Resource
Grade your team honestly. Then know what to do about it.
Every founder I work with can name their best person and their worst one. Almost none of them can say what to do about the sixty percent in the middle, which is where nearly all of the available value sits. This is the model I use to sort that out.
What a normal team actually looks like
These are the proportions I see in owner-led businesses. They are a mirror, not a quota. Jack Welch ran a version of this at GE that forced the bottom 10 percent out every year, and both GE and Microsoft eventually abandoned that practice. This is not that. The numbers are here so you have something to check your gut against, because most founders believe they have more A players than they do, and the honest ones usually find their B row is far wider than they thought.
The four levels
The Game Changer
1-2% of a team- What drives them
- Legacy and scale. They want to build something that outlasts the job.
- How they think
- Thinks in years, not quarters. Sees where a market is going before it gets there, and is comfortable being the only person in the room who believes it.
- What you see
- Invents the playbook. Opens a line of business that did not exist, and pulls other strong people in behind them.
- What to do about it
- You almost certainly do not have one, and at your stage you probably cannot hire one. If you do have one, your only job is to keep them and get out of the way. That means a real stake in the outcome, not a bonus.
The Owner
15-20% of a team- What drives them
- Pressure. Hard problems are the reward, not the cost.
- How they think
- Owns the outcome. If it misses, it is theirs to fix, and you hear about it from them before you hear about it from anyone else.
- What you see
- Runs at the mess. Fixes things without being asked, and quietly raises the standard of everyone working near them.
- What to do about it
- Protect them from admin, widen their scope, and pay them properly. The fastest way to lose an A player is to make them wait for permission.
The Operator
60-70% of a team- What drives them
- Recognition and safety. They want to do well, and to be seen doing well.
- How they think
- Competent inside clear rules. Protects their standing, which means avoiding the risk of being visibly wrong.
- What you see
- Executes well when the path is defined. Stalls when it is not, and waits for direction rather than inventing it.
- What to do about it
- This is where your leverage is, and it is the row almost everybody ignores. Give them one outcome to own, one standard to hit, and one person to check in with. A meaningful share move up inside a year.
The Passenger
5-10% of a team- What drives them
- Comfort. The job is a routine to be protected.
- How they think
- Avoids conflict, new tools, and anything that could go wrong with their name on it.
- What you see
- Misses targets, explains which part was not theirs, and slows down everyone downstream of them.
- What to do about it
- First find out whether they are a C or a B in a bad seat, because from the outside those look identical. Give one clear standard and a date. If nothing moves, move them out. Carrying a C is a tax your A players pay.
Most advice tells you to cut your C players. The money is in your B players.
Cutting is the easy half, and it is the half every consultant leads with because it is dramatic and it is fast. It is also the half that costs you the most, because you are a founder-led business and you cannot replace two thirds of your team. You have to build with the people you have.
The useful finding is that most B players are undertrained, not underpowered. They are waiting for a defined path because nobody ever handed them an outcome and let them own it. Give them one, hold a standard, and a real share of them move up. Developing someone into an A player is faster and cheaper than hiring one, and the person you develop stays.
I have done this directly. One person went from no technical skill to a working junior automation developer in eight weeks, and by week seven was showing the initiative that defines an A player: spotting a problem before anyone raised it and moving on it without being asked. That is the whole mechanism, and it is repeatable.
Exiting a C player is real, and sometimes necessary. It is the last move, not the first.
How to spot each one in a conversation
You do not need an assessment for this. You need to listen to how someone describes work that went wrong. These are the tells I use, in interviews and in weekly check-ins with people already on the team.
The Game Changer
Answers a question about this quarter by talking about where the industry is going, and has already tested something against it.
The Owner
Tells you the bad news first, unprompted, and arrives with the fix already half built. Asks what the outcome is, not what the task is.
The Operator
Asks what the process is, and asks it more than once. Describes work in terms of what they completed rather than what changed.
The Passenger
Explains a miss in terms of other people or other departments, and volunteers no version of the story where they could have moved it.
Where this model breaks
Any framework that sorts people is dangerous in the wrong hands, so here is where mine stops being useful.
- A B player under a bad manager looks exactly like a C player. Before you grade anyone, check whether they have ever actually been given an outcome to own.
- This grades behaviour inside one context, not a person's worth. People who were C players somewhere else become A players in the right seat, and the reverse happens just as often.
- S players are rare enough that most founders will never hire one, and chasing one is usually a way to avoid developing the team you already have.
- A level is a snapshot, not a diagnosis. If you grade someone today and never look again, you have built a label rather than a plan.
The A, B, and C labels are common language in the field. The S tier, the percentages, and the read on what actually moves someone between levels are mine, from the businesses I have worked inside.
Want to do this to your own team?
Building your team is a third of what I actually do inside a business. If you want the version where I am in it with you, start with a call. If you are not there yet, the community is free and the same thinking happens out loud in it.