There is something a little strange about leadership attention.
The people causing the most problems often get the most of it.
An employee misses a deadline. We have a meeting. Someone keeps making mistakes. We start coaching. Someone is difficult to manage. Suddenly, the calendar fills up with conversations about them.
Meanwhile, the people doing great work are… doing great work.
So we leave them alone.
That makes sense. Until it doesn’t.
In the conclusion of How to Hire A-Players, Eric Herrenkohl makes an argument that caught my attention: leaders should invest their time in their A-Players first.
At first, this sounds almost backwards.
Shouldn’t we spend the most time helping the people who need the most help?
Maybe. But Herrenkohl’s point is that A-Players create disproportionate value. They drive growth, create opportunities, and can take on more responsibility. If they are the people with the most potential to move the organization forward, it makes sense to actually invest in them.
And it made me think about something I’ve encountered in health and wellness coaching:
What we focus on tends to grow.
The Squeaky Wheel
I think there is a natural trap here.
Problems are loud.
Success is usually pretty quiet.
A struggling employee needs something from you. An A-Player might just need a little direction and then go do the thing. So the struggling employee gets the meeting, the follow-up, the performance plan, the Slack messages.
The A-Player gets, “Great job.”
Then we wonder why our best people eventually start looking for something else.
Herrenkohl’s argument isn’t that leaders should ignore poor performance. Some people need coaching. Some need clearer expectations. And some ultimately may not belong in the organization.
But there is a difference between addressing a problem and making the problem the center of your leadership.
Watering the Right Plants
I keep coming back to the garden analogy.
If you have one struggling plant and five thriving plants, you probably should help the struggling one. Maybe it needs more sunlight. Maybe the soil is wrong. Maybe something is eating it.
But imagine spending all day with that one plant.
Eventually, the healthy plants are getting nothing.
Organizations can do the same thing.
We say we want innovation, initiative, ownership, and creativity. Then we spend most of our leadership energy putting out fires.
What would happen if we spent more of that energy cultivating the things we actually want more of?
That might mean giving an A-Player a bigger project. Asking what they want to do next. Giving them room to experiment. Talking about where they see themselves in a few years.
Not because they are needy.
Because they are capable.
Making Room to Grow
This also connects to psychological safety.
People are more likely to speak up, experiment, and offer ideas when they believe their contributions are actually welcome. If someone knows their manager trusts them and sees a future for them in the organization, there is more room to take ownership.
And that matters for innovation.
A person who feels like they are just filling a role may do exactly what the role requires.
A person who feels like they are helping build something may start asking, “What could we do better?”
That is a pretty valuable shift.
The Attention Economy
Maybe leadership attention is a resource just like money.
There is only so much of it.
We have to decide where it goes.
Low performers may require intervention. Problems still need to be solved. But if all of our attention goes toward what is broken, we can accidentally neglect what is working.
And that seems like a strange way to build a company.
Sometimes the answer isn’t fixing the weakest thing in the room.
Sometimes it is giving the strongest thing more room to become something bigger.
If you want more innovation, cultivate innovators. If you want more ownership, cultivate owners. If you want more leadership, develop leaders.
What you focus on grows.
So we should probably be a little more intentional about what we’re watering.
References:
Herrenkohl, E. (2010). How to hire A-players: Finding the top people for your team—even if you don’t have a recruiting department. John Wiley & Sons.
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