91% A-Players: What’s Your Number?

“Lead­er­ship is hav­ing a com­pelling vision, a com­pre­hen­sive plan, relent­less imple­men­ta­tion, and tal­ent­ed peo­ple work­ing togeth­er.” Alan Mulal­ly, for­mer CEO, Ford Motor Company

Imag­ine review­ing all the key peo­ple in your com­pa­ny and say­ing, with­out hes­i­ta­tion, that 91% of them are A‑Players. By that, I mean those who fit the cul­ture of the com­pa­ny very well and almost always deliv­er as expect­ed – and often more or bet­ter than expected.

Know­ing that a typ­i­cal com­pa­ny has between 25% and 30% who meet the A‑Player stan­dard, 91% would be an incred­i­ble accom­plish­ment – and one that doesn’t come eas­i­ly. That takes a dif­fer­ent commitment.

In one of our first client plan­ning ses­sions of 2019, I sat in a room with a team I’ve worked with for many years, to review their tal­ent. Again and again, each one was an ​‘A’ and the total came to 91%. Before this, the high­est I’d ever seen was 73%, so this was the best, yet. This is an absolute­ly incred­i­ble accom­plish­ment that has hours and hours and hours of hard work and tough con­ver­sa­tion to make it happen.

Now you may think that they mark peo­ple too eas­i­ly or that these tal­ent­ed peo­ple must be very expen­sive. The real­i­ty is that an A‑Player doesn’t have to be more than you are will­ing to pay — it just means they are excep­tion­al ver­sus good.

It was also inter­est­ing, as we reviewed oth­er com­pa­ny num­bers, to see that they hit rev­enue goals and they were close to being 10% short-staffed. So how can you be 10% short-staffed and still hit your rev­enue and prof­it goals? Only with very, very tal­ent­ed people.

How did they do this?

1. A few years ago, they set a goal to get a high­er per­cent­age of A‑Players
2. Key peo­ple attend­ed a Top­grad­ing work­shop to learn the skills to keep the right peo­ple and to only hire top people
3. They became dis­ci­plined at let­ting peo­ple know when they weren’t the meet­ing or exceed­ing the expec­ta­tions of the company
4. When peo­ple didn’t fit or couldn’t per­form at a high lev­el, they gave tough feed­back and made tough deci­sions to ensure the team got stronger.

Now the com­pa­ny will catch up with hir­ing and, as we look for­ward to the next few years, we can only imag­ine what the com­pa­ny can achieve, with high­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and tal­ent­ed high-per­form­ers who fit well into a great work­ing environment.

We all make a strong cor­re­la­tion between tal­ent and per­for­mance, but most com­pa­nies don’t make the com­mit­ment to only allow A Play­er tal­ent to be in their most impor­tant roles and talk them­selves into expect­ing medi­oc­rity for all kinds of crazy reasons.

The Chal­lenge

• What per­cent­age of the peo­ple on your team are tru­ly exceptional?
• What would have to hap­pen to get that num­ber clos­er to 70 or 80% — nev­er mind 91%?

PS — If you want to learn more about how to make this hap­pen in your com­pa­ny, reach out to find out about our next Top­grad­ing™ work­shop (Octo­ber 29 and 30 in Van­cou­ver); and one-on-one pri­vate ses­sions, as you screen can­di­dates for impor­tant roles.