Clarity Beats Talent.

A Performance Gap Is a Leadership Gap

You Don't Have a Talent Problem

I hear a lot of talk about A-players and B-players. “An A-player is a top-performer and self-starter. They crave challenges and drive innovation. B-players need clearly defined goals and strategies provided to them.”

Ask 100 people, and they will all say they’re self-motivated and enjoy a challenge. They are likely correct. They do not lack energy or talent. But, top performers have identified key behaviors that they perform at the expense of everything else. They know which activities create value and which ones don’t. 

B-players need high and low value activity defined for them. A-players don’t need managers. They are self-led. They figure it out and do it. If you are in a leadership role, you are there for the B-players. With the right strategies, you can close the gap in performance between the two.

Leaders underestimate how much performance can be improved through clarity and reinforcement. Not everyone can be number one. But all employees can be developed to exceed minimum standards. Too often, someone with talent is distracted by low value tasks. What’s worse is that management is frequently the culprit. 

With clarity, leaders can cultivate above-average producers. There is only one way to do it though. Communicate and measure key behaviors. Hold employees accountable and promote or fire based predominantly on those metrics.

An A-player identifies, prioritizes, and executes behaviors that create disproportionate value for themselves and the organization. A B-player may be equally intelligent and motivated, but spends more time on neutral or low-value activities detached from goals. The role of leadership is not to wish that they were all A-players. 

Organizations depend on capable people who are not naturally discerning and self-directing. Left alone, they spend time on the wrong activities. That is why management exists in the first place! It is incumbent on leaders to provide clarity and direction to close the performance gap. 

You Get What You Measure

Organizations do not fail because employees neglect high-value behaviors. They fail when leaders enable them to confuse activity with effectiveness. Measurement promotes gaming the system. Gaming should work for, not against, productivity. You must verify that rewards produce desired outcomes. 

I worked with an employer who measured the time between receiving and responding to internal emails. They had a highly responsive email culture. The problem was they neglected in-person clients. Employees would check email while working with customers. The fact that “customer service” was enshrined in their mission statement did not change any of that. Leadership, through their metrics, sent signals that email was important to longevity and success within the organization.

Employees respond rationally to the system they are in. They optimize for what is measured. Every measurement elevates one behavior at the expense of others. Leaders who cannot distinguish value-creating work from low-value tasks inevitably reward the wrong things. If you want to lead, you have to deliberately make those distinctions. 

Courageous leaders intentionally fail at low-value tasks, especially when they hinder high-value ones. Consider the email culture. One manager went against the grain. She stopped measuring turnaround time. Instead she focused on customer wait times. She was nervous; no one else was doing it, and her entire division expected an uproar. In fact, before trying it, they gave every reason why they could not do it.

Reward systems nudge people to build routines, identities, and expectations around the benefits they provide. Any attempt to change those metrics threatens that equilibrium. That is why meaningful change is met with resistance. Leaders should expect that resistance, not interpret it as evidence they are wrong. 

That almost happened with the email culture. Yet, no one noticed when they stopped measuring email time. Upper management noticed their sales going up. Peers and other departments noticed they started getting bonuses. But no one noticed the change in metrics. 

But don’t forget, they just knew the entire company would come down on them! If you are a leader, permission starts with you. If you are convinced a metric is rewarding the wrong behavior, resistance is not a reason to abandon the change.

That resistance shows up in other forms too. When I, or someone like me, comes in from the outside, everyone responds the same way: “You just don’t get the culture here.” That is a statement about the perceived reward and punishment cycles. Culture is leadership driven, not a “fix the employee” issue.

Change is most effective when management endorses it with measurement. 

Employees fail when they know what to do and do not do it. Management fails when they pass off clarity development onto employees, and then blame them for guessing wrong. Once core behaviors have been clearly communicated, responsibility shifts to the employee. Until then, contributors do not have the fundamental tools to succeed.

The Gravitational Pull of Safe Work

Organizations naturally drift away from high-value behavior unless leaders actively restore alignment. If leadership’s primary responsibility is identifying value, then its second responsibility is building systems that keep people focused on it.

People gravitate toward low-value work because it is safe. It is virtually failure-proof. The behaviors that create value involve uncertainty, accountability, and the possibility of failure. Not only that—high-value behaviors are difficult, boring, and have to be accomplished repeatedly.

Consider making sales calls. Checking email is much less demanding. Salespeople get hung up on a lot. That neither feels productive nor risk-free. It won’t actually feel productive until you make a sale. That's why smart, capable people convince themselves email is productive while customers remain un-called.  

Great leaders know this and, rather than fighting human nature, they measure and reward high-value tasks. That means making them easy to do and hard to ignore. Simultaneously low-value tasks should be annoying or difficult. Managers must build a culture teaching employees to nudge high-value behavior in each other.

All behavior is expensive. It comes at the expense of everything else. That’s the danger in low-value behavior. Not only are they costing money in the form of payroll, they come at the expense of high-value behaviors. Managers rarely say “this is more important than that, do this first,” or “If something has to slide, make sure it isn’t X.” 

Communicating priorities requires identifying what is un-important, not only what is important. Leaders miss this. Worse, they claim “it’s all important.” Statements like that set B-players—the ones who need clarity and guidance the most—up for failure. The key to cultivating high performers is to help everyone identify high-value behaviors while giving permission to let low-value behaviors slide.

Work Backward

I had a friend, Clint, who did custom construction. He figured out that if he doubled the standard time with the customer, his blueprint rewrites decreased. That alone saved him hundreds of dollars per customer. On top of that, his customer service ratings went up. Time with customers is measurable. He then implemented it across his entire company.

Take note though, the action itself won’t work for everyone. You must apply the thinking individually. Clint knew why his customers bought from him and what affected margins. He understood his competition. He could confidently predict which initial investment would lead to better outcomes. If he were competing on price or speed, doubling customer time would have devastated the bottom line.

The takeaway is this: know the goals you have for your customers. You must start there. Even if you get it wrong, you will be closer than “do more” or “go faster” could get you. Business owners simultaneously face the pressures of growth alongside the fear of failure. There is always a new problem to solve, a crisis to deescalate, or a threat to manage. They cannot be ignored. Yet, it’s critical to restore vision and purpose to daily operations.

High-value behavior is not whatever keeps employees busy. It is behavior that reliably produces the outcomes organizations need. Start with the business. What drives the economic engine? What differentiates you from competitors? What do customers reward and punish? Then work backward.

If customers choose you because of speed, what behaviors enhance speed? If they choose you because of quality, what behaviors distinguish quality? If they choose you because of service, what behaviors improve service?

Most leaders stop at the strategic answer. They know customers value responsiveness, quality, or expertise. So does everyone else. What most fail to identify are the specific actions that produce those outcomes. The goal is not to understand the value proposition. The goal is translating value into behavior. That is what distinguishes great leadership from someone with a title. Once you identify what differentiates you, ask: What are your best performers doing differently?

You have to know who your best performers are. Then, study their workflow. Do not ask them. Most high performers operate on tacit knowledge. They can tell you what they believe they are doing, but cannot describe the many small decisions that separate them. For that reason, leaders should not rely exclusively on conversation. 

They need direct observation. Watch what they do. Write it down in time increments. What do they neglect? Contrast that with the same data from your worst performers. That alone will produce a basic do this, not that training.

The gap between an A-player and a B-player does not have to be huge if you highlight the behaviors that separate them. Talent and drive are rare commodities. So rare, you cannot wait for them to come along by chance. 

You can get above-average performance out of average employees by clarifying what you want from them. Once that’s clear, time and measurement will differentiate who you should keep and who should go work for your competitors.

If your B-players are underperforming, the first place to look isn’t their effort or talent—it’s what you’ve told them to do and what you reward them for doing. Too many managers spend their careers pining for better people when the ones they have were never given a fair chance. 

Were they shown what excellence looks like? Do they have permission to stop doing low-value tasks? 

Stop wishing for A-players. Start being the kind of leader that cultivates them.