Determine Whether You Have Stars (or Not)

Like every school in North America at the time, my junior high school had a simple method of determining who played for the school sports teams and who didn’t. We formed teams in phys ed class; went out to the baseball diamond, basketball court, hockey rink, or volleyball court; and tried our hand at playing the various games. The most talented kids couldn’t help but see that they were gifted in their sport and worked their hardest to be the best of the best in the school. These kids became the backbone of the school’s competitive teams.

Among the kids with average levels of talent, some were motivated to try out for the school teams and work their hardest to get better and raise their level of play. Others belonging to the middle pack were content to play at an intramural level, just for the fun of the sport.

Then there were the 10 percent of kids who made the top 90 percent possible: the truly terrible athletes. I have good intel on this group, as I served as their poster boy throughout my school years. Membership requirements of this group included (but were not limited to):

• Proudly wearing a yellow “participant” ribbon, given to everyone with any level of brain function who decided to show up at the annual track meet.

• Being hit in the head with various balls due to distractions (such as watching clouds or fantasizing about which superhero would have the best chance of overpowering Superman [answer: none]).

• Enduring the leaden stares of team members when we were assigned to their team in gym class.

Ultimately, the job of members of this group was to sit in the stands and cheer—and find something else to do that we were good at.

Today, this method is viewed as cruel by the crowd that awards a “winner” ribbon to everyone—whether the participant came in first or 10th—but I disagree. Not being a winner in sports actually helped me to focus on what I was great at and had passion for, and that was music. I saved my money to see many (now-dead) jazz greats in concert, competed at a regional and national level, and acquired a skill that’s still a joy to me.

We’re all good at different things. If a person isn’t the right fit in his current role, that’s likely a sign that there is a job he will be great at—somewhere else.

For a variety of reasons, if you’re like most leaders, you tend to grade your people higher than they really are. It may be because you’re afraid to see them hurt because they’re such nice people, or that you see yourself as a nice person who wouldn’t dream of causing pain to another. Maybe it’s because assigning a lower grade would force you to have some hard, maybe unpleasant, conversations resulting in you not being liked anymore.

We’ll deal head-on with some of these fears in Chapter 4, but for now, suffice it to say that not being honest with yourself about the performance of each of your team members doesn’t help you, doesn’t help them, and ensures that the performance of the whole team will suffer.

The 4 Essential Questions

Let’s try completing a simple, honest assessment of each of your key people. Write down the names of these main players, and ask yourself the following four questions about each one.

1. If you could do it all over again, would you rehire her?

2. Does he take your stress away?

3. How would you feel if she quit?

4. What if everyone in your business was just like him?

1. If You Could Do It All Over Again, Would You Rehire Her?

Knowing what you know now, if you could go back in time to when you made your initial hiring decision, would you rehire her and be excited to do so? In this thought experiment, you get to do a complete do-over. There are no consequences to deal with. You don’t have to review the history of why you made the decision you did at the time. You don’t have to think through questions of replacing the person or face the prospect of potentially painful conversations in the future. Just cut through the clutter and answer the question: would you rehire if you could do it over?

The mark of a star is that you answer with a resounding YES! to this question every time.

2. Does He Take Your Stress Away?

With that person in the role, does your stress evaporate? Do you go home relaxed in the knowledge that everything’s covered now that he’s on the job, or do you worry about what he’s doing? Do you double-check his work before it goes out? Do you create systems for him so his mistakes will be caught (by you or someone else)?

You know that you’re carrying someone else’s stress when you go home and think about issues he should be thinking about. The reason you hired him in the first place, and continue to pay him now, is so he will do his job and you won’t have to think about it anymore. Why should you pay someone to do a job and still carry part of the load and stress of that job? It just doesn’t make sense.

Have you been accused of being a poor delegator? Maybe the issue isn’t your skill in delegation, but the calibre of person you are choosing. I find that even natural micro-managers find it much easier to let go when they’re relinquishing an important task to someone who has shown a history of caring about the job as much as they do and of getting results. A reluctance to delegate often reflects on your experience: you’ve been burned in the past by delegating to the wrong person.

When a star is in charge, you relax; you’re confident that he will take care of it.

3. How Would You Feel if She Quit?

Would you feel delighted, relieved, ambivalent, or devastated?

When a weak performer leaves a company, she often fantasizes about how no one will be able to get along without her. She pictures the faces of her crestfallen customers who hear the news of her departure. She smirks with satisfaction as she envisions former colleagues awash with work they didn’t even know existed and have no idea how to complete. She believes that soon people throughout the organization will realize with dismay how wrong they were not to appreciate her indispensable contribution to the company.

What she doesn’t know is that usually these people are dancing with delight at her departure. Rather than dismay, colleagues feel a tremendous sense of relief and even of joy after a low performer leaves. Customers and coworkers are only too happy not to have to deal with the behaviours that made her an underperformer in the first place. There’s certainly no sorrow on display.

On the other hand, when a star leaves, her leaders and coworkers feel devastated—maybe even sick. They may go into a funk, wondering how they’ll go on without her. They regain equilibrium in time, but there are no feelings of ambivalence about her departure, and certainly no relief or delight.

Many times I’ve received a call at an odd hour from a CEO who has just found out that a key star player is leaving. Often the CEO is stunned. There may be long silences on the phone as he slowly absorbs the multi-faceted consequences he will have to face due to losing his star.

One of the hallmarks of a star is that no one wants her to leave.

4. What if Everyone in Your Business Was Just Like Him?

Does he bring the average up or down?

If everyone on the team played at his level, would the team be upgraded or downgraded? A below-average player will obviously bring down the performance of the entire team.

As a teenager, I had a summer job that involved erecting metal Quonset huts on farmers’ yards throughout small towns in Alberta. These huts were made up of semi-circular bands of corrugated steel secured together with thousands, maybe millions, of bolts. My job was to wait for my partner on the outside of the Quonset hut to insert a bolt into the pre-drilled hole of the galvanized steel band, thread a nut onto the bolt, and then hold it in place with a wrench while he tightened it with an air-powered drill. We performed this maneuver thousands of times each day. My partner and I didn’t find this career very rewarding, and we weren’t very good at it, either. We regularly fumbled with and dropped the nuts and bolts, and made endless trips up and down ladders to retrieve them. We were not the super-stars of the Quonset hut–building crew.

As the days wore on, however, one of the two-man teams grew so efficient at this operation that they would beat the rest of us by two, or even three, times. They raced up and down the ladders, firing bolts into the steel bands with military precision and zeal. They were positive and eager, and seemed to love the work. Their passion was a complete mystery to me at the time. This summer job was defined by a bare-bones existence: eating every meal at the jobsite, sleeping on garage floors by night, and tightening thousands of bolts by day. This didn’t precisely match my self-image as an urban sophisticate. But looking back on it now, I wonder what the boss thought about my two-man team, what the stars thought about the non-stars, or how many Quonset huts the entire crew could have built if we all shared the same skills and drive as those top performers.

If everyone on your team is a star, your business will rock and your life will be bliss. So why aren’t you bending all your focus and effort to attract and keep the stars?

Separating the Great From the Not-as-Great

As we’ve seen, building a great team is the most important job of the leader. Here’s what great looks like compared to not-as-great:

Great Employees	Not-as-Great Employees
Are punctual	“Try” to be on time
Get involved	Issue orders and expect people to obey
Make great hires and fix bad hires when hiring mistakes are made	Build weak teams of non-stars
Are honest	Cut corners and push integrity boundaries
Look for challenge/opportunity	Look for a job
Work with passion	Lack drive and do the “same old, same old”
Learn from their mistakes	Make lots of mistakes and don’t learn much
Stay until the job is done	Make excuses and delegate back to you
Steadily improve their skillset	Plateau and stay there
Regularly hit their targets	Are “almost there” on a regular basis
Work well with others	Stir up drama; engage in turf wars
Focus on solutions	Explain why things can’t be done
Figure out tough situations	Face challenges, make excuses, and give up

And here’s the real kicker: Ironically, stars often earn nearly the same as non-stars. This is true in any profession. When you choose a family physician, consider that 50 percent of all physicians graduated in the bottom half of their class. (Assuming that 100 percent of medical students have graduated from a given class, it follows that 50 percent of them would have had to be in the bottom half of the class, right?) They all charge the same amount of money for their services, but they’re not all created equal. This is also true of lawyers, purchasers, CEOs, electricians, mechanics, operations managers, barbers, sales managers, and retail clerks. Some are amazing at what they do, and some aren’t. And they usually earn about the same amount of money.

This established, why not make a commitment—right now—to attract the very best employees for your company? It probably won’t cost you more!

The 10 Sure Signs of a Star

Regardless of salary or role, the stars on your team are bound to have some things in common:

1. Maturity.

2. Passion.

3. Drive.

4. Integrity.

5. Reliability.

6. Positivity.

7. Run with a star crowd.

8. Bloom where they’ve been planted.

9. Track record of success.

10. Respected by colleagues.

1. Maturity

Maturity is the ability to see things from someone else’s perspective. A mature person is a joy to be around. He doesn’t bring drama to the workplace. He can be objective about his areas of strength. He owns his mistakes. And he can see things not just from his perspective, but from the perspective of other people as well.

Immature people see problems from their perspective only, and often have strong opinions about anyone who doesn’t bring immediate benefit to them. In their minds, people who come into conflict with them become “bad” people, and they are quick to pass on their judgments to others. How a person sees the world tells you a great deal about them.

As a young salesman, I dealt with a customer who was a very difficult person. When a phone call came in from him, my heart sank and I steeled myself to the unpleasant task of talking with him for the next 10 or 15 minutes.

He owned a business, and had a very low opinion of everyone around him. His wife (and both during and after his marriage, his girlfriend) was not up to the job of pleasing him as he deserved. Everyone who he did business with (including me) was constantly trying to cheat him. Worst of all, in his mind, were his employees, some of whom were family members. According to him, they were forever trying to steal time, product, and cash. He was a huge energy drain and tiresome to be around.

After one of his anti-employee rants, I finally asked, “Do you realize that you’re describing precisely how I feel about you? You, too, are forever trying to get every last nickel out of us [as his supplier] by faking quality issues, submitting bogus warranty claims, and demanding free product and free use of our technician’s time. So, believe me, I know exactly how you feel. Could it be that you’re training your employees to act like you do?” He surprised me by laughing nervously, looking at his shoes, walking away, and being more circumspect with how he spoke to me after that.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”

2. Passion

All stars have passion for what they do. They care about their customers, and they care about the company. Passion doesn’t necessarily look the same for everyone. Some people are demonstrative and enthusiastic, whereas others are quiet and determined. But for stars, the passion shines through over time.

Some people excel in high-profile positions. The spotlight naturally gravitates to them; they get lots of attention, and that’s fine. But often there are quiet, unassuming stars if you take the time to look.

I once worked with a multi-national company that nominated, and then selected by vote, its Most Valuable Player of the Year. Each year the award went to one of the top brass, or to an outstanding salesperson who was well-known and had “star power.”

One year they were brainstorming about nominees, and, out of the blue, Jackie’s name was thrown into the discussion. Jackie was a bookkeeper who had been with the company for...nobody really knew how long. She was part of the woodwork. Furthermore, she had an outstanding attitude, was uplifting to her colleagues, and did her job faithfully, well, and without complaint. She was considerate to the people around her, showing practical displays of kindness and love. She was positive and polite, and cared deeply about the company.

Jackie was also timid as a mouse and hardly said a word. Though she was a force for good on the team, unquestionably lifting the average, she didn’t spend a lot of time with her colleagues. She ate her lunch at her desk and went home directly after work, avoiding situations that might draw attention to herself. She was nothing like the well-known, star-power people who had won in the past. Yet Jackie was recognized as being a true star by her coworkers, who chose her in a landslide after she was nominated by the executive team.

People in any role can be stars, and passion looks different for different people.

3. Drive

Stars care about seeing things completed. They don’t give up, but push to see the job done well. They don’t need you to kick-start them. They can do that on their own. They need your advice and encouragement and mentorship, but not your motivation; that’s intrinsic to who they are.

If you find yourself thinking up schemes to motivate a person to do the basic jobs that he is already paid to do, something is amiss. Bonuses should be paid for behavior that’s above and beyond what the basic job requires. A wage isn’t a “showing up bonus” that must then be supplemented to get day-to-day work done.

4. Integrity

Although every star wants to win, a true star knows where the boundaries are. He doesn’t cut corners with customers. He doesn’t do shady side deals. He doesn’t quietly take product home for his own use. You never wonder if he can be trusted with important information or even with cash. He has integrity.

I’ve seen strong performers passed over for promotion for simple things that they might not have noticed or thought about, like stealing time from the company by taking breaks that were too long or taking home left-over “defective” product. Integrity matters.

I once worked for a company that employed a top-tier salesperson. He was very good at moving product, and was beloved by his customers and (grudgingly) admired by his colleagues. He outsold them all by a wide margin. However, if his customers had known how he spoke about them when they weren’t there, they may not have been quite as thrilled with his behavior.

Inside the office he would regale his small circle of young hero-worshippers with tales of how he had duped customers and prospects into deals that were great for him and for the company, but were not ideal for them in the long run. He would tell “white lies” to customers on the phone about missed delivery dates or reasons for quality issues.

Though he was viewed as a valuable player, he wasn’t trusted or respected, and when management considered people to promote, he was quickly eliminated from the list despite being talented, smart, and driven.

5. Reliability

A star is someone who can be counted on to do what she says she’d do. You don’t wonder if your star is going to forget to wake up and open the store in the morning when it’s her responsibility. You don’t wake up with a start in the middle of the night wondering if she remembered to make that important call. She is reliable; if she said she will do it, she’ll get it done.

Her reliability takes your stress away. It’s pretty tough to live with someone whom you can’t count on.

6. Positivity

Stars all have positive attitudes. I’m not talking about whether they’re cheerful in the morning (they may be), but about whether or not they have an attitude that says, “We’ll solve this.” They look for solutions and move every situation forward in a positive way. I’ve conducted many hiring interviews, and throughout a process that is quite involved and takes a fair amount of time, I’m always looking for this one quality above all others.

Non-stars come up against obstacles and shrink back from them. They have all sorts of reasons for doing so, but at the end of the day their tummy hurts and they have to go home. Stars encounter walls and figure out ways to climb, dig under, go around, or blast though them.

Positivity is expressed not in big smiles, but in resourcefulness. Positive people look at a problem, accept it, and start looking for a solution.

7. Run With a Star Crowd

It’s rare to find a star who regularly hangs out with non-stars. Typically, stars gather other stars around them, both at home and at work. If your so-called star is regularly hanging out with your toxic jerk, you should be suspicious. Part of the reason that stars are stars is that their “herd” is comprised of stars, too. We all become an average of the five people closest to us.

Excellence often comes in pockets. In grade school, the great athletes join the same herd, as do the great students, the great artists and actors, the great musicians, the great mechanics, and the great comics. Failure also comes in pockets. The terrible students, the partiers, the drug users, and the criminals hang out together, too. Things don’t change much when we grow up.

As the Bible says, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17 NIV). Whether you’re being sharpened or dulled all depends on what herd you choose to be part of.

8. Bloom Where They’ve Been Planted

A great way to identify a star is to look for a person who is blooming where he’s been planted. If he’s doing a great job where he is, and you would rehire him in a second if you had to do it all over again, you’ve got yourself a star.

That said, there are two types of stars: Some are great at their current job (they’re blooming where they’ve been planted) and have the ability to move up in the organization and take on more. Others are great at what they do and should stay in their role permanently. They occupy what I call a “legacy” position.

Just because your star isn’t promotable doesn’t mean he can’t claim star status. Those who are promotable show a desire for more, and clearly have the skill, leadership ability, and intelligence to get there. Both kinds are stars. The problem comes when people in legacy positions get promoted beyond their level of ability. In one stroke, you’ve lost a star and gained a non-star. This isn’t a win.

I once had a meeting with a middle-aged man who was a gifted mechanic. He loved what he did, but felt that his career should have more forward momentum. With the help of his wife, he had drawn up a document detailing why he should be considered as a candidate to lead his large team of mechanics. His reasons were that he had been at the company for a long time, was the right age, and could fix every piece of equipment on the worksite.

After he made his case, I asked, “When you come home from work and you’ve had a great day, what were you doing that day?” He responded that his best days were when he was covered in grease, solving a complex mechanical problem that required a creative solution. So then I asked, “How about when you’ve had a draining day and gone home exhausted? What were you doing on that day?” He replied that draining days were the ones when he had to deal with customers or with interpersonal conflicts with other team members.

The job that he (or maybe his wife) thought he should have was one that incorporated all the elements that comprised a terrible day for him. Promoting him into a leadership position would clearly not have been a win—for him or for the company.

This person was in a great legacy role. He was brilliant at what he did. He was energized by his job, and he got better at it every day.

9. Track Record of Success

This is one of the surest signs of a star. When we’re young, we bounce around and try a few things before we find our place in the world. That involves some bumps and scrapes, and sometimes means that we have gaps in our resume, or places that we tried that didn’t work out. Student life, for instance, is transient, and student resumes may include multiple jobs.

Down times are golden opportunities for companies to rid themselves of non-stars. When sales are slow and someone has to go, the non-star goes first. For this reason, stars don’t display a pattern of being laid off or “restructured,” or of finding themselves in positions they have to leave because they couldn’t find a way to overcome the obstacles in their way and make a success of things.

Though these things can happen to anyone—even stars—a resume dominated by these sorts of characteristics should be a red flag to you. More often, stars win everywhere they’ve been and are pulled from job to job without ever handing out a resume or seeking new work. When you’re great, people all around you take note, and want to pull you out of your current job so that you can work for them.

10. Respected by Colleagues

Stars are transparent people who always show their true colors. They say what they believe to be true, and don’t put on different masks depending on the situation they’re in or the people they’re with.

Whereas it’s hard to fool your lateral colleagues, and virtually impossible to fool your direct reports, it’s almost child’s play to pull the wool over the eyes of the boss. This happens all the time; it’s one of the great games that goes on in business. Everyone has something to gain (or lose) from the boss, so non-stars may engage in the dark arts of spin and flattery when the boss is around. Stars, however, avoid this type of deceit and, in doing so, earn the respect of their colleagues.

I was once a part of a good team that had a mis-hire forcibly injected into it by the boss, who met the man by chance on a plane. After only a few days, the mis-hire was both disliked and disrespected by his colleagues and subordinates, but because his core competence was spinning to and flattering the boss, he remained.

One day, out of the blue in a management meeting, to the amazement and disgust of his colleagues, the mis-hire publicly presented the boss with a trophy. It was 3 feet high and topped with a winged woman whose arms were held aloft in victory. On the base of the trophy was the boss’s name emblazoned under the title “MVP.” He then gave a speech about how great the boss was, elaborating on his real and imagined virtues for an extended time. The craziest thing about this bizarre situation was that the boss bought it, waxing eloquent about finding someone who finally understood the business! Only after the outcry from the rank and file became impossible to ignore was the flatterer finally dismissed.

People Action Steps

• Make a list of every key person on your team. Ask the four questions about each one, and answer them honestly.

• Make a commitment to yourself that you will be able to answer “yes” to each of the four questions within 18 months.

In Summary

You can discover whether or not you have stars on your team by asking four simple questions about each one:

1. If you could do it all over again, would you rehire her?

2. Does he take your stress away?

3. How would you feel if she quit?

4. What if everyone in the organization was just like him?

In addition, all stars have certain attitudes in common, regardless of their profession: maturity, passion, drive, integrity, reliability, and positivity. Stars also run with a star crowd, bloom where they’ve been planted, have a track record of success, and earn the respect of their colleagues.