Your Team Can’t Outgrow You: How to Hire and Lead A-Players | Rick Crossland

Send us Fan MailWhat if the person preventing your company from building an A-player team is the CEO?In this episode, Peter Boolkah speaks with author and leadership coach Rick Crossland about hiring high performers, defining what excellent performance actually looks like and confronting the founder behaviours that keep a business stuck.Rick argues that everybody deserves to be an A-player somewhere—but not necessarily inside your organisation. The leader’s responsibility is to place people in roles where their experience, abilities, values and motivation align with what the company needs.Peter and Rick explore what happens when an entrepreneurial business scales through improvised hiring, accumulates a disjointed team and eventually reaches the limits of its founder’s leadership.You’ll discover:Why an A-player must produce results and live the organisation’s valuesHow people can be talented but still be wrong for a particular roleWhy past results are usually more useful than hypothetical interview answersHow charismatic candidates can disguise a weak performance recordWhy the CEO must model the standards expected from everyone elseWhat happens when founders reject candid feedbackHow role agreements create clarity, measurement and accountabilityWhy tolerating weak performance affects the entire teamHow to coach capable employees towards a higher standardWhy every joint expectation should be specific and measurableHow founders can become the ceiling on their own company’s growthThe central lesson is straightforward: you cannot build a high-performance company around vague expectations, inconsistent hiring and a leader who believes the rules apply only to everyone else.This conversation was recorded in 2017. References to the contemporary employment market, millennials and making 2018 “the year of the A-player” reflect that period.Learn more about Rick Crossland: https://aplayeradvantage.comLearn more about Peter Boolkah: https://www.boolkah.comCONNECT WITH PETER BOOLKAHWebsite: https://www.boolkah.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boolkahInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/pboolkah/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BoolkahX: https://twitter.com/boolkahABOUT PETER BOOLKAHPeter Boolkah is a business coach, author and speaker who has spent more than 20 years helping business owners build stronger, more valuable businesses that do not depend on them for everything.He is the creator of The Hamster Wheel Trap® and author of Your Business Sucks: Build a Business That Works Without Destroying Your Life.Peter works with founders and leadership teams on the issues that ultimately determine whether a business creates freedom or becomes another job: leadership, founder dependency, people, profit, execution, scaling, exit readiness and enterprise value.His approach is direct, practical and built around one simple question:Do you own the business, or does the business own you?Learn more at https://www.boolkah.com