The Talent Evaluation Meeting

The meeting that hardly ever happens in organizations but would make the biggest single difference in how organizations coached, developed and improved their teams is to sit down once a quarter as a leadership team after you have graded everyone on your team and discuss the talent of the organization. And it's not just a process of you saying, hey, I've got, you know, this is my A player percentage. It is important to know our A player percentage as I've talked about in other videos, but It's going through sometimes, you know, all of your key roles and then if your organization is small enough, go through every person on your team, explain why you graded them the way that you did, and then get feedback from your peers on the leadership team. And then commit to what you are going to do next to help that person get to an A-player level.

And if they can't get to an A-player level, sometimes you have to make other decisions. So the key to this meeting is that you as leaders walk away committing to actions to improve the talent of your team, either through coaching, addition or subtraction. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to subtract. And what happens in that scenario is we grapple with situations that we couldn't previously articulate if we do it right.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail around how the grading is done, but yes, we're going to grade. Some people are going to argue, oh, we don't want to grade, you know, or nope, we have to grade or we do not grapple and grow. It's ether. If we aren't able to say, hey, this is where this person is, here's what they're struggling, and this results in their performance being an A, a B, or a C.

And A's, they live the core values often, they hit KPI driven goal. B's will live the core values pretty effectively. They're not as productive as they need to be. C's will neither live the core values nor be productive.

And there's more detail on that in other areas, but we need to go through that scenario as leaders and then have our managers go through that on our teams, go through that with us. But just that scenario of sitting down as leadership team members, being able to say, Hey, here is the current A player percentage on my team or the number of A players on my team. And here's what I'm committing to grow it to over the next year by taking the following actions. I'm going to grow these team members.

We unfortunately have to move on from the C player that's dragging the team down, and we're going to add one or two additional A players. By using the correct hiring process. This is the meeting that never happens. And as a result of that, organizations do not grapple with the single biggest and most important resource they have, which is having the right people in the right seats.

So if you're on a leadership team, start insisting that you want to sit down and look at company talent quarterly as a group. I've been on leadership teams that don't do that, by the way. Super dysfunctional. When leaders say, Hey, I'm not going to share my scores with everybody else.

That's mine. No, it's not. It is the purview of the leadership. To know the talent of the organization and be able to hold each other accountable to make positive changes to the teams that we have.

So leaders, CEOs, insist that you grade company talent quarterly so that you can succeed consistently.