Your Growth Isn’t Stalled. Your Team’s Potential Is Untapped and It’s Costing You.
You don’t need a better strategy. You need your people operating at their full potential.
Most founders realize this too late.
Here's an uncomfortable truth... Most people are average.
Most people were conditioned to follow systems rather than unlock their full potential.
The school system was designed during the industrial age to create submissive, average people who would just do the status quo, not be exceptional, because they actually needed them as workers for their companies.
Corporations further this conditioning by largely focusing on people's weaknesses rather than their strengths.
This is why most people are dissatisfied, disengaged, and looking for their purpose. Because most of their human potential is untapped.
Looking at the Pareto principle, the 80 / 20 rule, 20% makes up the majority of the results.
So 20% of a person's strong traits create 80% of their output, but if they spend 80% of their time focused on fixing the 20%, they disconnect from what makes them exceptional and never tap into their full potential.
This is their sweet spot, and it's where I feel corporate often gets it wrong because they're always focusing on a person's weaknesses. Which is why personality tests are so popular.
People are looking for their identities in something outside of themselves instead of tapping into the sleeping giant that's within them. Waiting to be awakened and unleashed into the world.
Over the past 15 years, Gallup has reported that disengaged workers account for nearly 80% of the workforce, meaning 20% of the workforce is creating 80% of the results.
The 20% of the people produce 80% of the results.
These are A-players; people who have tapped into their potential, passions, and are in a relentless pursuit of achievement.
B-players are average, come to work, check boxes, play safe, and go home.
C-players are petty. They're not living up to their potential, and they feel threatened by anyone who is living up to theirs.
Depending on the makeup of your teams across these three types of players, it's a clear indicator of the results and challenges you will face.
If you have mostly A players, you're a fast-moving organization that scales quickly; you fail often; you're competitive; your people take risks; and your wins are significant.
If you have a team of mostly B-players, you're steadily moving at a pace to maintain the status quo. You're not innovative, and you will not survive the digital age.
Mostly C-player businesses are non-existent. But if you have C players on your leadership team, they will cannibalize your A players, leading to high turnover, disengagement, and quiet quitting.
C-players make everyone the worst version of themselves. And here’s the hard truth: this isn’t a people problem. It’s a leadership decision.
The Unexplored Possibility of Unlocking Your Team's Potential
You don’t scale a business by managing people. You scale it by building around the right ones.
In the past 25 years, I've seen firsthand what happens when you unlock someone's potential.
In the Coast Guard, I often inherited underutilized teams. I didn't say underperforming. I said underutilized.
With a demographic of 0.1%, I needed to win BIGGER to get the awards that I desired. Which meant I had to learn to inspire my teams to give me their maximum effort so we could win together.
It was glorious, and the favorite part of my work.
Most of my teams retired at the senior levels, and my last group, who were all planning to lead by 2013, are now at the senior levels and in elite leadership positions.
I wrote a book about creating high-performing teams in 2017, but never published it.
However, I shared certain excerpts with my clients in Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore, the US, and so on.
My client at Unilever used the insight to develop a new team that created a division that grew to $6 billion in five years.
Over the past 10 years, as an executive coach to 300 leaders from 20 countries and 17 nationalities in the US.
I have seen firsthand what happens when you shift a person's perspective from the conditioning of their past to reveal the hidden potential waiting to be unleashed.
This subsequently led to $421 million in salary raises and business revenue. The money is just a way to measure someone shifting into their highest potential.
Systems are Interconnected and Not Separate
Is it possible to create a team of mostly A players using your existing teams?
Absolutely!! But it takes work.
While at Harvard Business School, I was stunned to learn that someone else would have been responsible for managing the culture of my team.
And that external people came in to help manage change. I couldn't believe Change Management was a profession.
For SMEs, it's essential to understand how to get the most from their leaders and teams.
For Leaders Personally: Health and Well-Being - Self-Improvement - Personal Growth - Relationships - Leadership Development
These are all important components for leaders, and they can't be split into silos or compartmentalized.
For Leaders Professionally: Team Performance - Loyalty - Culture - Change Management - Processes - Team Development - Communication - Difficult Conversations
These are all important components for leaders to understand, and they can't be split into silos.
A failure point in one creates a cascade of failures in others.
Exceptional leaders working with broken systems (lack of talent, processes, culture, change management, service delivery, etc.) are ineffective.
Having a perfect system with broken leaders (burnout, lack of training, unbalanced, lack of executive presence, not self-aware, etc) is ineffective.
I'm EXCITED to Share A-Player Insight
I have so much to share, and I hope you are excited to join me on this journey of becoming the highest and best version of yourself.
An A-player leader who creates A-player teams.
I've done it so many times... That it's predictable and expected. See a few of my results HERE.
I know FOR SURE we have countless gifts and talents we can bring to the world to make it a better, brighter place. Even amid chaos, opportunities abound.
Getting the best from yourself and your teams will significantly increase your effectiveness and profitability and allow you to create more meaning in the world.
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