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Build Your All-Star Team

It isn’t enough just to hire the best talent. You also have to deploy those high performers effectively.

By Michael C. Mankins

First published on Μαρτίου 03, 2015
min read


This article originally appeared on Livemint.com. Let’s imagine that you have recently assessed your company’s talent, and that you found plenty of high-performing executives and employees. Yet, somehow your company’s overall performance isn’t where it should be—all those A players just aren’t getting the job done. Why? The fact is, it isn’t enough just to hire the best. If you want to boost the productivity of your organization’s human capital, you also have to deploy those high performers effectively. One of the most effective methods of deployment I’ve seen is to create all-star teams. Teams like these are a kind of force multiplier. If you group (say) three individuals from your list of A players into a team, you’ll typically get more than three times the output. High-performing teams are the secret behind many extraordinary accomplishments. In the 1990s, for instance, then-chief executive officer (CEO) Mickey Drexler turned Gap around by creating a team of A-list merchants and designers, including luminaries such as Maureen Chiquet, now CEO at Chanel, and Andy Janowski, who later became CEO of Smythson. The team transformed Gap’s products and stores, and helped the company grow faster than any other retail brand at the time. More recently, SpaceX, the rocketry and spacecraft company founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk, developed its Falcon 9 launch vehicle for just over $300 million. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) analysis determined that the space agency would have had to spend nearly $1.4 billion to achieve the same result. Read the full article at Livemint.com.

This article originally appeared on Livemint.com.

Let’s imagine that you have recently assessed your company’s talent, and that you found plenty of high-performing executives and employees. Yet, somehow your company’s overall performance isn’t where it should be—all those A players just aren’t getting the job done. Why?

The fact is, it isn’t enough just to hire the best. If you want to boost the productivity of your organization’s human capital, you also have to deploy those high performers effectively.

One of the most effective methods of deployment I’ve seen is to create all-star teams. Teams like these are a kind of force multiplier. If you group (say) three individuals from your list of A players into a team, you’ll typically get more than three times the output.

High-performing teams are the secret behind many extraordinary accomplishments. In the 1990s, for instance, then-chief executive officer (CEO) Mickey Drexler turned Gap around by creating a team of A-list merchants and designers, including luminaries such as Maureen Chiquet, now CEO at Chanel, and Andy Janowski, who later became CEO of Smythson. The team transformed Gap’s products and stores, and helped the company grow faster than any other retail brand at the time.

More recently, SpaceX, the rocketry and spacecraft company founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk, developed its Falcon 9 launch vehicle for just over $300 million. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) analysis determined that the space agency would have had to spend nearly $1.4 billion to achieve the same result.

Read the full article at Livemint.com.