Rabid Husker Fan, Husband, Father and CEO at Strategy. We empower our clients through strategic marketing and technology solutions.
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Warriors, thoroughbreds, champions, A-plus team members. These are terms that people often use for the best employees in an organization. Dave Ramsey refers to them as thoroughbreds vs. donkeys. Some refer to them as A-players vs. B- or C-players.
I’ve been reading Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. In Chapter One, he talks about being on a panel at MIT on human achievement and mental toughness. A well-known and respected professor tells the audience that every person has a ceiling that they are genetically limited by. David Goggins strongly disagrees and tells this story:
“Heraclitus, a philosopher born in the Persian Empire back in the fifth century BC, had it right when he wrote about men on the battlefield. ‘Out of every one hundred men,’ he wrote, ‘ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior …”
Goggins goes on to say — and I’m paraphrasing here — that everyone can be a warrior if they have the desire, the grit and the perseverance to be one. We are only limited by our own minds and the stories that we tell ourselves. We only achieve about 40% of our potential. We can do much more than we imagine.
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You may have heard that one great employee is worth three good employees. The theory is to hire fewer people, make sure they are great employees and pay them really well. You can do this because a great employee will outproduce three good ones, so you get a three-to-one return. In addition, a bad employee can cost you up to 30% of their first-year salary.
You have great employees, and you have good employees. You’ve had bad ones too. My question for you today is: What are you doing to make your good employees great? Do you have good employees who want to be great? You can’t make someone desire to be great — however, you can provide all the tools, encouragement, systems, processes and training to help them achieve greatness. Are you calling them to that greatness?
One system we’ve implemented at Strategy to help cultivate great employees includes a very robust interview process. Candidates go through seven different interviews and are required to create a video to share with our teams on why they are excited to join the team. Our goal is to fire 99% of employees before they are hired. The interview process includes virtual meetings, team meetings, testings, onsite experiences, dinners and more.
Once a team member is hired, they go through an extensive employee experience to help them adjust to our culture and company mission. They are teamed with a mentor who helps them learn the Strategy way for the first 90 days. We meet monthly with each new employee and then move into quarterly check-ins, which all staff participates in. During the quarterly check-in, we go over their goals and remove any roadblocks to help them achieve those goals in addition to talking about culture and any improvements that they or we can make to make us better.
We strive to make sure that our staff is working in their strengths and in their working genius and often adjust job descriptions to better align with their passions, skills and abilities.
We also provide ongoing leadership training in monthly all-staff meetings, where we go over company numbers and goals with training on our values or company initiatives to assure everyone is on the same page in the middle of our crazy work schedules. We regularly celebrate birthdays, company anniversaries and success stories where we recognize staff and culture heroes.
We have an extensive library of leadership and personal growth books that we encourage staff to read and are rewarded for providing book reports. Some of our teams have book clubs where they work through books together and discuss them to help keep everyone on the same page and give them shared experiences.
As leaders, we have the challenge of leading and “doing” at the same time. Our priority as leaders must be to lead, not just do. Lead your staff to greatness and know when someone is not going to get there. Delegate and train your employees to do your tasks. It is more important for a leader to lead, coach, mentor and delegate than to do the actual work. It is critical to only do the work that only you can do — and quickly train others to do that work.
You can’t lead when you’re bogged down in the weeds of the work. If you develop your staff to be great, not just good, it will come back to you in exponential rewards. If you have staff who are not great, then replace them with great employees who will allow you to get more work done, have more joy in the work, give you margin to lead and allow the entire team to thrive. Because of the lack of drama, the increase in productivity, the increase in innovation, etc., profit margins will increase, and thus pay rates will increase. If you have a staff member who is an anchor, dragging down the team, it’d be better to let the “good” or “bad” employees go and redistribute their salary to the great ones.
What do you need to give up today so you can lead better tomorrow? What do you need to do, starting now, to grow your staff to greatness? What do you need to do to become even better than you are today? You cannot lead someone to a place you have not been, you can only lead to your own ceiling. You have great or good teams; they can be better. Don’t settle for the current reality.
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Author: Jason Wilson, Forbes Councils Member
