Good Authority. Jonathan Raymond

able to see how, by the very act of showing up the way we do, we disempower the people around us. That is, until we learn how to get out of the way.

      When you think about it, you start to see that there’s no such thing as an A player. There are certainly people who have more talent than others, an extraordinary skill or specialization. But have you ever met someone like that who didn’t have an equally, if not larger, shadow aspect to working with them that was related to that strength? The first thing we have to do is recognize that we ourselves are not A players. We all have something that we’re working on, something inside of ourselves that makes us feel incompetent, unconfident, insecure, or all of the above. And until we deal with our own internal world—not by fixing it but by being honest with ourselves and others about it—our strength will forever be used to perpetuate the false belief about our own authority that we started with: that other people value us for what we know and how many problems we can solve.

      When you start accepting the B player in yourself, you’ll stop looking at employees as being not good enough. You’ll start realizing that, no matter how skilled someone is, when they come in that door, into your unique business, they are a B player. They don’t understand your brand, they don’t know the way you do it there, they don’t know how to play with the people on your team, and they certainly don’t know how to work with you. It’s your job to roll up your sleeves and work with them on whatever in them needs working on. For most people this work will help them do great things. Some people won’t make the pivot and they’ll leave or you’ll have to let them go. But great management and mentoring starts with an open mind and an open heart.

      MYTH #2:

      “Nobody cares as much as I do.”

      It may be true that nobody cares about the things you care about as much as you do. But it’s not true—or fair, or helpful—to think that nobody cares as much as you. They care about different things, things that matter to them, things that inspire and move them. Your job is to get the things you care about and the things they care about to match up in a way where everybody wins.

      So what are the things that employees care about? What if, in the larger sense, they are the exact same things you care about: creative freedom, personal meaning, doing work they love, and making enough money to support their families?

      As we look across the management/employee divide, it’s easy to see the people on the other side as being made of different stuff than we are. They’re not. They’re just at a different stage, have a different appetite for risk, perhaps. And for whatever reason, they’ve decided to hitch their meaning wagon to yours. It’s your responsibility to discover just how much they care, in ways and about things that you don’t. Talk about a win/win scenario.

      MYTH #3:

      “I can’t afford to invest time in someone who is just going to leave anyway.”

      Think about the person on your team who’s having the most trouble right now. Okay, now do a little math as to how much time you are already investing in them. Add up all the times you’ve had to finish off their work that wasn’t quite there, or remind them about this, that, or the other thing. Please include the nightly conversations you’re having with your spouse, the complaint sessions you’re having with your colleagues, and the amount of time you lie awake at night in utter frustration that they did that thing again. How many extra hours did you spend with them over the past month? Five? Ten? Too many to count? How about over the course of the last year? Now add the value of the time that you could have been spending doing the work you were supposed to be doing. If you were to add it up, you’d probably realize you’ve spent 100 hours of your time on this person already. And if you look at what you’ve been doing during that time, you’ll see that it’s mostly not been mentoring or development: It’s been supervision. Yikes, that’s ugly stuff. That word should give you chills! Supervision is what children need so they don’t stick their finger in a socket. Not a good model for building a company culture for adults.

      What if instead of the next 100 hours of supervision, you spend 10 hours having direct conversations with this team member about what’s been going wrong, what your standards are, why they should care, how you’re going to help them grow, and how you’re going to hold them accountable for their growth. Don’t you feel better already?

      Think about it another way. Isn’t not investing in them the surest way that they will leave—or stay and drag other people down? Think of all the good things that will happen when you train and invest in one person. Think of what it will mean to them as a human being. Think of what it will mean to you to be the kind of human being who helps other human beings with hard things. Think about the message it sends to the other people on the team that you’re willing to take that kind of a risk. Think about the people below that person on the org chart who will benefit from their growth even if/when that person does leave. There’s no end to the potential benefits of investing in your employees, but ultimately the most important benefit is this: It’s the right thing to do.

      MYTH #4:

      “I’m not a therapist, I don’t have the skills to help them with their personal problems.”

      How many things have you tried to help you become a better leader, manager, and all-around effective person? How many consultants and coaches, how many self-improvement books, podcasts, and weekend workshops? How many of those ideas have you tried to introduce into your company culture? If you’re reading this, chances are you decided long ago that who you are and how you relate with your work is highly relevant to the business—and that your personal transformation would be good not just for you but for the people around you. Why doesn’t the same hold true for everyone else in your business?

      Even if you’re ready to acknowledge that your employees’ personal growth is relevant and will be good for your business, there’s still this challenge: How do you broach the subject? And how do you have this more personal conversation without going beyond the bounds of the professional agreement between a manager and an employee? We’ll be answering these questions throughout the rest of this book by offering many simple methods to talk about performance issues in a way that intersects beautifully with personal growth challenges. That it’s hard doesn’t put it off limits. It just means it’s hard. And as I hope you’ll discover in the rest of this book, you may be making it far harder than it needs to be.

      MYTH #5:

      “We just need better systems and more communication.”

      Systems, processes, action plans, and procedures are wonderful things. They are necessary in creating a minimum amount of order and predictability to your business. But ask yourself: How many systems do you have right now? How many hard and so-called soft documents have you written over the years with big promises as to what they were going to deliver? Vision documents, brand positions, marketing strategies, values presentations. Have any of them, honestly, done even a bit to get people to take real ownership of their work?

      Systems are not the solution to people problems. They’re absolutely the answer to systems problems though! The key is to know the difference. When an athlete breaks their leg you put it in a cast to help restore structure and stability. But to support them through the emotions of the fall and help them to get back up again? For that you need a whole other kind of medicine.

      Let’s make a new set of operating assumptions. They’re not the opposite of the myths we’ve hopefully just debunked, but a reframe that allows us to approach the growth conversation with the honesty and nuance that we all deserve:

      “I can’t find good people” becomes “I can’t know who my A players are until I challenge them to find out.”

      “Nobody cares as much as I do” becomes “I haven’t figured out how they care in their own way that can harmonize with the way that I do.”

      “I can’t afford to invest time in someone who is just going to leave anyway” becomes “I don’t have time to do anything else.”

      “I’m not a therapist, I don’t have the skills to help them with their personal problems” becomes “I’m not a therapist, but I am two steps ahead