The Definitive Guide to A Players

/ā plāər/
Noun
Also spelled A-Player

1. Someone in the top 10% of their profession, industry-wide.
2. A person on your team whom you would enthusiastically rehire.
3. One of a group of employees at an enterprise who drive all the profitability and growth.
4. A person of high integrity who delivers on commitments.
5. An instant-impact player and highly intelligent self-starter.
6. The employee that every organization covets.

A Player Synonyms: awesome employee, impact player, top performer, high performer, rock star, all-star, superstar, team player

A Players are top-performing employees who consistently rank in the top 10% of available talent for their job and compensation level. A Players are more than just high achievers—they’re impact players who fully embody and model the company’s core values. An A Player’s reputation precedes them. They consistently exceed performance expectations, create tangible business impact, and act as force multipliers for organizational growth, culture, and profitability. They’re all-around successful people.

In most organizations, a small group of high performers drive the majority of results. Hiring and retaining A Players isn’t a luxury—it’s a strategic necessity. A Players proactively solve problems, elevate the performance of those around them, and accelerate execution​.

One of the key reasons A Players drive greater profitability is simple: You get better results with fewer, better people. A Players are typically 2–5 times more productive than B Players and, often, cost the company no more.

• Would you enthusiastically rehire this person today?
• If they left tomorrow, would you be crushed, or quietly relieved and ready to upgrade?

They’re likely an A Player if you would be devastated by their departure. If not, and you would instead be grateful for an opportunity to upgrade the talent in the job, then the individual is likely a B Player.

In business, as in sports, greatness isn’t random; it’s engineered. Yet for decades, conventional wisdom has lulled leaders into believing they can win with a team lacking A Players. They hire employees who are competent and reliable, but fundamentally average. This belief is a trap. The truth is that elite organizations don’t settle for a few A Players—they stack the deck with them. Like the iconic 1992 U.S. Olympic Dream Team, they build rosters where excellence is expected at every position.

Influenced by outdated management theory and passive hiring practices, many companies unknowingly tolerate a Gaussian distribution of talent: a small cluster of A Players on the right tail, a mass of B Players in the middle, and a drag of C Players on the left. But high-performing organizations that implement Scaling Up principles flip this model. As my colleague and fellow Scaling Up coach Dominic Monkhouse insightfully observes, these elite companies exhibit a Power Law distribution—where value creation is driven by a majority of A Players.  These companies don’t get lucky with their roster. They curate A Players with exceptional ability, coach them to perfection, and refuse to compromise. As a result, they enjoy 2–5x the productivity from the same payroll as their average competition.

The Definitive Guide to A Players lays out the thinking behind that transformation. It’s a reminder that your job as a leader is to challenge the inherited assumptions that average is acceptable, that competent is enough, and that great teams emerge by chance. By defining what A Players truly are—and understanding the rigor required to build a team composed of them—you can create an organization where performance is consistent, culture is elevated, and results are driven by design, not default.

Allowing B and C Players to remain on your team creates organizational drag and major risks to your business:

• Increased Need for Oversight: Managers must spend disproportionate time supervising B and C Players, instead of leading and scaling the business with a team of highly motivated A Players at their sides.

• Lower Overall Accountability: Tolerating mediocrity forces top performers to compensate for others’ weaknesses.

• Risk to the Entire Team: It’s immoral to imperil the jobs and well-being of A Player employees by protecting the reputation of underperformers.

• Unfair to B and C Players Themselves: Keeping individuals in jobs where they’re failing denies them the chance to grow and succeed elsewhere as A Players.

• Holding People Back: By failing to address their performance gaps, you rob B and C Players of the opportunity to succeed in roles better suited to their strengths and abilities.

The real danger of B and C Players isn’t just their underperformance—it’s that they slowly dull your standards, numb your leaders, and erode your company’s true potential. Over time, you tolerate mediocrity, excellence fades, and you lose your grip on reality. Left unchecked, this hidden decay can cost your business its culture, competitiveness, and future.

In contrast, companies that scale refuse to tolerate mediocrity. They don’t just craft strong strategies—they hire elite A Player rosters that execute with precision, passion, and relentless accountability. A Players raise standards, sharpen focus, and strengthen culture, creating the momentum you need to outpace competitors.

Organizations that excel at building high-performance teams consistently:

• Recruit with rigor to attract and hire true A Players who live the company’s mission and deliver results. They’re lifelong learners who treat their role as a fulfillment of their purpose and not just a job.
• Develop A Players through ongoing coaching to maximize their impact, ability, growth, and retention.
• Build clear playbooks that define how success looks in each job, enabling accountability, consistency, and scalability.
• Coach B and C Players up or out to protect the employees’ performance, culture, and values from dilution.

Here’s a quick visual summary:

Hiring, developing, and protecting A Players is the highest leverage action you can take as a leader. Building a team of A Players is your job. It ensures faster growth, a stronger culture, and greater business valuation.

If you’re serious about increasing the profitability, value, and enjoyment you derive from your business, there’s no higher-return initiative than building a team made entirely of A Players—and yes, we mean 100%.

While many business leaders dismiss this as unrealistic, the truth is the opposite: Building a 100% A Player team isn’t just possible—it’s essential. In today’s competitive landscape, businesses that settle for anything less handicap their performance, their culture, and ultimately, their enterprise value. It’s how you run your company with the precision of a Swiss watch, unlock its full potential, and command the strategic valuation it deserves.

In building a world-class organization, no single metric is more critical or more predictive of success than the quality of your people. As Jim Collins, one of the most respected authorities on leadership and organizational excellence, reminds us in Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, there’s one number that matters above all others. It’s not money, not profitability, and not even market share. It’s this:

“And when you have your weekly, monthly, or quarterly management meetings, what is the number one, first-priority metric you look at?”

…there’s one metric that towers above all others, one metric to track with obsession, one metric which the greatness of the entire enterprise hinges…”

“And what is that One Metric?”  

“The percentage of key seats on the bus filled with the right people for those seats.”

—Jim Collins, Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0

At A Player Advantage, LLC, our Certified Scaling Up practice is built around a simple but powerful Brand Promise: 100% A Players. This isn’t just an aspirational statement; it’s an achievable and measurable standard.

While we advocate for reaching 100%, our experience shows that the transformation begins even earlier. When your organization has achieved 80% A Players, both your profitability and the happiness you experience in running your business start to rise exponentially.

The gains are real, immediate, and compounding. Push further—to 90% and ultimately 100%—and your business doesn’t just perform better: it becomes more valuable, more scalable, and far more enjoyable to lead.

Simply put: Every step closer to 100% A Players dramatically improves both your bottom line and your quality of life as a leader.

The next graphic shows this powerful, proven causality, which is stronger than a correlation. When you upgrade your team’s talent, you don’t just hope for better outcomes; you create them. Profitability, culture, scalability, success, and leadership satisfaction all move predictably and exponentially upward as the percentage of A Players increases.

You generally get the team you deserve. That may sound harsh, but it’s an empowering truth because it means you’re not stuck with the team you have today. Protecting and nurturing a culture replete with A Players who are hungry to learn and do more in their roles isn’t optional. It’s foundational for building a high-growth, high-performance company primed to succeed.

As former Henkel CEO Kaspar Rorsted famously said, “Good people want to work for good companies.” We take it a step further: “Great people want to work for great companies.”

If you want to consistently attract and retain A Player talent, start with you. That means evaluating your own leadership, business performance, and culture and being honest about what needs to change.

In many cases, the real inhibitor is hiding in plain sight: a B or C Player (or two) on your senior leadership team who is quietly holding back growth, standards, and accountability. Often, these employees are old friends who aren’t growing with you, or expensive new hires who aren’t getting you the results in a key area like sales, marketing, or operations. And you’re missing your numbers.

Corollary: “You may only be one exceptional person away from a radically better life or business.”

This insight, shared by my colleague Mike Maddock, encapsulates the transformative power of talent. Just one A Player—someone who is not only highly capable but aligned with your mission—can become the inflection point that changes everything. Whether it’s in a business venture or a personal journey, the right person at the right time can exponentially shift outcomes.

If you’re serious about becoming the kind of company that top employees flock to, that level of self-assessment and awareness is where the real transformation begins.

It’s critical to evaluate the percentage of A Players on your roster.  

A word of caution: when doing this, you’ll notice that your managers will tend to inflate the grades of their team members.

This happens for a few reasons:

1. 1. They don’t know what the A Player Standard is.
   2. They aren’t very good at coaching to the performance they need from their employees.
   3. They’re afraid of conflict.
   4. They don’t know what an A Player looks like or how to recruit and hire better than the team they have now.
   5. They subconsciously know the truth that they can’t be an A Player manager if they’re tolerating B and C Players on the team. They’ll inflate their employees’ ratings to protect themselves.

Interestingly, if a manager isn’t addressing the above, then they’re not displaying A Player leadership, which becomes self-evident and self-fulfilling. 

This leads us to this profound truth that a manager cannot be an A Player if they’re harboring B and C Players on their team. 

The reason for this is simple. If they were an A Player manager, two simple things would happen:

1. 1. They’d be able to coach employees to an A Player performance.  
   2. They would not tolerate B or C Player performance and would recruit A Players to upgrade their current team.

The whole is a sum of its parts, and if a manager is tolerating B’s and C’s on the team, the math simply does not equate. De facto, they must be a B or C Player manager. Holding your managers to this leadership philosophy is the quickest way to increase the percentage of A Players on your team.

The acronym CARTS stands for:

There is no substitute for smarts. A Players bring a triple-threat intelligence: IQ (cognitive smarts), EQ (emotional intelligence), and street smarts (practical savvy and judgment). A smart, coachable person can be taught any skill, making Smarts a foundational trait.

A Players don’t just produce—they do it in a way that reinforces your company’s values. They model the behaviors you want replicated across the company. You’d trust them to represent your culture to customers, new hires, and the public because they live it every day.

High-growth organizations can’t afford talent that merely meets expectations. The performance differential between A Players and other employees is too significant to ignore. Investing in top-tier talent isn’t just a hiring decision—it’s a strategy.

“Hiring fewer, better people is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

—Rick Crossland, The A Player

Let’s break down why they matter so much.

A Players raise the bar, not only in terms of outcomes, but also in expectations, pace, and mindset. Their presence helps establish a high-performance standard that attracts like-minded individuals and discourages complacency. Over time, this compounds into a self-reinforcing talent culture.

A Players don’t just execute tasks. They elevate everything and everyone around them.

They challenge inefficiencies, offer practical innovations, and step into leadership gaps without waiting to be asked. Their influence pushes teams to move faster, think sharper, and deliver better results.

Like Michael Jordan, true A Players are natural force multipliers: They raise the standard, coach their teammates, and inspire others to perform at levels they didn’t think possible. Their presence accelerates strategic priorities, strengthens culture, and often leads to breakthroughs ahead of schedule.

In short, A Players don’t just “do their job”; they change the game.

Building a dream team isn’t aspirational, it’s foundational. In this ultra-competitive global economy, we contend that having a team of 100% A Players is the real mandate for business success as fewer, better people is your #1 profit lever. Having A Players run your company’s proven playbooks is the recipe for a >10X of EBITDA Strategic Valuation at exit.

High-performing companies are built on teams comprised almost entirely of A Players. These individuals are consistently in the top 10% of available talent for their roles and compensation levels. They’re reliable, self-directed, coachable, and fully aligned with your company’s values and performance standards.

You already know who they are. They take initiative, raise the bar for their peers, and deliver without the need for micromanagement. They don’t just fit your culture, they advance it.

And like champions, their status must be continually earned. Performance isn’t a title but a standard they meet and exceed, again and again.

Since writing The A Player in 2017, we discovered there’s a value play in talent known as the A Potential. An A Potential is a high-upside, early-stage, or industry-adjacent employee who is less than 9 months into their role and on a visible path to becoming a full A Player. They’re your rookie draft pick—a value play—who may come from outside your industry, be slightly undervalued, or be newly promoted from within. They usually come with leadership qualities, and like a gifted athlete learning a new sport, they have the talent, aptitude, attitude, and coachability to thrive with the right system.

You’re not guessing—they’re already showing promising signs in other similar roles, exhibiting the signs of absolute conviction found in A Players. You’re thrilled with their trajectory relative to their experience and compensation. You see it. You feel it. They’re making progress. And most importantly, your systems, playbooks, and coaching infrastructure are built to accelerate that development. Think of them as a “Do-it-Yourself (DIY) project” with massive potential ROI.

But here’s the key: A Potential isn’t a permanent status. It’s strictly time-bound to a 6–9 month runway. At the end of that window, they must graduate—either as a full A Player who excels or as a B Player who didn’t fully capitalize on the opportunity. You cannot—and should not—keep someone in “potential” limbo.

And crucially, B Players cannot become A Potentials. An A Potential is a rookie with upside, not a veteran with unfulfilled promise. You can coach a B Player up to A, but you can’t reset their clock. Don’t use the A Potential label as a crutch or an excuse for underperformance.

A Potentials are your leadership bench. They represent raw, high-trajectory talent that, when developed well, can become tomorrow’s A Players. Investing in their development pays exponential returns—but only if you’re honest about their current performance and structured in your coaching.

They aren’t “almost A Players.” They’re future A Players—if coached rigorously, held to a high bar, and supported by proven systems and playbooks.

And here’s why they matter financially: A Potentials are also key to your salary cap advantage. When you have the right infrastructure—clear processes, structured onboarding, strong playbooks, and intentional coaching—you can develop A Players internally at below-market compensation. That’s how winning companies build deep teams: by spotting affordable, under-the-radar talent and turning them into stars.

A Potentials are not placeholders. They’re your next wave of high performance—if you treat their development like the strategic asset it is.

Not every hire will hit the A Player standard, but that doesn’t mean you should settle. B Players are basic. They may be competent, but they’re inconsistent. They often require disproportionate management attention and lower the overall talent bar. For the same or similar compensation, there’s usually an A Player out there who would be thrilled to work for you.

B Players tend to go through the motions. They rarely take initiative, don’t exhibit leadership qualities, and don’t deliver results that move the needle or create excitement. The right approach? Coach them up. Give B Players a 6–9 month window, with clear expectations and support, to meet A Player standards. If they don’t rise to the challenge, help them explore their next opportunity elsewhere. With good coaching, about 50% of B Players can make the leap.

And to reiterate a key point from earlier: there’s no path from B Player to A Potential. A Potentials are not just new—they’re developing performers who are early in their roles and already demonstrating strong signs of developing into full A Players. They’re on a visible upward trajectory. B Players, on the other hand, have had sufficient time in their roles to establish a track record and have not met the A Player bar. While B Players can be coached up, they do not get reclassified as A Potentials. That designation is for rising stars, not a second chance.

C Players are a direct threat to performance and culture. They either can’t deliver results, or they’re culturally toxic—and often both. They create organizational drag, miss deadlines, erode morale, and cause your top performers to disengage or leave. Nobody wants them on their team.

Can C Players be coached up? Occasionally. But only about 25% make that leap—and only if they’re truly motivated and open to feedback. 

And let’s be clear: even A Players must continually earn their status. Just like a national champion starts each season 0–0, past performance does not entitle anyone to future standing. Excellence is earned, not given, and must be backed up by consistent impact, learning, and ownership. In high-performing organizations, greatness isn’t a label—it’s a standard, reinforced every day.

Growth begins where compromise ends. If you’re still rationalizing mediocre hires or holding onto people who wouldn’t make the cut today, it’s costing you financially, operationally, emotionally, and culturally.

The most effective way to accelerate performance and build enterprise value is straightforward: raise the bar to A Players only, and commit to building a team where excellence is the standard, not the exception.

If you’re serious about that transformation, here’s where to start:

• • Assess your current roster with brutal honesty. Who are your A Players? Who are your A Potentials? Who are the B and C Players who are no longer a fit?
  • Develop your A Players. Even top employees must keep growing. Their growth should be intentional, driven by clear development plans crafted and owned by their managers. Invest your A Players’ continued coaching, provide clarity on next-level expectations, and ensure they’re consistently challenged to stretch and lead.
  • Coach your A Potentials. They’re your leadership bench and salary cap advantage. Invest in them to develop quickly.
  • Hold the line on standards. Every seat must be earned, every quarter. Tenure and likability are not performance.
  • Leverage systems, playbooks, and structured accountability. Culture doesn’t scale without infrastructure.
  • Lead decisively. Culture follows clarity. If you set the standard, your team will rise to meet it—or make room for those who will.

At A Player Advantage, LLC, we provide thought leadership, tools, coaching, and insights to help you build and scale the best team money can buy.

If you’re ready to stop settling and start winning, we’re ready to help.

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