Evaluate Your New Leadership Team: ‘A’s, ‘B’s, or Chronic ‘C’s?

I want to share with you a conversation I had with a friend and former coaching client of mine, Greg Goff, CEO of a Fortune 100 company.  

Greg is a highly talented executive. At the time of our conversation, Greg had been in his new job just over 100 days ago. In the following year, he would pull off a major turnaround, adding many millions of dollars to the company’s bottom line.

After talking how he was doing in his new job, we spent some time discussing his strategic intentions for his company, and then the ability of his leadership team to executive on it. This brought up a discussion of my new book, Your First 100 Days in a New Executive Job, and one of the chapters on creating an ‘A’ player in every job.

Evaluating Your Team Can Be an Eye Opener

I shared with Greg about a meeting I once had with the CEO of Cadbury Schweppes who had an impossible future that involved exponential business growth. I asked the CEO how many ‘A’ players he had on his management team.

He gave it some thought and told me: 1 ‘A’ player, 2 ‘B’s, and 7 ‘C’s. When I asked him if he thought he could reach his goal with his team, he confided, “probably not.” He said that the question was an “eye-opener.”

He then called the Vice President of Human Resources into the room and asked him, “How many ‘A’ players do you think we have on the executive team?” The HR managers said, without missing a beat, “All of them.” And he added, “I am proud to have hired them all.”

When the HR manager found out that the CEO rated the executive team very differently in his conversation with me, his face turned bright red, and later boiled over into a sarcastic tiff with me as he showed me the door. I never did land Cadbury Schweppes as a result of his poisoning the well.

How Many ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’ Players on Your Team?

Greg was amused by this story and began to ponder how many ‘A,’ ‘B,’ or ‘C’ players he had on his team. He said he wondered whether he needed all of his team to be ‘A’ players anyway, he just wanted them to execute on the strategy. “Maybe you don’t need all ‘A’s,” I said, “but you do need some.” I pointed out that if you look at sports teams who win championships, they always have at least 2 to 3 ‘A’s, nothing less.

For example, the Boston Celtics is a basketball team that has not gone very deep in the playoffs for over a decade with 1 ‘A’ player, Paul Pierce, and a retinue of ‘B’s and ‘C’s. Yet they won the 2008 championship when GM Danny Ainge made some trades that allowed him to surround his star Pierce with two other star players, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. The group became known as The Big Three and the championship was theirs.

I know from experience that Greg recognizes the importance of talent, but I asked him if, since he has placed much of his time and attention in his new job on strategy and operations, whether he might need to put some more time now into hiring, coaching, and retaining a team of ‘A’ players.

An ‘A’ Player’s Impact is Not Just Additive, But Exponential

I pointed out that Greg showed up for me as an ‘A’ player and in my experience, every time he came into a new role, his contribution was not just additive, but exponential in terms of its impact. I shared that for me, it was very frustrating when you are an ‘A’ player to have to work with people who are mere ‘B’s and ‘C’s.

When you are constantly trying to get people to a higher standard and they can’t get there, it’s very easy to become frustrated and to take out your hammer and start hitting them over the head, something which can be very destructive to the relationship.

Get Me the Best in the World

I also commented that I have often seen a tendency in leaders who are ‘A’ players to take the ball away from ‘B’ players when they failed to live up to expectations, which results in having to play a lot of roles simultaneously, something that can wear one down after a while.

It has been said that ‘A’ players hire ‘A’ players, simply refusing to just fill positions. ‘B’ players, by contrast, tend to hire ‘C’s who are not a threat to them. Former CEO of Home Depot, Arthur Blank’s instructions to HR when a new position was open was “Get me the best in the world.” He did not say that he wanted a person who could do a passable job in this new role.

I suggested to Greg, “If you spent more time recruiting the best people, you would probably have a lot of time to do other things that are your top priorities.”

“You are probably right,” he said.

If you need help evaluating your leadership team, let’s talk.