It is interesting to me that in almost every management meeting, seminar, or presentation. We talked about the importance of having quality people. What’s interesting about this is almost everybody I know said it but then they wouldn’t do anything about it. They don’t really mean it. As a district manager I would have 12 to 16 store managers report to me. One year when I was getting very serious about developing my management team I asked each manager to take a list of their so associates and grade them A or B or C. A – was a great associate, had very high-quality’s, had initiative, and always did a good job. B – was a good associate, they would always do what they were told, and do it well, they rarely called in sick, but they would not go above and beyond what was asked of them. C – was the person that you really didn’t want on the team but was still there. As I traveled each and store and reviewed the Store manager’s rosters and ratings, I noticed that the grading was similar in each store and for the most part the managers were satisfied with the overall quality of their staffs. 20% of the teams were rated A associates 15% were rated C associates and 65% were rated B associates. Why would we be happy with 80% of our associate being rated as B or C? So, this begged the question, why can’t

 we have 60% of our teams rated an A?? Each manager was asked to develop a strategy to address this over the long term.  Once we started to do this as a team you could see the qualities of the associate team starts to improve. A majority of very good high-quality associates on a team brings the total performance of the team to a higher quality standard. However, if 80% of your team is rated a B or C, discussed you will never get the performance that you want to get theory. Interesting note: When we how to address C players I noticed very few had been talked to about their performance and almost everyone thought they were doing a good job.  

Question: are you doing everything you can to have an A staff, if not get busy.