Let’s imagine over the last year you have gone through a great recruitment and assessment process, the result of which is that you have both identified and acknowledged you have a highly talented team. Yet somehow your company’s overall performance isn’t where it should be — all those top players just aren’t getting the job done. Why? The fact is, it isn’t enough just to hire the best, you also have to deploy those high performers effectively — put them to work so they can deliver the results they’re capable of. One of the most effective methods of deployment I’ve seen is to create all-star teams. High performance teams like these are a kind of Force Multiplier: if you group, for example. three individuals from your list of A players into a team, you’ll typically get more than three times the output. Many companies fail to take advantage of the Force Multiplier because their culture or systems get in the way. Here are three tips that may help you get past those internal obstacles:
1. Rank and reward team performance, not individual performance. The typical corporate way of management rate individuals against each other and give disproportionate rewards to the top performers. These “stacked ranking” systems may sound appealing, but they work against high-performance teams. When there’s stacked ranking, people who are “A “players typically decline to collaborate with other top performers, for fear their ranking and incentive compensation will suffer. You’ll escape this trap if you reward team rather than individual results.
2. Create an inspiring goal. You can’t put your top-performing teams on every job — there aren’t enough “A “players to go around. So save these teams for the critical tasks, and make sure every member understands the tasks’ importance. Teams of Navy SEALS and the best Formula 1 pit crews succeed because every team member is a high performer and because they all know that achieving their goal matters. If you want your top performers to work productively together and forget about their sometimes-large egos, you have to inspire them to put the mission first.
3. Put top leaders in charge of top teams. A 2012 academic study of a large company’s front-line supervisors concluded that, as one summary put it, “The most efficient structure is to assign the best workers to the best bosses.” Great bosses bring out the best in people by getting them to work more effectively.
