Jasmine Star 00:00:00  My mentor once told me that a players only hire other A players and B players hire C players so they can keep their jobs. So that's why I only want eight players to hire within our team. And that's not to say that good leaders get it right all the time. No, not at all. Welcome back to The Jasmine Star Show, a place where we discuss business mindset and today, understanding A, B and C players in your business. Now I get it. Even if you don't have a team, please do not sleep on this episode because understanding these dynamics are going to prepare you for future leadership roles, and it's also going to help you recognize the traits in yourself and others. And you already know that understanding people and their motivators is very important to all aspects of business. So we're going to make sure that we highlight that before we dive into this banger of an episode. I would love to read some kind words for Mrs. Luke, who left a five star review on the podcast and wrote, I recently found Jasmine's show about two and a half weeks ago and I've already listened to 20 of her podcasts because I can't get enough.

Jasmine Star 00:00:58  Thank you for putting yourself and your story out there for all of us to benefit from. I'm excited to keep learning and listening. Well, Mrs. Luke, thank you 20 times over for listening and taking action on what you've learned. Now y'all, if you haven't left a show review, please, this is your cue. I would love to show you out and read your name and your words in a future episode. And as a pointer and a reminder, this is what helps us attract and get other amazing guests to be on the show. So help me help us do this thing thing together. Now, before we dive into the show, we're going to cover the characteristics of A, B, and C players. The key differences between each type of these players on your team, and how you can identify A, B, and C players in your organization. We're also going to focus on training possibilities for each type. Now this is a very important part, and I'm going to share some examples of legendary leaders and their philosophies around this topic, which I thought was fascinating as I was researching and preparing for this episode.

Jasmine Star 00:01:57  I'm going to pause, and I'm going to let you know that I have been doing a lot of research about team building, and what I wanted to do was go and use the research against my personal experience. And we all have different businesses and we're all different business owners, and we're going to approach things very differently. But what I thought I wanted to do with this episode is take a lot of the research, take a lot of my personal experience, and I also am consulting businesses and talk about their experiences with their team, because I think that the more we know about how individually and collectively we approach building a team and training team members, the better off we're going to be. Now, before we dive in, I have to admit that what I'm about to share it might ruffle a few feathers, but it's a short story that reflects the reality of building teams. I write a book called Radical Candor, and in it, Kim Scott describes two types of people in teams the superstar, the person who wants to quickly climb the ladder in the organization, and the rockstar, the person who is driven and talented but wants to own their corner of the organization and they want to thrive there.

Jasmine Star 00:02:57  Now, both of these team members, they're needed and they're amazing. But I want to share a twist on the analogy. A friend had a conversation with her mentor, and he told her, when it comes to building teams, there are unicorns and there are donkeys. Every leader wants to hire a unicorn, but it's just not realistic for 99% of companies. Now knowing this, he told my friend, quote, build process is so good that even donkeys can win races, end quote. Statistically, teams are mostly comprised of donkeys. Now, her mentor said that you want to aim for about an 80% ratio of strong donkeys to 20% of unicorns. So how can you win races with donkeys? You have to have unparalleled processes. Yes, a A phenomenal operating system can ensure your team is keeping up with the unicorns. So we're going to stop here for a second. When I first heard his quote about wanting to hire a unicorn, but mostly what we work with are donkeys. It rubbed me the wrong way and I was like a donkeys.

Jasmine Star 00:04:00  But we have to go back and think about what donkeys were. Donkeys are work animals. They're fantastic at doing things with strength and with consistency. So before you think through it, the way that I had thought it like it was a negative thing, no, donkeys are powerful work mechanisms. And so as we move on with the definition of a donkey, how might you define a unicorn? So I want you to think of it this way. A unicorn generates revenue for the business, and the donkey keeps the revenue stream flowing. A unicorn is somebody who thinks in systems they can create a system from scratch. They build it out. They manage it on their own, with no one having to follow up on deadlines or accountability. They're self-starters. And here's the best part. Unicorns can train a donkey to take over the system because the system is that strong. The process should be so good that most people can win using that system. And if a person can't win using a perfect system, then it's a great sign that they're probably not a good fit for your business.

Jasmine Star 00:05:02  And that's totally okay. When our team suspects that someone might not be a good fit for the business. We don't fire anybody without warning. We're very open about our performance improvement plans like otherwise. You're gonna hear me say like a pip pip performance improvement plan. And this is where a person knows exactly what they need to do to have a turnaround in their performance, to stay on the team. Now, on that note, let's talk about characteristics of a player's people. We're going to be calling unicorns B players. We're gonna be talking donkeys in C players. People who are on a pip starting with A players a players are your top performers. They are the ones who are consistently exceeding expectations. They take initiative and they're the ones who are driving results. They're highly motivated and they display strong leadership qualities. They go above and beyond their job descriptions. They're not just skilled in their roles. And then I'm going to tell you this is very important. They have a strong commitment to the company's goals and to the company's values.

Jasmine Star 00:05:55  The interest only in joy. They thrive in challenges, and they're often seen as role models within the team. Now, if you're trying to figure out whether somebody on your team is an A player, which I'm sure you'll know. But just in case, here are three ways that you can tell somebody is an A player on your team. Number one A players embrace feedback point blank. They ask for it. They make it a goal to turn their weaknesses into strengths. They're able to put emotion aside for the sake of growth and improvement. A player, unicorns, they want to be challenged and they want to be pushed to their highest potential. They want to continuously improve and use the company to reach their goals like they have goals so big that their big goals fit right underneath your big goals as a company. Now the second way you can tell if somebody isn't a player is if they praise other team members publicly and they don't need credit for every little thing. Because here's the deal and I want you to hear this.

Jasmine Star 00:06:48  Eight players don't see competition within their team, period. They want everybody to perform well because their number one priority is the success of the company. They want to work with a players, even if it takes the spotlight off them. When surrounded by other high achievers, a players will continually grow and they'll stay motivated. In fact, they become frustrated if they feel like other people aren't pulling their weight or if they're consistently required to compensate or follow up, or keep accountable for underperforming team members. If you're a self-proclaimed nerd like me, you might have heard Steve Jobs talk about the A player philosophy. Now, I've seen this a couple times on Instagram, and Steve Jobs was well known for his philosophy of only hiring a players and how he believed in surrounding himself with top talent. He famously said, quote, A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. End quote. Now, you might not agree, and that's totally okay. I want you to keep listening because there are other great leaders who don't necessarily agree with Steve Jobs philosophy.

Jasmine Star 00:07:48  And I'm going to share more in a minute so we can see different perspectives. But my mentor once told me that a players only hire other A players, and B players hire C players so they can keep their jobs. So that's why I only want eight players to hire within our team. And that's not to say that good leaders get it right all the time. No, not at all. One area I believe leaders maybe go wrong is when it comes to eight players is to leave unicorns where they're at instead of advancing them in the company because they're so efficient and they're so reliable in their current roles. And this could be a problem for many reasons. First, a players thrive on challenges and opportunities for growth. When they're left in the same role for too long. Like they'll probably become bored. They'll become disengaged. They need new challenges to continue developing their skills because those challenges are actually drive them. Secondly, refusing or maybe pausing advancing as a player, it can lead to a frustration on their part.

Jasmine Star 00:08:42  And then lastly, when a players are not given the opportunity to advance or grow, it sends a message to the entire team about the organization's career growth opportunities. It can really demotivate other employees like who want to grow in the organization. But if they look at the A player and the A player is not advancing well, what does it mean for them? They might think, well, if so-and-so didn't get the promotion and she goes always above and beyond at everything she does, then I definitely don't stand a chance. Okay. And that kind of de motivation is detrimental for your unicorns. So what happens when you have a team member who thinks they're in a player, but you think they're a B player? Well, this is likely resulting from an undefined definition of what an A player looks like in your company. Because the definition of an A player is different at different companies, you must take the time to inform the team of the business objectives, tell them how they can be considered a unicorn and what they need to do to move into that category.

Jasmine Star 00:09:39  Remember my friend's mentor who described a unicorn versus a donkey? Well, his definition of a unicorn was perfectly aligned with my business definition, too. Now, it might not be the same for you, but in my business, unicorns are systems creators. Unicorns create revenue. They build processes so good they don't miss deadlines. They don't need help staying on track. And they have a system that is so good that it's teachable to a donkey. I've always maintained that if somebody on the team wants a promotion, they need to work themselves out of their job and into the next one. But if they haven't mastered and dominated their processes and systems on their own, well, how could they be moved up without historical proof that they can and do build airtight systems on their own that drive revenue? So what was the key takeaway here? You want to nurture and advance your players, but define what being an A player means at your organization. And this totally doesn't mean that a B player on your team isn't an A player somewhere else.

Jasmine Star 00:10:39  Not at all. It depends entirely on the organization's objectives and goals. Okay, now let's move on to the characteristics of B players. B players man their solid. They're reliable employees who meet expectations but don't necessarily exceed them. Now don't get me wrong, they have the potential to become a players and with the right leadership and development, they can definitely become them. So I'm going to pause. I think the greatest room for growth for me as a leader is to invest in training of B players. Having a clear way to say this is how we've defined being an A player. And if you don't know how to create systems or you don't have a desire to create systems, no problem. We can teach you or you can stay in this domain, own it, build a really great opportunity for work life balance. Have a lot of incentives tied to how good you are at what you're doing, but it's going to be very clear that we're in alignment, that it's either you don't have the capacity to build systems to move into an a player status, or you don't have the desire.

Jasmine Star 00:11:43  Both are cool with me, but we just have to be on the same page. Now, I'm going to tell you, when I was researching and preparing for this recording, I found an article from Harvard Business Review and I'm going to link it there in the show notes. But I want to quote something that I found quote. According to Harvard Business School professor Thomas DeLong, he says B players may have the skills to be a players, but they often choose their roles for lifestyle reasons, prioritizing work life balance over constant career advancement, I think that's very interesting. I'm going to finish off his quote, quote, managers who bring up the best in be players are tapping into wonderful and often well hidden resources. End quote. Okay. He believes and I do too, that organizations and individuals are better when everybody's on the same page. So reading this, it got me thinking. Before someone can categorize a person on their team as a player, I wanted to ask yourself if they're set up to be an A player in your organization.

Jasmine Star 00:12:39  Now, I'm going to admit that this is something that I am working on right now. I'm revisiting our org chart, the values I'm defining, what it means to be an A player on the team. And I need to clearly convey that to the team again and again. So how do you do this? Well, you would start by asking yourself, does this employee have the resources and the tools that they need to excel in their role? And the number two. Have I provided sufficient training and development opportunities to help them grow? And number three, is this employee's workload reasonable or are they overwhelmed with too many tasks? And number four, have I created an environment where they feel safe to take a player ownership and innovate? Or are they micromanaged? Okay, by finding out these answers to these questions, you're going to know if your players have the support and environment that they need to potentially become those glorious unicorns that we want. Now that we've outlined A players and B players, let's get into characteristics of C players, people who might be in or on their way to a performance review.

Jasmine Star 00:13:38  C players are the ones who often struggle to meet expectations, but the absolute worst part is they usually maybe don't have the desire to improve. Or maybe they do and they just don't know how. They might also require a little bit more supervision and support to complete the tasks. And in most cases, they're not so focused on the results. And they were saying, I just want to be here to get my job done, and I want to do it as fast as I can. Now see, players have the ability to turn into A or B players. They absolutely do. But they can only do this if they want to do it. So I'm going to talk about an experience here where I had hired an executive assistant and I believe and I talked to my mentor and I talked to the recruiter whether or not I had clearly defined the roles and the expectations. And for all intents and purposes, I had I had to the best of my ability. Now, what we had asked the executive assistant to do took about 20 hours a week.

Jasmine Star 00:14:35  It was taking me about 20 hours a week. It was taking somebody else on our team who was taking those responsibilities from me about 20 hours a week. Now we thought, if I can do it, if somebody else can do it. We thought we had a pretty good idea. Now, if it ended up taking a new person, I don't know, 25 hours a week. Well, there was some flexibility because within the first 30 days I needed to know was it a fit? And here's what I knew in the first 30 days of hiring this executive assistant, she wasn't manifesting the clear desire to say, I want to get better. And when we had approached her, hey, at the end of 30 days, what we're seeing is that this is X, Y, and Z, and what we need to be improved for the next 30 days is going to be these things. So we put her on a pep, a performance review, and we said, here are the clear responsibilities and here are the times associated that we think you should be using as a benchmark to get it done and to the best of her ability.

Jasmine Star 00:15:33  She couldn't or wouldn't follow through. And so we have had multiple conversations and we just said the kindest thing that we can do, moving from day 60 to day 90 would say, okay, so in day 30 we said, this is what we need to see improved by day 60. It wasn't met by day 60, but because we're committed to your growth and commitment, we're going to actually carefully follow along and see where you're getting stuck, specifically to see if we can help navigate that. And even with us asking and saying, please make us available to what it is you're doing, it didn't happen. And so at the end of the 90 days, it wasn't a shock to anybody that we did not extend a role for employment at that time. So if you're hearing this and you know, deep down you have a teammate who needs to start a performance review, please take action. I have waited way too long with so many people because I was like, it's uncomfortable. I don't know what to do.

Jasmine Star 00:16:32  Like I'm nervous, have that conversation. There's no such thing as a bad or a hard conversation. It's just a conversation. And if you approach it with humility and the desire to help that person be better on your team, then that person is going to feel it. I think a lot of times for me, it was tempting to think, oh, they just need more time or they're just going to get it soon enough. But if you're not comfortable with how they're performing right now, I can promise you they're showing you the best they have. It's not going to get better. They're showing the best thing that they can in that first 30 days. I'm just going to come out and say it's not a them thing. It's a you thing. It's a me thing. You need to tell them what your clear expectations are and clearly define how that they're going to adhere to them. Now here are the four steps to follow when it comes to creating a performance review. If you've never done one, I wish you know, when I go back in my career, I'm like, I wish I had this framework, so I'm just sharing what I wish I had the first time I had to venture into a performance review.

Jasmine Star 00:17:27  And I have to tell you, what comes up is like, I get really nervous. What comes up was like, who am I to do this? What comes up is I wonder what they're going to think about me. That was me then, and now I just have completely come to understand that it is my objective, and it is your objective to build and protect your business according to your standards. It doesn't mean that they're not talented, that they're not good, that they're not capable. It is. They're going to find the perfect fit for them elsewhere. But for you, as CEO of your business, you must choose what is best for the organization. So step one is to get to the underlying issue behind their performance. Get to the root cause of their performance issues. Is that a lack of skills help them get skills. Is it lack of motivation? Well, if it's lack of motivation, probably not going to be helpful because people have to be intrinsically motivated. Is it something else? Now I had an opportunity to move somebody into a Pip, and when I took the time to actually understand what was going on in her situation, she had said, you know what? I haven't been as available for work.

Jasmine Star 00:18:34  I haven't been paying attention. I've been missing deadlines because she had become recently a caretaker for her mom. It was a very private matter. If I didn't take the time to sit and have a conversation with her one on one, for her to let me know that her mom got sick and her mom moved in with her, and her taking care of her mom was impacting the amount of work that she did. I don't know if I would have ever learned that. So me listening to the story and saying, hey, we're here to help and we're here to support, we will absolutely be flexible with what you need us to be flexible on. So her PYP turned into less about performance and less about time management. What could we do to help this? What can we take things to take off her plate? How long might it take for her to get used to her being at home with her mom? That was a very different pip than, hey, you're not doing a job. It was just, hey, there's a lot on your plate.

Jasmine Star 00:19:19  How do we sit here and support that? That became a very different performance review. Step number two is to provide clear and direct feedback and expectations. Now, to do this, you're going to want to explain how achieving those results, achieving those things aligns with the organizational objectives. Now this is going to be a test. If I tell somebody like hey, you need to do X, y, and Z because it aligns with our goal and then they become defensive or argumentative, or maybe they're just unwilling to change. That has happened before. Like it is likely time to part ways that energy transfer between people. You get a very clear read at where they're at. Now, I was working with a former manager of customer success here at Social Curator, and this person had continuously asked to hire more people. And before we hired, I asked the manager to create a system on how the team handled tickets and the average response time. I asked this person, hey, maybe you can change the system so that we're optimizing for turnaround time, not optimizing for specific team members on cost to do that.

Jasmine Star 00:20:22  So here's what was happening. Tickets were coming in. They were being assigned to a specific Customer Success team member, but not everybody on our team was working full time. So if somebody came in for, let's just say like a six hour shift and they didn't respond within that six hours to the second follow up, the person who was emailing had to wait a full 24 hours to get a response, and I thought to myself, this is silly. So we're asking for more people to work part time. But if we just change the system so that we said we have a standard way of responding to tickets and they're not specific to each team member, well, we wouldn't have to hire more people. We would just have to train everybody on how to jump into other people's conversations. So I had asked her, please create a system that trains the team on tickets and not personalities. And because I asked her to create a system and it wasn't in alignment to what she wanted to do, and it wasn't in alignment to how she wanted to run that department, she put in her notice a month later.

Jasmine Star 00:21:15  I was bummed. I really loved this person, but this person had a very distinct way of doing it. And I, as the protector and an organizational structure person on this team who saw a very clear way to build a system for optimized productivity and managing costs, which is my job. It wasn't in alignment. Now, it doesn't mean that this person wasn't in alignment for somebody else's organization who wanted to handle it that way and had a budget to hire out a team, but it wasn't in alignment here. We became out of alignment. She made a decision and it was the good call. Now, on the flip side of this, if you feel like an employee is receptive, excited to grow, and grateful for this feedback that shows they're committed to their role and they care about the company's goals and vision as a whole. And if that's the case, the feedback will motivate them and they're going to be excited to implement your feedback on their next assignment or project. Now I want to pause here.

Jasmine Star 00:22:13  Let's just play out the situation differently for that manager who put in her notice and she left the organization. What would have it looked like if she had said, hey, I don't necessarily agree that your approach is best, but I'm willing to try and test it. If she had tried and tested and we ended up with the same results, I would have stood down. I would have said, well, we have proof that the test didn't work. So now we get to create a new test or go back to your other way of doing it and hiring more people. All I needed from the manager was to say, I'm open and willing to try something else, to get a different data set so that we can actually make an organizational decision. Now, as a quick review, step one was when somebody is on a performance review, understand the underlying issue. Step two is providing clear feedback and expectations. Now on to step three. You want to offer tailored support and development. Now, I know this seems time consuming and quite honestly, you feel like man.

Jasmine Star 00:23:07  Do I have to handhold? But this is the only way you're going to be able to see whether you're going to get a team member up to speed, you're going to see, oh, this is where they're getting tripped up, but more importantly, they're going to see that you care about their improvement. When a team member is in Pip, their direct report is available at any time in slack. They can get a meeting with their manager. That's a priority. They can even have a weekly check in if they want. In fact, sometimes we request the weekly check in. Now, if we want people to succeed and we do, then we're going to show up for them, and we're going to need to ensure that we did everything we could to support their outlined expectations. We don't want them feeling like they're like, set up to sink. Now, the last step of the framework is to hold them accountable. Employees want to be held accountable. Accountability demonstrates your commitment to their growth and development, and it reinforces those expectations for continued growth and advancement on the team.

Jasmine Star 00:24:03  So now that you understand A, B, and C players, you can write the rules and procedures for your organization. And once you've done this, you clearly communicate it with your team. And then you outline how they when you outline how they advance. and then you share how together you're going to be growing the business. I want to say thank you for listening to The Jasmine Star Show. If you would be so kind to rate and leave a review for the show, it would mean the world to me. I look forward to reading every single one of them. The team and I celebrate. And it's because of you that we get to do this. And I want you to hear directly from me. Thank you so much.