Attracting and retaining talent is essential to scaling your business successfully. This is especially true for your “A” Players. Let’s continue visiting with our friend Frank.
Frank was sitting in his office feeling great about his team and the company in general. “I know I’ve been doing a great job for the company, and I sure appreciate all the appreciation and resources that I get to take the whole company to a higher level of success.”
Derek Newton wrote a book a while back entitled “Feed Your Eagles.” It was about how to build a high-performing sales team, and it had a huge impact on my thinking. One of the major tenets of the book was that a leader will have greater success by spending more time and money on supporting their “A” Players to take the company to the next level of success than on trying to turn “B” and “C” Players into “A” players.
Leaders sometimes lose sight of the fact that they have limited resources (time and money) to achieve their goals. While caring about your followers is an important part of leadership success, it’s also important to keep in mind that a leader in a business setting is held accountable primarily for achieving financial results.
To add more detail and context to the discussion, there are two basic types of coaching. If a team member has the basic skills and passion for the role, and you’re teaching them technical skills, then you can get a good ROI for the time and money spent. Where leaders can go wrong is when they try to improve the performance of someone who doesn’t have those basic skills and passion for the role in the first place, i.e., lack of role fit.
Feeding your eagles, however, will always provide a great ROI. It’s a classic case of a win-win relationship in which both parties flourish. Then you can watch your team fly ever higher, my friend.
Don’t be a stranger. (770) 993-1129, tdockery@TheResolveFirm.com
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