Recently, I was having a conversation with a client who is a CEO of a small life-science organization. He was telling me about his big problem: his executive team was not operating as it should —they were in the weeds of their departments, their performance was inconsistent and there were issues in delivery of the product, wasted batches, etc. The quality was improving, but for what they wanted to achieve, they needed far more consistency.
So I gave him a challenge. The challenge was to get the answer to three simple questions from every single one of his senior leaders—about 20 people—and report back to me. The three questions he had to ask each person were:
- Who is your number 2?
- What’s your plan for the bottom 3rd of your team?
- What’s your plan for developing your B-players into A-players?
The mission took him about a month. He came back with the responses and unsurprisingly, in every one of those conversations, the answer to all three questions was I don’t know.
I don’t know who my number two is. I don’t have a plan for the bottom third, and I don’t have a plan to move B-players to A-players.
This is something I commonly see in small companies who operate in a perpetual state of fire fighting. They go from one project, problem, or crisis to the next without thinking too much about tomorrow or how they could be more efficient or accomplish more with their people.
So on the back of a napkin, we did the numbers and the cost on productivity was over $1M/quarter. Let me state that again: It was costing him $1M/quarter because his team did not have an answer to these three questions. This might sound astonishing, but look for a moment at all the costs.
Here’s why these questions are key.
Who is your number 2?
If a leader doesn’t have a number two, everything depends on her. This means there’s a single point of failure and the work suffers when the leader is out. Her absence sends peers and direct reports into scramble-mode to find critical information and derails the momentum to achieve the project’s or critical task’s objective.
Because the leader holds all the keys to their functional area or team running well, they are never able to fully step out of the flow of work and fully engage into higher level conversations with peers and senior management. The absence of the leader’s input into these strategic discussions prevents that group from arriving at the best possible outcome or at a minimum not able to fully consider that leader’s functional area or team.
It also means the best ideas and plans aren’t being implemented. The leader is going it alone and doesn’t have a strategic partner in their functional area in decision making, problem solving or planning. The cost comes in the form of less innovation, missed opportunities to improve things and falling into the trap of the leader’s inherent biases and no one to challenge them.
What’s your plan for the bottom 3rd of your team?
If your team has eight or more members, when you stack rank the team, the bottom third in the rank will likely be your C players. The C players are typically identified by their lack of preparation on assignments or their consistent failure to meet deadlines and follow up on requests. They tend to blame others or external factors for delays and incomplete assignments. They may accomplish only 40% to 50% of what you were expecting. This type of behavior is what Gallop, in their annual employee engagement survey, calls actively disengaged and having them on your team is costing you.
For every $10K in salary for a disengaged employee, it’s costing you $3400. So for an entry level $50K employee who’s disengaged, it’s costing you $17K annually in productivity. These costs just keep going up with higher salaried C players.
There’s also C players in the bottom third of your team who are there due to poor people skills. They execute their assignments well but they achieve their results at the cost of people. They tend to be domineering, aloof, abusive, self-serving, or arrogant. They may steal credit. They can interfere in other people’s work. They object to receiving coaching and mentoring and steamroll their direct reports and peers in the process.
It is critical to take the time to stack-rank your entire team, and create a plan for the bottom third. How will you develop them? How will you more closely assess them? How will you replace them?
And if the obvious costs noted above weren’t enough, not taking action can block the advancement and development of your A and B players. They will question your credibility as their leader which could cost you dearly in the end if they choose to leave your team.
What’s your plan for developing your B-players into A-players?
B players make up the bulk of your organization’s employees, but the focus usually remains on A players, who don’t need the attention, and C or D players, who I talked about in the previous section.
B players might have the potential to become A players, but maybe they lack some key traits, like communication skills or self-motivation. Or they might be a B player simply because they are easy to work with and flexible, and therefore aren’t wasting a manager’s time, even if they aren’t hitting their goals every month.
B players can tend to get lost, when they should be valued as an untapped source of talent. There is a cost associated with ignoring B players, because with a little attention, these employees might wind up being your most valuable assets. Without that attention they may develop into another company’s A player.
So go ahead, take on the challenge yourself. At a bare minimum, ask all your direct reports these three questions and see what their answers are. At the very least, you’ll have more information about the state of clarity and alignment in your organization.