Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve

This book has the answer. "Build an A-Team" argues that employees need to be continuously learning in order to stay engaged. Managers who intentionally help all their employees to learn will be rewarded with a loyal, productive workforce, the author says. This means stretching them with new roles when they're ready, and giving them fresh challenges. It's about creating space for people to shake up their routines, because change leads to growth, while inertia leads to boredom.

This book provides a roadmap for bosses who want to build enthusiastic, high-performing teams. It offers a wealth of useful tips, backed up by fascinating case studies of organizations that follow the author's approach.

This combination of practical tools and real-life stories makes "Build an A-Team" a must-read for leaders and managers across a range of industries, from the corporate world, to the nonprofit sector, to the sports field. If you're struggling to lift morale, or you're worried your top workers will defect to a rival, this book is for you.

Employees who want to get the most out of their careers, or to help their bosses understand how to keep them fired up, will also benefit from this book. It's especially relevant to anyone who feels they're stagnating at work, and who wants to get back in gear through a process of personal change or disruption.

And who better to coach us on this topic than Whitney Johnson? She's an advisor to CEOs, the host of the weekly "Disrupt Yourself" podcast, and the author of "Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work." Previously, she worked as an award-winning Wall Street analyst, and she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. Fortune and Thinkers50 have recognized Johnson as one of the world's most influential management thinkers.

So, keep listening to hear about the S-shaped learning curve; how to hire people for their potential, instead of their proficiency; and how to put pressure on star performers, so they don't get bored.

"Build an A-Team" opens with a fascinating story of a well-known brand that appears to have found the secret to employee engagement. WD-40 has become a household name. Seventy percent of American homes own one of these blue and yellow cans of multi-use lubricant, and it's widely used in Britain and elsewhere, too.

WD-40 has been at the top of its game for more than 60 years and has staved off competition from some 200 rival products. The company also manages to keep its people happy. Ninety-three percent of workers at WD-40 say they're engaged. That's pretty impressive, and way beyond what you'll find in most organizations.

So how does WD-40 do it? Johnson says the company's human resources strategy is one of personal disruption, centered around learning. Managers encourage people to learn, to leap to new roles, learn something new, and then jump again. Employees aren't allowed to stagnate. They're given new challenges before they get bored, meaning that many people stay for 10 to 25 years, or more.

This loyalty has a huge impact on productivity, and it directly benefits the company's bottom line. WD-40 understands that people are wired to learn and change, and it gives its employees what they need.

This opening story sets the tone for the rest of the book. Johnson deftly mixes theory, analysis and tools with real-world anecdotes from business, history and politics that prove the effectiveness of her approach.

So let's take a closer look at some of her ideas, starting with the learning curve.

Johnson's approach is based on a learning curve in the shape of an elongated letter S. Picture this in your mind for a moment. At its lowest point, there's a horizontal line that then leads into a gentle curve upwards. Next, there's a steep incline before the curve flattens out again at the top. Now, imagine your personal learning journey follows the shape of this letter S.

When we start a new role, it can feel like a slog. Sometimes it's like we're not progressing at all. Other times, we know we're moving forward, but at a painfully slow pace. At this stage, we're at the bottom of the S.

As we get more practice, we grow in confidence and competence. We're excited and fired up. Tasks get easier. Work seems to flow. This is the steep back of the S. Then, as time goes on, we become masters. We can do our jobs almost with our eyes closed. We're coasting – so much so that we might get complacent or bored. We plateau out, just as the S levels off at its highest point. We might start to look around for a new challenge, and think about jumping ship.

At this crucial point, managers need to step in, Johnson says. They need to give employees assignments that truly stretch them, or move them into fresh roles where they can learn something new and start back at the bottom of the S curve. They need to create room for individual disruption.

The author suggests new team members might stay at the low end of their curve for about six months, depending on the individual and the role. They'll then start hitting peak productivity and likely stay in this second phase for three to four years. At this point, they'll begin pushing into mastery. These are generalizations, of course – helpful as guidelines, but we should remember that everyone is unique.

The S curve model forms the backbone of Johnson's theories, and it's at the heart of this book. But Johnson didn't come up with it. American sociologist E. M. Rogers popularized the S curve last century in his book, "Diffusion of Innovations," using it to describe how people adopt new ideas. Johnson herself used it in her investment banking career, to gage how fast an innovation might be picked up, and how quickly it might penetrate a market.

So the S curve isn't new, but we like how Johnson uses it to describe the various stages of the learning journey. And we think it fits well – it's easy to apply, and memorable. Case studies back up her ideas, and she provides links to online diagnostic tools that readers can use to see where they are on the curve, as well as team members, and potential new hires.

Let's now look at Johnson's tips on recruitment.

It's tempting to hire people who are at the top of their game, candidates who are fully qualified and can walk straight into a role with minimal training and get on with the job unsupervised. After all, the last thing a busy manager wants to do is take time out to develop a new recruit.

But, if we bring in people who are close to the top of their S curve, they may soon get bored and start looking around for a new challenge. Then, before we know it, our new hire has left, we have to recruit again, and we're more overwhelmed than ever.

More than 40 percent of employees who leave their jobs of their own accord do so within six months of joining, according to a survey quoted in the book.

So the key to building an A-team is to hire for potential, not proficiency, Johnson says. She offers the following ideas to help managers do this, and to avoid some common pitfalls.

First, identify the tasks you want a new recruit to perform. It's too easy to recycle a job description from a year or two ago, especially if the previous employee performed the role well. But maybe your organization has moved on. So what do you need now? Look for people who meet your minimum requirements and who have the capacity to grow into this role and future roles, rather than for masters who are already at the top of their curve.

Another key step is to work out how the new hire will affect the rest of your team. How many team members are at the low end of their S curve, how many in the middle, and how many at the top? Johnson suggests a good mix is to have about 15 percent of people at the low end, 70 percent in the sweet spot in the middle of the curve, and 15 percent at the high end. So if you have a lot of novices already, you might want to hire someone in the middle of the curve, she says.

It's also vital to understand why you're hiring. One mistake is to recruit a carbon copy of yourself – someone who thinks like you, shares your skills, and agrees with your approach. This may work for a while, but the new hire will likely get bored and frustrated with such little space to grow, or maybe you'll feel threatened by the clone you've hired. Instead, aim to hire people who know what you don't know, and who have complementary skills.

Johnson also offers tips on writing a job description to hire your ideal person, on interviewing, and on recruiting from unconventional talent pools. Do your recruits need to be college graduates? Could they be people returning from career breaks? Could you hire someone who worked for you before? These are good questions that create more possibilities.

We like the way Johnson encourages managers to think outside the box, and to do things differently to how they've been done before. Busy managers who have roles to fill and fires to put out won't find her approach easy, as it requires time for reflection. But it is doable, and it makes long-term sense.

Let's now look at specific ways to challenge and stretch employees who are close to the top of their learning curve, so that they stay motivated and do their best work.

It's not always feasible to send top performers to the bottom of the S curve, but managers can put pressure on them by setting challenging deadlines or tightening budgets. For example, you could ask your star employees to hit annual targets in nine months rather than 12, or to release a new product a few weeks ahead of schedule.

You could ask them to brainstorm what they'd do differently with half the budget. You could also promote creative thinking by challenging employees to approach a problem like a novice. Or you could ask them to get buy-in for their ideas from other departments. How might they persuade the finance team to back their innovation, or convince HR?

Too much pressure can be overwhelming, but just enough can fire people up, so we like this idea of applying constraints to up the pressure and motivate colleagues. Tips like these are practical and easy to follow, and Johnson includes helpful analogies as well as stories that back up her theories.

Of course, disruption isn't without its risks, and Johnson mentions some of these toward the end of the book. Some organizations and managers are bound to question the merits of shifting star employees into new roles, for example. What about lost productivity? What about training and development costs? And what if the top performer can't do the new job?

The author agrees her approach has its downsides. There may be short-term pain, but the long-term gain is worth it, and the upsides far outweigh the negatives, she argues. If employees aren't engaged, they'll either leave or underperform. If they're not working to their potential, they won't come up with new ideas, and a company that stops innovating will fall behind its rivals.

We like that Johnson addresses the potential downsides of continuous disruption at the end of the book, but it would have been useful to hear more about the negatives earlier, along with her tips for dealing with them.

This book would also benefit from more insight into team dynamics. We learn about the learning curve and how to create a good mix between novices, highly productive employees, and masters. But if readers want to find out how to get a good mix of personalities on a team, they'll be disappointed.

These are minor failings, because we think "Build an A-Team" has a lot going for it. Johnson builds a compelling case for continual learning and personal disruption at work that could help organizations tackle employee malaise. She does this with an engaging writing style and with some great storytelling.

"Build an A-Team" by Whitney Johnson is published by Harvard Business Review Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.