No substitute for a higher percentage of A-players, The CEO has only one tool & Turn the Ship Around

19 June 2022 Newsletter

Management is about getting people to do something for you; leadership is about getting people to do something for themselves.
Monty Moran, former co-CEO Chipoltle

Hope you’re Thriving!

It’s the end of the financial year here in Australia, which means lots of planning and budgeting. Also, it means I’ve been pretty busy! Let’s jump into it.

There’s no substitute for a higher percentage of A-players

Something stood out when working with a team this week that I’ve worked with for nine years. The single most significant impact on their success has been the number of A-players in the leadership team.

Let me be clear; an A player is defined as a person who is in the top ten percent of available candidates at the pay rate you offer. They typically do the work of 2-3 people and solve problems by themselves.

So for this team, as I worked with them and we reflected on the leadership team we started with in 2013, the secret to their success was the people in the room. The leader had successfully hired A players, one by one, into every seat. Not only had that transformed the leadership team, but the culture, the company, and the results are now profoundly different.

It made me reflect on other teams I work with; what’s been the secret for them? Or why are they still struggling? And sure enough, as Jim Collins said, you’ve got to have the right people on the bus, doing the right things, the right way.
If the people on your leadership team aren’t A players, as I’ve defined above, then perhaps it’s time you took action to make that the case. It could be costing you more than you think.

Hustle

Over the past couple of years, I’ve only recommended a couple of movies – The Queens Gambit and Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

This week, I’ve found another you might enjoy.

Hustle is a coming-of-age story set in the world of NBA basketball. Now, if you’re not into sports movies, it’s OK; this movie is much more about how coaches invest in people and help them realise their potential. It stars Adam Sandler, the slapstick comedy guy, but the film was much better than I anticipated.

Sure, the plot is predictable, but I think you will enjoy it.

Check out the 2-minute preview here Hustle

Turn the Ship Around

How does a book become timeless? How does it stick around, where people continue to read and talk about it, rather than disappear?
In March, I re-read the book Turn the Ship Around and I have noticed just how many people were talking about it or reading it in the past months.

This isn’t because I prompted them to or raised it but of their own volition. In any case, perhaps I’ve heard 20 people talk about it. Personally, I don’t love it when sports or military people try to translate what they do into business, but this book seems to permeate quite well. In fact, USA Today called it one of the top 12 best business books of all time.

Here’s the synopsis:

“Turn the Ship Around! is the true story of how the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy’s traditional leader-follower approach. Struggling against his own instincts to take control, he instead achieved the vastly more powerful model of giving control.

Before long, each member of Marquet’s crew became a leader and assumed responsibility for everything he did, from clerical tasks to crucial combat decisions. The crew became fully engaged, contributing their full intellectual capacity every day, and the Santa Fe started winning awards and promoting a highly disproportionate number of officers to submarine command.

No matter your business or position, you can apply Marquet’s radical guidelines to turn your own ship around. The payoff: a workplace where everyone around you is taking responsibility for their actions, where people are healthier and happier, where everyone is a leader.”

Check out the book here: Turn The Ship Around

How many COVID infections will you have in your lifetime? There’s probably a limit.

Here’s the article that has sat with me and those I’ve shared it with for days afterwards. I know; life’s back to normal. The pandemic has passed. We don’t want to think about it anymore.

Why write about it?

We don’t know what we don’t know.

Consider this quote from the article, and read the article if you’re interested.

“How many SARS-CoV-2 infections can an organism sustain? People don’t get the flu 2 or 3 times a year, and if they did, that would probably also be bad. But getting a thing that kills your T cells seems not infinitely scalable, right?”

Read the article here: The COVID Event Horizon

This week on The Growth Whisperers podcast

The CEO has only one tool

We know that a carpenter or a nurse has many tools to use in their profession, but a CEO has only one tool. That one tool is meetings, and is the only mechanism that CEOs can use to get things done. So, if you’re a leader, it’s essential that you master meetings, the only tool that’s at your disposal.

We talk about how to become masterful at meetings, how to prepare, how to host and how to run meetings.

Episode 114 – The Growth Whisperers

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Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles