Why You Should Treat C-Players Like A-Players
danielmiessler.com
danielmiessler.com
- Poorly written and communicated, with faux-profound single word paragraphs
- 'Insights' that would look more at home on a wall decal ("It’s true that I resisted the negativity, escaped, and embraced the positivity and rode it to its potential.")
- "I used to think this way, before I became enlightened" style statements showing complete lack of self-awareness
- Article about a vague concept without defining any of the behaviours that go along with that concept
- Reference to 2x2 matrices (iron law of management theory: all of human behaviour can be collapsed into four quadrants)
- Sign up for my newsletter modal
- His own signature at the end of the post
Is there anything in his background that separates this from the low-grade shlock that pollutes my Medium feed on a daily basis?
Considering he posts about his background on his very site, maybe you should do a bit of research before asking such a basic question and sling what amounts to a bunch of insults.
It's hard to trust this comment is from a real "journalist" when it throws so many of my "doesn't do any research and just asks questions to try to be different" flags.
My biggest problem with the "A" player mythology is that I don't think anyone has any real way to judge it, so "A" player becomes "looks like me". Which I think is the heart of our industry's myriad issues.
They are sharing material that generates large amounts of value and helps define and shape their respective areas (such as Martin's piece on Serverless, Patrick's work helping support small vendors, Jess's "Containerize everything" post), and what they do share is clearly and cogently written without bullshit or hyperbole.
They are names that immediately come to mind when someone asks me "Do you know someone who is good on... ?"
Fowler seems to have gotten better over the years, but I don't put him in the A-List with people like Rich Hickey or Cliff Click.
Patrick for instance (who I pick precisely because I respect him so much) could be crucified by your model ('charge more' is the best bumper sticker ever, he endlessly tells you to add people to your newsletter, lessons learned are his core competency, etc)
For technical posts, see https://danielmiessler.com/study/
For several topics, the guy's blog is high on Google and provides detailed, plain introductions.
Anyway, A player is relative to the league and specific to the skill. Tough to judge from a random blogpost. I guess that should be a platitude, but it's worth repeating.
As a developer and a startup operator, there are things I'm quite good at. But they're not necessarily the things you'd assume based on what I write publicly. They're definitely not usually the things people say I'm an authority on!
So you have a couple of problems here. Among them, that elite aptitude is multidimensional and probably not very correlated, and that people's public profiles are not a reliable indicator of what dimensions they really excel on. But if you extrapolate a bit from this, it should also occur to you that if my true aptitude† isn't revealed by my public profile, neither is most other people's. How many amazing people are you missing by paying attention only to high-profile people?
† other than for writing overlong message board comments
I'd rate myself as C- at my first job, local-A-but-global-C at the salaryman gig, A at Bingo Card Creator, C- at Appointment Reminder, A+ to B- depending on engagement during my consulting career. (I'll take the liberty of excluding my last two gigs out of social concern.)
I am something of an expert on my own work history and can pull any amount of evidence required to substantiate these lower grades. I literally slept on the job as a translator, out of boredom and underengagement. That should be classic C behavior, right? I think I missed growth goals (that I set and owned!) for ~20 consecutive quarters at Appointment Reminder.
And yeah, I also have done some pretty good work over the last 15 years, too.
So what happened? Some of it was straight-up skills growth; I'd paste 25 year old me along almost any axis (10 years later). But 25 year old me had approximately the same health, approximately the same intelligence, and approximately the same diligence... how come he couldn't figure out what time to leave the house to reliably arrive at 9 AM, even though he knew his colleagues were exasperated by that?
Part of it is the nature of the organization. If you're a 26 year old at a Japanese megacorp if you give what is, to the global standard, excellent work, the company's immune system will reject you. I was a good soldier, and gave the organization what it wanted, which is (by the standards of almost any HNer) shockingly low measurable productivity, delivered in a fashion which suggested that I was going to upset no apple carts. I don't know if there is any company routinely present on HN which is not a Japanese megacorp that would be even borderline happy with me reprising that performance.
I strongly believe that there are ways to be an excellent A+++ Googler and replicate the same performance at a startup while flying it into the side of a mountain, at an angle and speed which non-Googlers would be envious of but for the whole flaming death thing. This goes for many tuples which are not (Google, archetypical startup), too.
There are a number of factors other that identity-of-organization that are also confounders. I think I have highly variable productivity (even if you drop periods of poor health as outliers), and if consistency matters to you more than absolute results, I would be a poor candidate for most jobs. I have had team dynamics which acted as force-multipliers for me (and vice versa); I have had teams which had dynamics where adding me added much less than a simple "sum the productivity of these two units" model would suggest.
I think that I'm much, much better at some roles than I am at others. I'm a passable interpreter on my best day and have had serious breaches of the canon of professional ethics twice. (The canon is wrong on the issue [+], but it isn't ambiguous.) I'm a much better writer... in English, on a restricted subset of topics, to a particular audience/cluster of audiences.
I do not think that my written work is a complete accounting of what I'm good at; I think my median reader probably underestimates my technical ability substantially (for plenty of good reasons, median reader) and probably substantially overestimates... hmm... sales ability. (I'm pretty good at sales, but people probably give me too much credit. I frequently fail to do table-stakes things like aggressively following up to make sure indications of strong interest turn into signed contracts ASAP.)
I endorse using samples of written work as likely indicators of ability, but I don't think the static caste system model of A/B/C players cleaves reality at the joints, and accordingly I don't think that written work likely helpfully buckets people as A/B/C.
[ + ] To forestall the follow-up question, the issue is "Translators/interpreters MUST reproduce the input as closely as they are capable of in the output [even if the input is monstrous or the correct output would contravene other goals of the translator/interpreter]."
Poorly researched, unnecessarily inflammatory, weak in arguments.
"Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant."
It is unfortunately not uncommon to find people who see the world as a fixed bag of A- vs. C-ers (and many of course whom think of themselves in the A category.)
But this is a fixed mindset and I think it correlates (when you get down to it) to one's own private/personal sense of their ability to grow.
You really want to become a rockstar/master/A-player? Don't define yourself by your skill set. Always keep a clear focus on that wide gap between you and what you could be. In other words, always think of yourself as a B-player trying to get to A. Know you'll never get there, but keep trying. Do this, and you'll reach excellence.
You'll also see how little difference there is between you and the "C-"...and then you can collaborate on helping each other toward mastery.
"Girl didn't like me? Maybe I'm not attractive." Have that experience enough times and it becomes a part of how you view yourself (i.e. your Identity) and you'll behave accordingly. A lot us struggle with identity issues that cause us to act out in unproductive ways, particularly when we're treated badly (like as if we're a c-player the author points out).
I think treating people with respect and giving them the benefit of the doubt as the author advocates is spot on, which is what I suspect is what he meant by treating c-players as a-players.
What I don't think the author meant was that we should treat ALL c-players like a-players as that sounds like an oversimplification. It would only help if someone is actually high potential and their ego and self-esteem issues get in their way. That's far from the only reason people perform poorly. Quite often, someone is simply less capable than the top performers (that flows from the definition of "top" performance). And yes, with experience and practice, people can improve. And it's good to assume they will and give them the guidance they need to get there.
But if you treat someone as if they're better than they really are, they might feel better about themselves but they could also loose the motivation to improve because they're getting the signal that "they're already there" and they'll start to develop a distorted self-image that could lead to other kinds of problems.
If it takes a skilled, determined manager (say) 6 months to mould a C player into an A player, then that's a big hit on the manager's time, and an eternity (in the modern fast paced world) before the employee starts delivering the goods. It might not make business sense to make that kind of investment, especially if the typical employee leaves after 2 years.
Most real A players I know are very much into coaching other people and giving them opportunities to grow.
10 is a low score.
I think managers can give mentorship and advice but it's up to a person to improve themselves. That mostly comes down to attitude, interest and perseverance. Some people just stop themselves from being better, and give themselves arbitrary limits on what topics they won't learn or areas that aren't in the scope of their job.
"This is so pronounced that if I were to evaluate myself 15 or even 10 years ago, I wouldn’t recognize myself as an A-player. I simply wasn’t one. And yet here I sit looking down at my previous self."
There's a few 10x engineers out there, which I would call A players, but I've only met a couple of them in my lifetime.