A, B and C Players

A Players are uncomfortable being comfortable. They are driven by an unreasonable demand to reach their own potential, they measure themselves on impact, and they are suspicious of ease. The A stands for accountable. B Players focus on optics. They avoid clarity, dodge accountability and manage perception rather than create value. The B stands for busy. And a C Player? There is no such thing. Or at least there should not be. Professional sports teams have no room for them, and neither does your go-to-market team.

The question this answers for a leader: who on this team is actually producing, and where should my time go?

The mistake is spending leadership time in the wrong place. Profile a team honestly and you get three groups. A Players. B+ Players, who have the potential to be an A or are out of form. And B- Players, who do not have the potential. Most leaders spend a disproportionate amount of their week on the B- group, and the A Players, who would grow fastest with that attention, get left to get on with it. The other mistake is forgetting that A is relative to the role and subject to form. A first-year AE can be an A Player. A ten-year veteran can lose their A game for a quarter.

How I use it. I look for effort displayed as evidence. The AE with 27 open opportunities, all yellow or red, defending each one with “I’m working it hard”, is the B-Player tell. It is not laziness. It is activity standing in for outcomes. The work is legible now, so busyness hides nothing. I coach to the outcome, I remove the barriers that slow A Players down, and I am honest with myself that the barrier is sometimes a B- Player.