This past weekend my son and I traveled to New Hampshire for a college lacrosse recruiting showcase. High school lacrosse players from around the country gathered to show their stuff to some forty college lacrosse coaches. The stakes don’t get much higher for a high school player. Scholarships and bragging rights are all on the line. This is the big game and they have to “bring it”.
My son played on a team composed of many different high schools. Not only had his team never played together, they had never met each other until twenty minutes before the first game. Yet once the whistle blew you would have thought they had grown up with each other. It was exciting and amazing to watch each player move to their usual position. They instinctively knew what the other players were going to do. Within the first few minutes of the game the ball moved down the field and their first goal was scored. They went on to win.
This happened because they were all ‘A’ players. Although they had never met, never played together, never practiced as a unit, they were successful. ‘A’ players just know what they have to do to achieve their objective. They have a passion for their role on the team and they are perfectly matched for the job they must do. When this combination exists it becomes a winning formula.
Businesses can use this same formula as well. Put an ‘A’ level employee in the role he or she was made to fill and get out of their way. Productivity and bottom line results will soar if this idea becomes a strategic focus. Sadly almost 50% of workers in the US are in the wrong job. Most a ‘C’ players who were placed in ‘A’ player jobs our out of expediency or through ineffective hiring processes.
Employee productivity, effectiveness, and bottom line impact is more important now than ever before. Businesses have to learn to do more with less. Over the next 15 years the labor force will start to contract and the “war for talent” will rage once again. With fewer people to choose from, businesses must be more strategic in how the attract, hire, and retain key contributors. Not doing so means eroded profitability and the dulling of your competitive edge. It is just too expensive to put ‘C’ or ‘B’ level players in key contributor roles.
The first place to start is redefining how a business attracts these ‘A’ level employees. If your recruiting plan is to cut and paste a job description into an online job board then you’ve already lost the game. These people don’t respond to online job ads, especially the dull and uninspiring ads most companies post. You have to learn what makes an ‘A’ player tick, find out where they gather and who they associate with, and communicate your job as being tailor made for them. These employees are looking for new challenges, they want to learn new things, and they want an environment that allows them to grow and excel.
Do you want winning players on your team? Then start by identifying what that player looks like and start attracting them to your organization. If you make this a strategic part of your business plan you’ll start scoring goals a lot earlier in your game.
Posted by Richard Yadon 
Have you ever experienced a day of 115 degree temperatures? That’s how I spend the past weekend while at a national lacrosse tournament in Towson, MD. The combined heat and humidity created a heat index in excess of 115 degrees! To say it was miserable would be an understatement. It’s a wonder more players didn’t collapse on the field.
