There’s an old expression in sports that you’re only as strong as your weakest player. I’ve heard some version of it for most of my life, and the longer I’ve spent building teams, the more I’ve come to believe there’s a lot of truth behind it.
When we think about a weak performer, we tend to focus on that person’s individual production. Are they doing enough? Is their work good enough? Are they meeting expectations? But I’ve learned that those questions don’t capture the real cost because performance rarely exists in isolation. The way one person operates affects the people around them.
When someone consistently misses details, somebody else usually catches them. When they don’t follow through, somebody follows up. When their work isn’t right, someone fixes it. When they’re unprepared, somebody else has to be more prepared. And sometimes none of this is visible from the outside because strong people are very good at compensating. The project gets finished. The deadline gets met. The client remains happy.
But somebody paid the price.
That’s one of the hidden realities of high-performing organizations. Strong people can sometimes make weak performance difficult to see because they’re continually absorbing its consequences. The cost shows up somewhere else in the system through additional time, management, rework, frustration, lost capacity or energy.
Over the years, however, I’ve become equally fascinated by what happens in the opposite direction. If one person’s poor performance can create additional work for everyone around them, exceptional performers can create an entirely different effect.
Weak links create drag. A-Players create lift.
I’ve watched a small number of exceptional people change the behavior of an entire group without ever giving a speech about standards. People simply watch how they operate. They notice the preparation, the discipline, the responsiveness and the attention to detail. They notice that nobody has to chase them and that when something goes wrong, they don’t disappear into excuses. They solve it. Most importantly, people eventually begin seeing the reps behind the performance.
We often admire someone’s ability without thinking enough about what produced it. We see a great presentation without seeing the preparation. We see confidence without seeing the practice. We see good judgment without seeing the thousands of decisions that helped develop it. We see the result without seeing the repetition behind it. That’s one reason I’ve never believed talent alone defines an A-Player. Talent matters enormously, but talent gives us potential. What we repeatedly do with that potential matters more. Talent may establish your ceiling, but your reps determine how close you get to it.
Something interesting happens when enough people in a group operate with that kind of discipline. The definition of normal begins changing. When everyone prepares, being unprepared becomes uncomfortable. When everyone follows through, failing to follow through stands out. When everyone pays attention to details, ignoring them becomes obvious. Nobody has to circulate a memo announcing that expectations have increased. People can feel it.
That’s culture in one of its most practical forms. Culture isn’t only a collection of values written on a wall. It’s the behavior people repeatedly observe around them and eventually come to expect from one another. That means every one of us contributes to the performance environment we’re part of through our attitude, preparation, discipline, accountability, curiosity and willingness to improve. Sometimes we raise the standard without realizing it. Unfortunately, we can lower it the same way.
Building InnoVision Marketing Group has taught me that an A-Player isn’t necessarily the person who makes the fewest mistakes. Exceptional people make mistakes. They need coaching. They have bad days and occasionally get things wrong. What separates them is often what happens next. They take ownership. They listen. They correct. They learn. They put in the reps and come back better.
I also don’t think A-Player is a designation anyone permanently earns. Yesterday’s performance doesn’t guarantee tomorrow’s. A title doesn’t guarantee it. Tenure doesn’t guarantee it. Even extraordinary talent doesn’t guarantee it. Excellence has to continue showing up in behavior.
The encouraging part is how much of that remains within our control. We don’t control every opportunity we’re given or every circumstance we encounter, but we have tremendous influence over how prepared we are when the opportunity arrives. We decide whether we’re coachable. We decide whether to put in the reps. We decide whether we bring solutions or excuses. We decide whether the people around us constantly have to compensate for us or become stronger because we’re there.
Maybe that’s the better way to think about being an A-Player. Instead of treating it as a label we either possess or don’t, we can treat it as something we’re continually becoming. And maybe the most revealing question isn’t simply, “Am I an A-Player?” It’s, “Do the people around me become better because I’m here?”
Because ultimately, the strongest people I’ve known don’t simply carry their own weight. They create lift.
