignment repeat the same four ideas: communicate more, set shared goals, build trust and run better meetings. This guide does three things those pages do not.

It attaches the alignment problem to measured evidence rather than assertion, using Gallup's second quarter 2025 workplace data and a London Business School and MIT Sloan survey of 11,000 senior managers. It gives you the five questions in the order I actually ask them in a room, including the accountability question most guides leave out. It also states plainly where this approach fails, which matters more than one more list of tips.

Why teams drift apart even when the strategy looks clear

Misalignment is usually a clarity problem rather than an effort problem. In the second quarter of 2025, Gallup found that 47% of employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work, and that only 32% feel strongly connected to their organisation's mission or purpose. If fewer than half of your people can state what is expected of them, no amount of rowing harder will fix the direction.

The same pattern shows up at senior levels. A survey of 11,000 senior executives, leaders and managers from more than 400 companies, designed by MIT Sloan senior lecturer Donald Sull with London Business School teaching fellow Rebecca Homkes and reported by London Business School in December 2015, found that only a third of senior managers can correctly identify their firm's top three priorities. Even with five attempts, on average only around half of them listed the same single priority.

Rebecca Homkes, Teaching Fellow of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, puts the requirement simply: "For firms to execute a strategy well, that strategy must be clearly communicated and understood, throughout the organisation."

That is the whole rowing analogy. A crew does not go faster because each rower tries harder in their own direction.

Question 1. When does your team actually get together?

Start with meeting rhythm, because alignment is impossible in a team that has quietly stopped meeting. Ever noticed a rowing crew is in the same boat? Step one is getting in the same boat, on a predictable cadence, before you attempt anything more sophisticated.

When people are pulling in different directions, teams usually meet less, not more, because the meetings have become painful. Reverse that immediately. Get together, communicate something, check how everyone is going, and take a pulse.

Think of meetings as practice. A crew does not arrive at a regatta having only trained alone, and your team cannot arrive at a hard decision having only exchanged messages. If your meetings are the problem rather than the fix, read Patrick Lencioni's Death by Meeting and implement his meeting model before adding any new forum.

Question 2. Why does your team exist?

Purpose is the second question because purpose decides what your meetings are for. Ask why your team exists, in language a new starter could repeat, and keep asking until the answer stops changing between people.

Some leaders are naturally contagious with their why. I am not one of them, so I have to be deliberate about repeating my organisation's purpose far past the point where I am bored of it. That repetition is the work, not a sign the work has failed.

Patrick Lencioni, author of The Advantage, makes the case for why this is worth the effort: "Healthy organizations minimize politics and confusion, raising morale and productivity to levels that their competitors could never imagine." Confusion is the tax you pay for an unrepeated purpose. For the fuller version of this question set, read Understanding the Six Questions.

Question 3. Who are you as a team?

Values answer the question of how your team behaves when the purpose gets hard. Articulate the two or three behaviours that genuinely make your team distinctive, and drop the generic words that every organisation claims.

Honesty and innovation are not values, because no team lists their opposites. A real value costs you something. One of Clarity's values is work and life balance, which means turning down work that would violate it and refusing to ask a colleague to break it for my convenience.

Write down the last three decisions where your stated value cost you money, time or a client. If you cannot find one, the value is a poster rather than a value.

Question 4. Where are you going, and what matters most now?

Direction fails on quantity, not ambition. Write the list of what your team is working on, then cut it to the few items that genuinely matter this quarter, because a list of fifteen priorities is a list of none.

An Olympic crew is not trying to catch fish, get a tan and win a medal at the same time. Pick the one thing that must be true in the next ninety days, name it in the room, and let that one thing outrank the rest when priorities compete for time.

Alignment usually breaks between departments rather than inside them. Dominic Houlder, Adjunct Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, notes what actually carries cross-team commitments: "Informal, personal networks trump formal structures every time. Those networks need to be known and nurtured." A restructure will not deliver what unclear commitments could not.

Question 5. Who is not rowing, and who will say so?

Accountability is the question most alignment advice skips, and accountability decides whether the first four questions survive contact with reality. Once purpose, values and the top priority are agreed, name the gap out loud when someone rows against them.

Start small rather than with the largest unspoken issue. Reset expectations first so that nobody is held to a standard they never heard, then hold the line consistently once the expectation is clear.

Do it in kindness, and do it anyway. When it comes to culture you get what you create and what you allow. If conflict is the part your team avoids, the Five Dysfunctions summary gives your team a shared language for naming conflict without personalising it.

A five step sequence for your next ninety days

Run the five questions in this order rather than treating them as a menu.

Step one. Fix the meeting rhythm. Set a recurring team meeting and protect it for one quarter.

Step two. Draft the purpose in one sentence. Test that sentence by asking three people to repeat it back a week later.

Step three. Name two or three real values with a cost attached to each value.

Step four. Choose one most important priority for the next ninety days, and write down what that priority will not include.

Step five. Agree how your team will call it out when someone rows against the four answers above, and agree who does the calling.

Review the five answers at a set interval, quarterly for most teams, so the cadence outlives the initial enthusiasm.

Imagine a school leadership team working through the five questions

Imagine a school executive team of seven people who have not met as a full group for a term. Wellbeing, timetabling and a building project are all described as the top priority, depending on who you ask.

The team restores a fortnightly meeting, writes a one sentence purpose, and cuts the priority list to one item for the term. When a member commits to a competing project, the principal names the clash in the next meeting rather than absorbing it, and the commitment is renegotiated in the room.

This is an illustration rather than a real account, but the lesson holds: the sequence matters more than the wording, and the accountability step is what makes the first four questions real. For the school version of this question set, see The Six Questions of Organisational Clarity for Schools.

Where this approach does not work

These questions assume a team that can meet and speak candidly. The five questions will not fix the following situations, and using them there wastes goodwill.

They do not resolve a structural problem, such as two leaders holding the same accountability or a team measured on competing targets. They do not substitute for a decision the leader must make alone, and they will stall if the leader is unwilling to be held to the same standard. They also do not work where trust has broken to the point that people will not say what they think, in which case a facilitated conversation or a change of membership comes first.

Alignment tools also do not create capacity. If a team is understaffed or under sustained overload, clearer direction sharpens the problem rather than solving it.

One limitation of the evidence above is worth naming. The Gallup figures are current to the second quarter of 2025, while the London Business School and MIT Sloan priority survey was reported in December 2015, so treat the priority finding as a long standing pattern rather than a fresh measurement.

Your next action this week

Send your team one message that asks a single question: what do you believe our most important priority is for this quarter? Collect the answers before you correct anyone, then bring the range of answers to your next meeting as the starting point.

That one exercise gives you an honest read of where your team actually sits before you invest a day in a strategy offsite.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to get a team rowing in the same direction?

Expect a full quarter rather than a workshop. The five answers can be drafted in a single session, but those answers only hold once the team has repeated them, tested them against a real decision and used the accountability step at least once.

What if my team already has a vision statement?

A vision statement is not the same as alignment. The working test is whether every member can state the purpose and the current top priority in their own words without prompting, which is exactly what the Gallup and London Business School data suggest most teams fail.

Do I need an external facilitator?

Not always. Run the five questions yourself when the team can speak candidly and you are willing to be held to the same standard. Bring in help when you are part of the disagreement, when trust is low, or when the conversation has failed before.

CLARITY