By Howard Shore
My partners and I recently devoted our weekly meeting to discussing an issue we encountered with our upcoming learning event for local owners: Building a Team of High Performers. We believed this would be an important topic for the start of 2011 for 2 reasons. First, every company that we have met that has a cash flow problem or was unsatisfied with their growth or profits also had a people problem. Growth problems attributable to bad strategy are also people problems because companies that choose the right people (including advisors, consultants, and coaches) are less likely to have strategy problems. 2) The people problems were self-inflicted.
We were having trouble filling the learning event. This was stunning to us, given that the last two learning events each included C-level executives from over 100 companies. Both events were highly rated, and thus we expected to have a good following. What we had to figure out was why people were not signing up. Our combined work has spanned hundreds of companies, and we have yet to meet a company that could demonstrate that at least 50% of their employees were “A Players” – most have 25% or less. Research shows that replacing even one “B” or “C” player with an “A Player” has a big impact on a person’s business. Anyone you ask would agree. So what was the problem?
