Unlock Your Company's Potential: Build a High-Performance Team with Proven Strategies

Last night, I attended a LA Lakers basketball game. It had been two years since my last game, and I was amazed at how much the team had changed. Only three players remained from the championship-winning roster of two years ago. This highlights the harsh reality of the sports world: to be successful, teams must be dispassionate, calculated, and ruthless in their roster decisions. The same principles apply to high-growth companies.

In a high-growth company, investors expect elite performance, leading to massive outcomes. This is because every issue or opportunity in a company is ultimately about people. It is crucial to have the right people in the right positions at all times. This requires a ruthless approach to talent management.

The fiction of companies as families needs to be done away with. You cannot be stuck with employees like you are with family members. Companies can and must choose who to hire, and employees choose who to work for. This is particularly true in startup hotbeds like San Francisco, where high employee turnover and rampant salary inflation have led to a decrease in employee loyalty.

As a company grows, it goes from needing generalists to specialists. The bar for what it takes to lead a function gets higher and higher, making it more likely that a team member will need to be replaced. To pick the right team, a company needs systems in place for evaluating and retaining its people. At FreshBooks, we used a matrix to evaluate and segment our employees based on their potential and performance.

At least once or twice a year, we would allocate every person in the company to one of the following boxes: high potential/high performance, high potential/low performance, low potential/high performance, or low potential/low performance. The executive team would take personal ownership over developing high potential team members, who were our future leaders. However, a good mix of talent was necessary, and we had a system in place for identifying and growing our stars.

Letting people go is never easy, but as a CEO, you must make the necessary moves to have the best possible team. Good is the enemy of great, and only a great team will deliver a great outcome.

To ensure the success of your company, consider the following questions:

• Do we have a system in place for evaluating our people, and is it effective?
• Do I know who the high potential people are in this company?
• Do I know who the low performers are?
• Do we have a system/plan for nurturing our high performers and developing them?
• Do we have a system/plan for retaining key people and minimizing painful turnover?

In conclusion, ruthless talent management is crucial for the success of high-growth companies. Companies must have systems in place for evaluating and retaining their people, and must not hesitate to make the necessary moves to have the best possible team. A great team will deliver a great outcome.