Are you surrounding yourself with the right people for success?

Great companies are built on great people. Over the years, I have adapted my own version of the business educator Jack Welch’s philosophy, that the people you want to surround yourself with, both in business and in life, are what he calls the ‘A-Players’.

A-players are usually easy to identify because they are the people who share the values of your business and can deliver a high performance. The kind of values you have as an adult are pretty much the values that your parents instilled in you as you were growing up. By the time you reach the age of 16, those values are pretty much set in stone, which means that as an employer, you can’t hope to begin instilling new or different workplace values. Instead, you need to look for people who already have the right kind of values that you need, such as a positive, open mind; a can-do attitude; enthusiasm and passion; honesty; a willingness to work hard; and discipline. These A-players are the people you need to build your business around. You should promote and develop them whenever possible and do everything you can not to lose them.

This diagram illustrates the various combinations of values and performance. I have simplified the permutations for the benefit of clarity and simplicity:

The people who have both low values and low performance – the D-players – are obviously no good to anyone and should be fired immediately. In an ideal world, you should never hire such a person in the first place. With a bit of interview experience, you can learn to spot a D-player early on and prevent this occurrence.

But sometimes one slips through the net. As soon as you realise the person can’t perform or indeed has the wrong values, you must act swiftly and decisively – no performance-improvement plan will fix this individual. You will simply waste company resources and have a poisonous element infecting other staff. Fire immediately. As a good friend used to say: “you can’t fix stupid”.

The people who have high values but low performance – the B-players – are the people in the office who are always friendly and happy, and will make you cups of tea, but they just don’t quite get the job done.

These individuals have the right values but just can’t seem to cut it. It is not that they are not working hard or trying their best. What you really want to do is turn these employees into A-players. There are really only two things you can do. Either move them to a different role – they may improve if you change their job to one that is better suited to their talents and abilities – or retrain them. Sometimes the reason for sub-optimal performance can be that they just got a bit stale and bored. Retraining can get them back on track, get them fired up about their career and goals again. Whichever solution you choose, you must leave the employee in no doubt that this is their chance to step up and start delivering the performance you expect as an A-player. There is simply no room for B-players in your company.

In the early days of starting XLN, I had an employee in the customer-service department who was a nice guy but clearly in the wrong job. When I walked past his desk one morning, I saw that a light on his phone was flashing red and asked him why. He got very flustered as he realised that he had left a customer on hold for 20 minutes and completely forgotten about it.

We had a chat where he explained that his real passion was technology and music and that he had only applied for the customer-service role because he desperately needed a job and it was the only opening available at the time. I gave him a job in the technology department where he now looks after all our data and is a very valuable member of the team. He has been with the company for over 17 years now.

?Beware the C-player

This is the most important thing to know in people management and one of the hardest lessons to learn. People who do not have values but deliver high performance are the most dangerous. They can literally ruin your company from within and in a very short period of time. They are very tricky to deal with because, when you are their boss, they are difficult to differentiate from an A-player – they look the same when you look at them from your elevated vantage point. The way you deal with them will determine whether you create a mediocre business or a great business. C-players will deliver a good or often great performance and say all the right things. They will almost always hit their targets and will look like the perfect A-player. But they don’t have the values and don’t subscribe to your company’s way of doing things. They will undermine you behind your back but kiss your behind in public.

I call them sunflowers – they have a very large head which moves towards the sun, i.e., you, the boss, and so if you look down at them from above, you will only see their high performance. Their low values will remain hidden. Only the people below them will see what they are really like. They create shade under and around them and nothing will grow there.

Most people have worked for a C-player – someone who takes credit for other people’s work, isn’t honest or reliable, and plays political games at work. They are very easy to spot when you work for one, but if you employ one, it is much harder, because they deliver the results. And you won’t have experienced their bad side because sunflowers always behave impeccably when in your presence.

Very often their performance isn’t real anyway. They fudge the sales numbers and set themselves easy targets that they can hit with minimum effort. They are very skilled at deceiving management. If an A-player – and remember these are the good guys you want to build your company around – ends up working for a C-player, you can be sure that they will quickly see through the individual. Often the C-player will try to eliminate the competition by discrediting the A-player. In short order, the A-player will decide they can’t work for that individual and, by extension, your company. They will have lost faith in your leadership abilities because they won’t be able to reconcile why you would allow the C-player to work in your company. So, the A-player will leave and over time, only other C- or D-players will want to work in that department. It will be rotten to the core and nothing they produce will be real.

No second chances

The important thing to remember about C-players, however, is that one day you will catch them out. You will catch them fiddling the budget or altering targets in their favour. You will find out that some of their sales or results weren’t real. You will catch them being dishonest or outright lying, or you will realise that they took credit for someone else’s work. They will say they are sorry and that it will never happen again, but really this just means that next time they do something underhand, they will be smarter about it and you won’t catch them.

Usually, you only get one chance at spotting a C-player. Remember, a leopard never changes its spots. The problem is that most people will not fire a C-player because they are likely to be the firm’s top producer. So they compromise and let them stay. But if you do that, you will have completely undermined the business and everything it stands for, because C-players don’t have the right values and are never going to change. The good people working for you will lose all respect for you and your company too. The minute you spot a C-player you must take action and fire them. Remember that you cannot change someone’s values. If their parents didn’t give them good values by the time they were 16 years old, you have no chance of changing them now they are in their mid 20s or 30s. So don’t kid yourself.

The brutal truth is that if you don’t start getting really good at making these kinds of leadership decisions, and fast, then your business will not succeed.

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