161: The A Player Advantage – Building a Team You Would Enthusiastically Rehire with Rick Crossland
/
What percentage of your team would you enthusiastically rehire? That’s the percentage of A Players on your team. What if your entire team was made up of A Players? According to author and business coach Rick Crossland, that’s not only possible, but a necessary part of realizing your business’s highest potential. On this episode of The TalentGrow Show, Rick joins me to define what an A Player is, how we as leaders can encourage and develop A-level performance in our employees, and what we should be doing about the B and C players on our team. You’ll learn about what Rick calls the seven Cs of leadership and find out what differentiates true leaders from non-leaders. Plus, discover why Rick thinks panel interviews are the way to go when you’re looking to bring someone new onto your team. Listen and be sure to share this episode with others!
ABOUT RICK CROSSLAND:
Rick Crossland is an internationally known expert and thought leader on A Player talent. His innovative approach to developing and validating high performers—A Players, has been published in leading business sites such as Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com, Fortune.com, Recruiter.com, Columbus CEO and Leadership Insights. Author of the book, The A Player, Rick Crossland has almost 30 years’ experience in building high performance teams. In particular, he is a leading national expert in developing and recruiting teams of A Players across a wide variety of industries. Rick has brought immediate results to industries including chemical, automotive, fashion and beauty, retail, insurance, customer goods, IT, business to business and manufacturing.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
Rick explains what he means by A Player, identifying three simple definitions (5:51)
Why A Players need to reflect their company’s core values (7:46)
Halelly and Rick contrast Jack Welch’s leadership philosophy with Rick’s and discuss how to view the other 90% who aren’t in the top 10% of performers (10:03)
What can we do to become an A Player? And what can we do as leaders to encourage A-level performance on our teams? (15:16)
Hard work is the most rewarding work. Rick draws an analogy between leadership and baking (18:10)
Rick explains what he calls the seven Cs of leadership (19:35)
What differentiates a leader from a non-leader? And in a fast-moving, technologically-driven age, what does an A Player Leader look like? (23:00)
The story of a young leader who took Rick’s coaching advice and successfully applied it in his team (24:24)
Rick explains why he suggests holding panel interviews (27:38)
What’s new and exciting on Rick’s horizon? (28:33)
One specific action you can take to upgrade your leadership skills (29:26)
RESOURCES:
Get Rick’s book, The A Player: The Definitive Playbook and Guide for Employees and Leaders Who Want to Play and Perform at the Highest Level
Check out Rick’s website
Transcript:
Episode 161 Rick Crossland
Rick said, One of my best questions is, of your team right now, what percentage would you enthusiastically rehire? Most people start high. “Oh, I love my team. People are the most important assets. I would enthusiastically rehire 60 percent.” So he or she would not enthusiastically rehire 40 percent. But then as they talk, “Oh, not so fast. Maybe 50 percent. 40.” And it’s amazing how that level drops. The definitely of an A player is somebody that you would enthusiastically rehire. I actually ask that when I do reference checks for executives and it’s interesting how many people pause and are like, “Ooh, they’re a good person, but enthusiastically, hmm. Let me think about that.” That is really the precipice, that these are the people who light you up. Literally if they leave your organization, you are in tears and in therapy because they were so darn good.
Transition music playing... The announcer says, Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.
Halelly said, Hey there. Welcome back TalentGrowers. I am glad that you’re here to listen to our latest episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, the company that sponsors the TalentGrow Show so that you can have a free podcast to listen to every Tuesday morning. And this week we have Rick Crossland, who is going to talk to us about A player talent. We’re going to focus in this conversation about how to define A players, why it’s important to actually not have B and C players on your team at all, and really just make sure that everyone is A player talent. That is, in part, the interviewing and hiring process, and in great part your leadership and coaching process. So, Rick gives a lot of specifics and examples and walks you through what you need to do to create a team of A players. I hope that you find it valuable. I’d love to hear what you thought about it afterward. Without further ado, let’s listen in to my conversation with Rick Crossland.
All right TalentGrowers. I am here with Rick Crossland. He is an internationally-known expert and thought leader on A player talent. Rick is the author of the book The A Player, and he has almost 30 years experience in building high-performance teams. In particular he is a leading international expert in developing and recruiting teams of A players across a wide variety of industries. Rick has brought immediate results to industries including chemical, automotive, fashion and beauty, retail, insurance, customer goods, IT, business to business and manufacturing. I am looking forward to discussing his insights today on the show. Rick, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.
Rick said, Halelly, thank you. I can’t wait to share with your audience. I’m looking forward to this.
Halelly said, Thank you. I am likewise, and we always ask the guests before we get started, tell us about your professional journey. Where did you get started and how did you get to where you are today?
Rick said, I was a chemistry undergraduate and I was very good, better in science than in math. I was enjoying that and one day I kind of got fed up with what I was reading in the school paper and I ran for student government president and won, in the largest landslide in history, and I inherited a three-quarters of a million dollar operating budget. I think if you check, that was at the University of Delaware, that we had one of the most successful administrations and I really enjoyed just being the face of the student body. We were very active, had a lot of events, and we got a lot of people around the table and got a lot done, including I was actually on the provost selection committee as we were upgrading talent. I wish I knew what I knew then. That was really interesting. We had a locked room with all the resumes and it was a large library type room and we would go and review resumes and I would actually work with a very senior search committee. I was the only student on it, so that was cool.
I was going to be a medical doctor and I said, “I really like this leadership thing,” and it pivoted. I was going to go into the Army and be an Army doctor and I forgoed my scholarship and instead applied to Duke University for their MBA program. Because of my student government background as president, they let me in early. That led me to Ford Motor Company and that’s important because at Ford, as I progressed – I was at Ford for 13 great years – I had my own executive coach for about six to nine months. I can’t remember exactly, but it was about a six to nine month period and his name was Harry Cohen. Two things, Harry got me into the top leadership strata at my salary band, and the other thing and equally importantly, as I was working with Harry I enjoyed the coaching experience. I always thought that Harry was the best job in the world. It was seeded to me to do that. I was recruited down the Limited brands, and after a couple of years at Limited, I had the opportunity to bet on myself, which I did. I chose executive business coaching as my career. So I’ve been doing this now 12 years – actually over 30 years in total leading people – and just really love it. It was actually having a coach that inspired me to bet on myself and do this.
Halelly said, I think for every one of us, our journey is what prepares us for where we are going. So everything that you’ve done had a purposeful impact on getting you to that dream that was seeded very early on and kudos on your success and on your new book called The A Player. It got my interest piqued when you sent me a note about that and I thought, “Well, this could be something that I think the TalentGrowers will find interesting.” We’re going to talk more about how to be an A player, how to be a leader who gets more people to be A players, but we should definitely first start with definitions. What do you mean by A player?
Rick said, Absolutely. I’m happy to define that. What I find interesting is this can actually be somewhat of a controversial topic. We have some B player and C player apologists out there. It fundamentally starts with, I really believe it’s our God-given duty to be the best we can be. An A player, I have three simple definitions. One is your top 10 percent of the industry for what you do at your level, at your salary band so to speak, so different levels of the organization – this does not necessarily mean everybody is going to be the CEO. Reception can be an A player receptionist. You can be an A player custodial staff. You can be an A player director of marketing. Any role, but pound for pound, because the dollars are important, any strata you are in the industry, the talent experts would say, “Oh, yes, this person is top 10 percent of their field.” That’s definition number one.
The second one is a little simpler. It’s somebody you would enthusiastically rehire. I’ll give you kind of a little story and we might come back to this. A lot of times I’ll gain a lot of business by bellying up to the bar with a CEO and one of my best questions is, of your team right now, what percentage would you enthusiastically rehire? Most people start high. “Oh, I love my team. People are the most important assets. I would enthusiastically rehire 60 percent.” So he or she would not enthusiastically rehire 40 percent. But then as they talk, “Oh, not so fast. Maybe 50 percent. 40.” And it’s amazing how that level drops. The definitely of an A player is somebody that you would enthusiastically rehire. I actually ask that when I do reference checks for executives and it’s interesting how many people pause and are like, “Ooh, they’re a good person, but enthusiastically, hmm. Let me think about that.” That is really the precipice, that these are the people who light you up. Literally if they leave your organization, you are in tears and in therapy because they were so darn good.
And then the third and equally important is, these are people who model your core values. A quick story on that is, and I find core values is “talk is cheap and results are priceless.” Are you really walking the talk on the core values? Most organizations, by the way, their core values are way too wooly, they’re not defined enough. But we were looking at a very top of the game, one of the top IT technologies, a very expensive person, somebody who would earn about a half a million dollars a year, and we concluded two things from the interview. One, this person’s results were real, and two, he was a flaming jerk. In fact, I was at the NBA Finals that week – I meet Scotty Pippin, I meet Vince Carter, Charles Barkley bought me a drink, I meet Shaquille O’Neal. All these bonafide hall-of-famers, and this individual’s ego was bigger than all five or six of those. It was amazing. I tapped at the core values and I said, “Is this person live your core values?” And the VP of sales, who wanted to hire this person because he was a top sales person, said, “Well, it doesn’t matter, he’s going to be out in Kansas anyway. We’re not going to run into him.” Then I said, “You’re not being congruent. You can throw these core values out the window.” And the COO who was a total A player, she interjected and said, “Rick is right. We’re hypocrites if we don’t abide by our own core values.”
Halelly said, Maybe I’m jaded in thinking we all have been exposed to being on a team that has a co-worker like that, somebody who is allowed and enabled to continue working while not being aligned with the values or doing things that are out of integrity. It’s not just about what they do, but it affects other people too. It affects everyone in the organization so I agree with you completely. You should always be congruent to values.
Rick said, Exactly. I think the neat thing on core values is, your organization’s core values can be different than mine. That’s cool. That makes us unique. I’m probably tougher on my team than others – they also know that I love them – but I’m like a sports coach. I am always in their face for results. That might not be a good culture for someone else, but it sure works well at our organization and they know that. We’re very transparent up front, and the people who do work here love it and they actually help me weed out people who aren’t good here because we run a very tight ship.
Halelly said, It helps, I think, with where I want to go next in our conversation, because I know sometimes when people listen to this they say, “Is this very exclusive? Are you saying there is only room for certain types of people in our organizations?” And you just kind of opened the door to say, “No, because there are different types of organizations where people can thrive.” Because they can be in alignment. Every organization has different values and different personalities, if you will, different cultures. So you can find a place where you can personally thrive. But I do want to push back a little bit – and I hope I’m not one of those B and C player apologists here – but people love to hate Jack Welch. If you think about how he was famously a leader at GE where he put people on a bell curve. The idea is that people naturally perform at different levels and not everybody can get an A in the class. Not everybody can be an A player, but he always kind of ranked people and then got rid of the bottom. So, if you’re saying that A players are at the top 10 percent, how can you put 100 percent of people in 10 percent? The math doesn’t work out for me, so tell me more.
Rick said, Got it. Excellent. This is where the controversy comes up. We actually followed Jack’s plan at Ford, and what I ascribed to my clients is not what GE or Ford did. What Jack primarily did, infamously, and it did work for him, was he would cull the bottom 10 percent of performers. Here’s the difference – we are defining what an A is, and we have no numeric descriptions. If you qualify for an A, in other words, if I’m a university professor and I have a fair and let’s say a tough test, but I really train my team well – which in my world is coaching – I coach up and define this and my team does really well on this challenging calculus test, they all deserve their A, and they get all the rights of being an A player. Where people get it wrong is, and I see this all the time and that’s why I coined the B and C player apologists, they get their couple of stars and they thank the good Lord for their good fortune there. They feel to offset the blessing they have in the A players, they have to tolerate the Cs – and I’m going to get back to Cs, because the Cs have no business on your team – and then they’re like, my lot in life is I’m going to have the majority are going to be average. What happens is, you don’t win with average.
What we’re really building, and going back to my NBA analogy, is we’re taking the best players from the team and making an all-star team. What that means from a leadership position or perspective is, you need to be so much more clear on your expectations. I think you’d agree with me here, if we walked into the average leader on this podcast and I would take this bet and said, “Show me your positional agreement. Show me how to get an A in a position.” They probably wouldn’t have it, or they would pull out a moldy, 20-year-old position description that no one has looked at in 20 years and it’s literally brown from age. They would not know how to coach their person to the lead measures of performance that they truly want. And that’s one key factor, most leaders don’t have a clue at a fundamental level what their people should do. Sports teams do this so much better than business – in fact, I would contend that every sports team on the planet, including Little League and peewee football – is better managed than most businesses because they have definitions, they have playbooks, they have coaching and practice and that’s why they are so good, uniformly. If we really define what an A is, you’re going to get almost immediately results.
Halelly said, So define the expectations, really describe what a person should be doing to do a good job, or to meet those expectations and it sounds like you’re saying have high expectations. Don’t describe the average or the minimum that they need to do, but really the top?
Rick said, You’re describing the top. You’re defining A player performance. I believe everybody deserves to be an A player somewhere. Maybe not at my organization. I’m a tennis player. I’m an A player 3.0, which is an intermediate level tennis player. I’m not an A player 3.5 and I’m not an A player 4.0, but I am an A player where I am. Now, being a 3.0 tennis player, most people realize, doesn’t pay anything, just my own enjoyment of playing. Obviously if you’re a 5.0, you’re on the pro tour or 6.0 and they’re making millions. Here’s the thing, we let B players go, or usually they leave on their own accord. We’ll run into them at the state fair or somewhere in the mall and they are the most friendly people to us. They’re like, “You know what? Thank you for freeing up my options because I'm now truly happy with where I am and I’m doing really good. That was not a fit for me, but now I’m happy.” That is, I think, the best blessing we can give someone. People need to follow their core purpose. And if they’re not doing their core purpose at their current career or job, then there’s a misalignment and you’re not going to get that A player performance.
Halelly said, They’re going to be miserable, make you miserable, all of their teammates are going to be miserable and it’s not a good game. So as leaders, TalentGrowers are listening to you, so let’s concretize this – what are some specific things that you can suggest that they do to, I guess, first get the kind of people on their team that they need? That’s probably the recruiting or hiring, but also working with the people that are already on their team or those people they bring onto their team to help them create A player performance?
Rick said, Great question. Here’s the formula, and it starts again with making that decision that you want to do this. I can tell you this, I can guarantee the results if you do it. If you go with a team of A players, and what we’re doing fundamentally is we’re coaching up your existing team and then we’re adding talent, first is make a decision that we’re going to be a team of A players. One of the first things you do there is literally make a chart and say who are my true As, my Bs, who are my Cs, get some other senior leaders to look at that. Usually you won’t want to grade up, so you’ll need to move some of the people you thought were in your As into your Bs. Then, it’s what I tell leaders, it’s game on. A players love this stuff. The Bs and the Cs start to get kind of weak-kneed. It’s really defining that A player performance. We do it with something called an A player agreement – there’s a sample of that on my website. I refer to the book. That is a job description on steroids. We show, for three to five key thrusts of the role, what the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly expectations are, and we put as many metrics as possible on that. What the beautiful thing with that is, a lot of B players will see that for the first time and say, “Thank goodness. Somebody figured out what the role is. Now I know what to do.” And again, that comes back to leaders, because if you have wooly expectations, you’re going to get wooly results and then they tolerate this underperformance. So you use the A player agreement to define what the performance looks like, and then as a leader, the highest form of leadership recognized in the modern age is actually that of a coach – can you show me how to do that? Can you challenge me to do that? It’s not about telling, it’s about not only setting those expectations, but coaches draw up playbooks. I have proprietary knowledge, as a leader, and I’m going to show you how to get an A. If you choose not to be an A, then that’s on you, but I have As on the team and I know exactly how they got to where they are, and here’s the formula for success. I think you’d agree, most leaders fall short of that standard.
Halelly said, Yeah, for sure. It’s hard work, but hey, you want to be a leader and you want to do a good job. If you want to be an A player leader yourself, then this is more like you have to step up to produce something like this and to go through the difficult thinking process of outlining and articulating all of these specifics, because otherwise how do you expect people to know what you expect?
Rick said, Right. It’s that old osmosis. That’s where people get frustrated, because there’s poor communication. The leader has one expectation and the other person has a totally different expectation as the employee, and then the friction builds. And you touched on a very important thing – that hard work is some of the most rewarding work we do as leaders. Our job as leaders is to grow other leaders and this is hard work. It’s painstaking, but when you take the time to do it when we’re baking – which is a very good analogy here – the best way to bake is actually to weigh the ingredients. What’s the mass of the flour, the mass of the sugar. That is far more accurate than actually volumetrically, how much volume do I have? That is a more precise measurement. You uniformly get great cakes when you do it that way, because it’s that precision. Kind of the same thing with these A player agreements. I know exactly how to hit the sales target. I know how to get these tight production tolerances, because we have studied it. We have an A player agreement. We have playbooks. We have all these standards and measurements and training processes to show you how to be successful.
Halelly said, TalentGrowers know that sometimes I put on my devil’s advocate hat. It’s coming out. I don’t know why, but I keep thinking, I have a lot of shows about innovation and about uncertainty and about how things are changing in the world at such a great speed. I keep thinking to myself, if I were in a position to have to do this, in many organizations, it’s not that clear. The stuff that you do today is so different from the things I had people do six months ago because the world is changing, the customers are changing, the technology is changing. So what do you do when you feel like it’s not so clear and cut, what success looks like or how exactly to do it?
Rick said, Let me do this. I will answer the questions, so as I’m talking through this, my context is what I call the seven Cs of leadership. I’ll give you the seven Cs right now. Challenge. Part of challenge is seeing the future, and one of the things with leadership is that we’re making a better tomorrow. That is fundamental to leadership. We’re taking any situation and we’re making it better. The situation could be a pretty decent status quo, but as a leader, I don’t want the status quo. I’m always looking for continual improvement. So that’s the first one is challenge, which gets into your future.
The second one is clarity. How clear is my message? How clear is my big, hairy, audacious goal in where we’re taking the department, the company, the corporation?
The next one is credibility. Am I credible as a leader? Coming to yours, if I’m in a technical, fast-moving field, as the leader I need to be tech savvy as well. I need to be a very good consumer of information, and if I’ve just leaving that to chance with my team, I’m not being a very credible leader. Again, you sports coaches, people go to the best schools for football because they have famous coaches like Nick Sabin or in basketball Mike Krzyzewski, where they are going for a proven system. That’s credibility.
The next one is congruence. As leaders, we need to be working harder on ourselves so when people look at us, the leader is working as hard, if not harder, on themselves and their leadership confidences and everybody else. If not, any reasonable person – particularly the A players – will see right through you.
Next one, character. I can’t tell you how many times leaders tell white lies, and I can tell you that because I’m in the box with them as their coach. They’ll say one thing to one thing and they’ll say another thing to me and there is so much we can all clean up our character game. Character almost goes without saying, but we have to talk about it because every single one of us on this podcast has told a white lie in the last week. It’s just the truth of it. I don’t have the data at hand, but look it – there’s a lot on how much people lie everyday so character is super important.
Halelly said, Dan Ariely has a book about this, I think I’ll have to try to think of the title of it, but he’s a behavioral economist.
Rick said, I think the data is in a 60-minute interview, there are six lies told. Any conversation, 60 minutes, there are about six mistruths that are told. So, just takes us back to square one on how we can get better at that. That’s the fifth one.
The sixth one is courage. Do you have the courage to coach up a B player? By the way, the way we do that is, we need to get you to an A. That’s the best language I’ve come to. “Are you saying I’m a B?” Yes, I am. You are currently a B player and we replace Bs. As a leader, you need to have the courage to get better because you’re holding the organization back if not.
The last one, the seventh one, is care. Just like a sports coach, you can be amazingly demanding on somebody, if they know you care about them. And they will go to the ends of the earth, but you need to truly care. If you truly care with someone, that kind of opens up that courage, because then you can give them the honest truth. I like to say nice stands for nothing inside me cares enough. And people don’t have courage. “I can’t tell somebody that.” Why not? Then they tell them and it’s all better.
Halelly said, At least you’re being honest.
Rick said, Now, with the seven Cs of leadership under our belt, to answer your question, which is really in a fast-moving, technology-changing period, well, that’s the fundamental piece of leadership. The thing that differentiates a leader from other credible people is their ability to see the future. And to share a clear, compelling work plan on where to go. Your job as a leader, like a military General, because they’re working – even in today’s day and age – military leaders, Admirals and Generals, work with tremendous amount of uncertainty as to where the enemy is, etc. So you have to, with the information you have, as the leader, you need to coalesce all of this into a game plan. And the best leaders pull kind of like parallel processing. We’re pulling from all the best data sources, all the best minds in our organization, but the end of the day, our job as a leader is to coalesce that into a plan. Even in a case of uncertainty, the A player leader needs to be able to project the strategy to win. And that is fundamental. It doesn’t matter that the world is changing so fast. We need clear strategies, which is a big plug to get your team involved with quarterly strategic planning, which we can get into. And A players love planning. B players hate strategic planning. You want to know why?
Halelly said, Why?
Rick said, Because we hold people accountable, and the B people don’t want to be held accountable to their plans.
Halelly said, Do you have a recent or memorable story you can share with us about a change or a transformation that you’ve seen or ideally that you’ve helped make?
Rick said, Absolutely. I’m very proud of this situation. The reason is, because the talent involved is so young. This is a $100 million construction company – that’s not a small business, as you can imagine – they were going through a leadership change where the first generation was starting to turn the reigns over to the second generation, and the leader of this business is a very brilliant 38-year-old. He is brilliant because he’s so self-aware. What they did was this gentleman works harder on himself than others work on. So he is the most self-aware leader I am currently coaching. The moral of the story is, they defined what an A player was, they got everybody on the team to, in this case an annual meeting at the end of the year, they had everybody read the book. Did everybody get on board? No. Some of those people left on their own accord. They developed the A player agreements. This gentleman did a wonderful job of coaching up talent and in fact, what they’ve done is they’ve been able to grow the talent internally with exceptionally young people. I’m coaching another member in this organization who runs about $60 million of revenue. That gentleman is 29 years of age and his leadership trajectory has just been fantastic. So I like to call these guys the youth movement. The HR director, I don’t know her age actually, but I think she’s about 32, and these folks got serious, made a decision that we’re going to be A players, they invested in coaching their people both internally and in some cases I help them externally. But they have a developmental plan for folks.
Everybody wants training and all of this – all of the wisdom of the world is available, but they have packaged a lot of this into training, so these guys have actually a real competitive advantage because they can grow talent versus other construction companies. In today’s day and age, you can’t get talent off the street, so they grow it. Because of their training systems and they run their business like a sports team, they are able to bring in very junior people and literally in 18 months time, 24 months time, they’re actually in much more senior roles, punching way over their weight class. They had the courage to exit the B players and, again, just a real predominance with coaching. It all starts with that 38-year-old leader works harder on himself. When I coach this individual, he comes in with a great list of deep questions – how can I do this better? How should I think about this? They’ve really instilled a coaching mindset throughout the organization.
The other thing I would mention is, they do three-hour top-grading interviews, and they pass on B players. You can be a B player or apologist and say, “Okay, they’ll do.” They will go to the ends of the earth to bring in these A players. The executive team, we interview every candidate together. I did want to put a plug in for that. I recommend you do panel interviews, where you have your team interviewing a candidate. The reason is, you all have a common perspective, a common experience with the candidate. Here’s the thing, if they’re an A player, they’re going to love the fact that everybody had interest in them. We ask them very tough, very detailed questions about the results and then we know what we’re looking for. Our interviews aren’t just interviews, they’re a celebration of growing A players because we’re bringing more A players into the fold.
Halelly said, That sounds like it probably creates a very benevolent spiral up of performance, when you take that route?
Rick said, Absolutely. You’ve got to earn your right to be on the interview team and it becomes a flywheel, to use Jim Collins’ analogy. It’s self-perpetuating.
Halelly said, Great. Thanks for sharing that. Rick, we’re almost out of time, and I always ask my guests to share one specific action, but before we do that, what’s new and exciting on your horizon these days?
Rick said, You know, a couple of things. Two things came to mind. One is, and folks can take advantage of this, I have our first A Player University course out. This day and age, with so much being digital in terms of training, our number one thing we heard from CEOs and leaders was more accountability on the teams. So, we actually have an offer at the end of this podcast, if somebody wants to try the course, by all means. We’ve gotten really good reviews on it. So the accountability course on A Player University. The other thing we’re doing is the quarterly strategic plan, an online platform, which enables us to work with folks across the country, and it is just tremendous how well the strategic planning is going. It makes the invisible visible, and we can see people’s accountabilities.
Halelly said, Cool. All right. We’ll link to that in the show notes. What’s one specific action that the TalentGrowers can do today, tomorrow, this week, that can help them upgrade their own leadership skills?
Rick said, Excellent. Love the question. Work harder on yourself than others do. In other words, you need to be the most self-aware. We do ask, “What are your weaknesses?” in interviews. And that is a litmus test for us. I find, and listen through this analogy, if I meet a CEO unguarded and I say, “What are you working on?” The top people have lists of about 20 or 30 things that they want to do better at. That’s your top leaders. Your average leaders, “I’m okay.” They don’t have any real substance. The to people know where their kryptonite is, and they work aggressively to fix it. When your team sees you working so hard on yourself, they almost have no choice but to follow your lead.
Halelly said, It is very inspiring. Rick, thank you so much for sharing your insights today. How can people stay in touch, learn more from and about you?
Rick said, Website is APLayerAdvantage.com. For our podcast listeners, we have three offers you can take advantage of – an A player assessment, also you can get access to that A Player University accountability course I mentioned, and if you like, there’s even an option to get a free book from me.
Halelly said, Awesome. We’ll link to that. And thanks. I appreciate your time today, thank you.
Rick said, Anytime. Really enjoyed it.
Halelly said, All right TalentGrowers. I certainly think that by the fact that you are listening to this show, I believe – maybe I am just too idealistic – but I believe that you are working on developing yourself. There are people out there who do nothing to grow and you are taking time to listen to this show and I imagine others. Actually, let me know which others! They help you develop as a leader, so kudos to you on that. And what else are you doing to develop yourself as a leader? What do you want to work on? What do you need to work on? And how can I support your growth? Let me know. I would love to create more specific podcast episodes that help cater to your needs, to your growth and your development, to bring on topics and guests that are of interest to you, and certainly see if I can help you in any other way. Keep those communication lines open and let me know, and in general, I hope that you found this valuable and I thank you for taking the time to listen to today’s episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and until the next time, make today great.
The announcer says, Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.
Get my free guide, "10 Mistakes Leaders Make and How to Avoid Them" and receive my weekly newsletter full of actionable tips, links and ideas for taking your leadership and communication skills to the next level!
Don't forget to LEAVE A RATING/REVIEW ON APPLE PODCASTS/iTUNES! It’s easy to do (here’s how to do it in 4 easy steps). Thank you!!
Like the Facebook page of The TalentGrow Show!
Join the Facebook group – The TalentGrowers Community!
Intro/outro music: "Why-Y" by Esta
You Might Also Like These Posts:
Ep066: Successful culture and leadership advice from startup mentor and investor Carter Laren
100: Cultivating a Culture of Growth and Learning in the Workplace with Elliott Masie