Does every employee in your company need to be an 'A-Player'?

“We only hire A-Players”

That’s what Jon Lax, founder of Teehan Lax (acquihired by Facebook in 2015), once said to me at a conference.

An A-Player is someone who closely resembles you as the founder. They are driven, passionate, and committed to the company. They embody your core values. They’re versatile and adaptable, jumping into any role at a moments notice and getting done whatever needs to be without complaint. They are excellent at their craft, among the best you’ve ever worked with.

A-Players like this are also incredibly rare.

There just aren’t a lot of these people in the talent pool applying for jobs. If everyone was the best, then by definition, they wouldn’t be — they’d be the average.

But let’s pretend for a moment that hiring only A-Players in a company was actually possible — would you want it?

If every person on your team wanted to and had the ability to be on your executive team, then you wouldn’t have anyone on the front-lines making sales calls, writing code, or shipping product. Your A-Players would be disgruntled that another equally talented A-Player is their boss.

The star quarterback on the winning football needs receivers, tackles and tight-ends, not everyone can be the quarterback.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be choosy about who you hire. You still need high standards. You should know what your core values are and only hire people that you feel align with them. But what if you don’t know?

How to uncover your core values

At my company, Proposify, we recently had our yearly planning session, a two-day offsite retreat with our leadership team.

One of the things we did during those two days was work to uncover our core values, things we value as a group, that we’ll hire and fire against.

We performed an exercise where I asked everyone in the room to write down two people in the room and two people back at the office who they feel embody our values, whatever they are. If they could clone these people and make an army of them we would hit our 3 year goals in 1 year.

Next, I asked them to write down why they put their names down, a list of tangible qualities.

We went around the room and named our people and their qualities. I wrote out everyone’s answers on a flip chart. Interestingly, a handful of names came up repeatedly. Everyone on the leadership team already knew internally who our best people are and the qualities that make them who they are.

Finally, we narrowed down the qualities to 4. These are now are core values, and we will look for these values in new people we hire. If someone on the team isn’t working out, it’s usually because they’re sorely lacking at least one of these core values.

This doesn’t mean we only hire A-Players, it means we have a consistent standard we now use as the baseline for hiring. You can be a bit inexperienced, or someone who just wants to show up at work, put in their best effort, get their work done on time, never get promoted to a management position —but still embody our core values. So who do you promote to a leadership position?

How do C-level executives and VPs differ from the rest of the company?

Rand Fishkin, founder and former-CEO of Moz posted this to LinkedIn:

“On a recent email thread, Sarah Bird was asked what separates executives who report to the CEO from other managers at a company. I loved her answer and got permission to share it here.”

If you’re an employee looking to level-up at your company start focusing on the business as a whole and how your department fits into the big picture.

As an example, let’s say the CEO asks you if a project is done. You say yes because you/your team checked off all of your to-dos and now it’s waiting on another team to launch. If you’re thinking at a company level the answer is no, it’s not done. To a CEO, it’s not done if it hasn’t launched. Someone who wants to be a VP or C-level executive looks beyond them, their department, their team. They look out for the company as a whole.

However you may ask, wouldn’t you want everyone on your team to have a company mindset, not just the leadership team?

Not necessarily. Some people are worker bees. They want to come in, do their jobs and leave at the end of the day. They have no motivation to be a manager or exec. Every company needs those employees, and the bigger the company gets, the more it needs.

A lot of founders can’t comprehend a world where their employees want to show up on time, get their work done, and never give it another thought when they get home. Employees that cheer for snow days and long weekends, like kids who get to play hooky from school without getting in trouble. It will baffle you as the founder because this company is your baby, your passion, your reason for being, and they are treating it like a job. Which it is. If they were all you they wouldn’t want to work for you. They’d be off starting their own companies.

But there are a few who will treat it like their own company and want to stick with you for the long haul. They don’t want the risk that comes with starting their own companies. Instead they want to help you build the business. Your A-Players. Your leaders. At best you can find one or two of these people every year you’re in business.

How do you find them?

One way is to pay a headhunter to recruit them, which I’ve never done before. Instead, I prefer taking it slow and letting serendipity take over. Maybe they reach out to you because the startup they were at just closed its doors. Maybe they’re a friend of a friend looking for a new opportunity who loves your company and wants to be a part of it.

Or sometimes, they’re already working at your company and you just need to level them up, like Pokémon. They love the company and want to grow their career and begin proving they’ve got what it takes. Be the lighthouse that draws them in. Don’t micro-manage them. Let them screw up as long as they learn from it and hold themselves accountable. Notice their abilities. Coach them. Promote them. Eventually they’ll be so good that your leadership team will do the bulk of the heavy lifting in growing your business.

Can every employee think big picture?

Maybe. Probably not. As your company grows, most employees will focus on their own job, department or their small team within a department.

You can and should communicate your company vision, market position, and long-term goals early and often. Employees in the trenches enjoy feeling a part of the company's mission and big picture goals, even if the reality is that right now you need them to focus on their job, whether that’s offering great customer service, closing deals, or writing code. The stuff that actually makes your business run day-to-day.

What if someone four layers below you on the org chat wants to share an idea they have? You should create a structure where every employee, no matter their position or seniority, feels free to grab a coffee with the CEO and share their big idea. Where no one gets reprimanded for not following a chain of command. Where people who want to and have the capacity to level-up and get promoted will.

Conclusion

You can’t hire all A-players and even if you could, you wouldn’t want to. In fact, it’s better if we stop using terms like A, B, and C-players all-together. In reality, your employees align with your core values or they’re don’t. They’re either in the right position or they aren’t. That’s for you to decide.