A leader can't hire A-players without becoming one first. What counts as an A-player changes between startups and Fortune 500 companies. At Freedom Practice Coaching, the founder claimed the team was all A-players, but the speaker cut half of them in three months because the standard was different.
If you hire A-players and you're not working on yourself to be an A-player leader, those people are never going to perform or they're going to leave. That's right. How do you think about managing teams? I think there's stages and spectrums of A-players. So what's an A-player for you when you're in a startup is going to be very different than when you're in a scaling business. I remember this when I first came into Freedom Practice Coaching. I was told honestly by the founder, we have an entire team of A-players and I think we cut half of them in the first 3 months and then moved on from that. The spectrum is they were the best people that he had ever worked with. So in his mind, they were A-players. I had a different perspective coming from working for Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 50 companies, and I had a very different perspective on what A-players were. I was the most expensive person by a long shot that they had ever hired, and I was hired absolute lowest amount of money that I would possibly take to take that job. A couple of years before that, they would never have been able to hire me and I wouldn't have looked at that business. I saw the potential of where we could grow this to and had an agreement around that made me want to dig in and invest in that company and help grow it to where it is today, much further from where we are from now. With an A-player, it's not just about having the money, right? Your organization needs to match what you are saying it is going to do.
