“A Players or A Positions?” The Strategic Logic of Workforce Management, Harvard Business Review A Great workforce is made up of great people. What could be more intuitively obvious? Is it any wonder, then, that so many companies have devoted so much energy in recent years to identifying, developing, and retaining what have come to be known as “A players”? Firms like GE, IBM, and Microsoft all have well-developed systems for managing and motivating their high-performance and high-potential employees—and for getting rid of their mediocre ones. Management thinkers have widely endorsed this approach: Larry Bossidy, in the best-selling book Execution, for example, calls this sort of differentiation among employees “the mother’s milk of building a performance culture.”
But focusing exclusively on A players puts, well, the horse before the cart. High performers aren’t going to add much value to an organization if they’re smoothly and rapidly pulling carts that aren’t going to market. They’re going to be effective only when they’re harnessed to the right cart—that is, engaged in work that’s essential to company strategy. This, too, may seem obvious. But it’s surprising how few companies systematically identify their strategically important A positions—and then focus on the A players who should fill them. Even fewer companies manage their A positions in such a way that the A players are able to deliver the A performance needed in these crucial roles.
While conventional wisdom might argue that the firms with the most talent win, we believe that, given the financial and managerial resources needed to attract, select, develop, and retain high performers, companies simply can’t afford to have A players in all positions. Rather, we believe that the firms with the right talent win. Businesses need to adopt a portfolio approach to workforce management, placing the very best