Your “A” Team is Someone Else’s “C” Team

There’s an uncomfortable moment in every leader’s journey that, for the growth-minded, shifts their perspective and improves their potential.

It happens when they realize their definition of excellence falls far short of what’s possible and expected beyond the confines of their firm.

The brutal truth is that many leaders I’ve known—including CEOs—wouldn’t even be considered “interview-worthy” by the highest-performing executives I’ve coached. Indeed, some of the people you consider to be “A” players on your team, including you, would likely be considered “C” players on someone else’s team

This point isn’t intended to diminish your accomplishments; it’s meant to illuminate a critical reality that separates great leaders from the majority.

The highest performers ask themselves one question constantly, without regard to how “good” they think they are:

“How can I raise the bar and elevate both my team’s performance and my own?”

Think in Continuums

In any dimension of leadership performance, you’re probably not awful and you’re certainly not flawless. You exist somewhere on a continuum between the two extremes. Viewing your development this way prevents you from getting caught up in binary thinking about whether you’re “good” or “bad.” Rather, it reinforces the idea of continuous improvement and what you can do next to continue your progress.

As leaders and firms scale, there are seven predictable continuums where leaders must continually evolve to grow with their business. When you don’t progress on these continuums, your organization will struggle, stagnate, and consume far more resources than necessary to generate a proper return.

The goal of this continuums-based framework to understand where you and your team members are now and then to deliberately move to the right; toward more scalable, sustainable leadership behaviors. This is how you’ll raise the bar and continually elevate your performance.

The Seven Leadership Continuums

1. Manager <—> Leader

Managers are entirely focused on the present. They pay attention primarily to today’s work, this week’s priorities, and this month’s deliverables—not to what needs to happen to help the organization achieve long-term success. An executive who spends mornings reviewing yesterday’s sales and production reports and afternoons in meetings covering current projects might know everything that’s happening right now but has no vision for where they should be in one or two years. They’re managing, not leading.

Leaders, in contrast, are future-focused. They spend the majority of their time thinking strategically: anticipating market shifts, identifying capability gaps, and positioning the organization for future opportunities. Their focus is on what needs to happen six months or two years in the future to accelerate the business.

Moving toward the leader end of this continuum requires allocating time for strategic thinking and creating systems to enable others to manage today as you focus on building for tomorrow. You’ll move away from being the person who gets things done and toward being the person who determines what needs to be done to get somewhere important in the next two years.

2. Passenger <—> Driver

Passengers ride on the bus. They wait for others to initiate change, they operate reactively, and they tend to offer spectator-sounding commentary using phrases like “Today’s meeting was really interesting” and “I can’t wait to see how this works out.”

Drivers, on the other hand, take ownership of moving the organization forward. They’re the ones asking, “Who should be accountable for this?” and “What exactly needs to change here?” They don’t wait for permission to solve problems or identify opportunities. They come to meetings prepared—with opinions, solutions, and next steps already formed in their minds.

The shift toward the driver side of this continuum activates when you:

Stop waiting for others to identify problems and start surfacing issues yourself.
Start speaking your mind rather than waiting for others to say what must be said.
Add rigor to how you prepare for meetings, conversations, and decision-making.

You must be willing to become fully accountable for ideas, initiatives, and outcomes rather than more passively observing the drivers around you.

3. Activities <—> Results

It’s always tempting to focus on activities rather than results. No doubt you and your team work hard, but activities like calls made, client visits, meetings attended, hours worked, emails sent, and effort expended don’t necessarily translate into profits or growth.

An activity-based mindset keeps you focused on busyness rather than measurable outcomes. Just like running flat out on a treadmill, it’s exhausting, but the view never seems to change!

Results-focused leaders cut through the noise and identify what matters most. They measure the results that move the business forward, define clear outcomes (hint: outcomes are nouns, while activities are verbs) for each member of their team, and then hold them accountable to deliver.

The key is to ruthlessly question whether what you’re measuring correlates with tangible business progress and yields a return on your investment to operate the firm. Activities might feel productive, but they’re a means to an end, never the end itself.

4. Instances <—> Patterns

Leaders focused on instances consume their resources addressing individual situations or problems. I see this frequently in client executive team meetings when an operational problem occurs and they focus intently on the one instance. They’ll spend thirty minutes dissecting a single error, misstep, or project delay, and while they often resolve the problem, they rarely step back to see the bigger picture.

When I notice a team in the weeds like this, I’ll often interrupt to ask, “What’s the broader pattern here?” This shifts the discussion from reactive problem-solving to more strategic, sustainable solutions. In my experience, there are always patterns to discern and resolve that generate a far higher return for the business than fixing a single instance.

Pattern-focused leaders zoom out and ask what’s really going on. When they see the similar issues surface multiple times, they’re positioned to address the root causes instead of merely treating the symptoms.

5. Being the Genius <—> Being the Genius Maker

There’s a predictable career progression that undermines many managers and leaders. You become great as a worker, get promoted to manage others because of your success and expertise, then continue to be the expert for your team, even though your role has fundamentally changed. Consider the department head who prides themselves on being the go-to person for every technical question, or the manager who can’t delegate because “It’s easier to do it myself.” Every decision flows through them, every problem lands on their desk, and every creative solution originates from their mind.

Ironically, the mindset that made you successful as an individual contributor often becomes a liability when you manage and/or lead. Teams become entirely dependent on your thinking and growth becomes limited by your personal capacity.

One brain—no matter how brilliant—cannot scale beyond a certain point.

The alternative approach—what Liz Wiseman calls being a “genius maker” in her book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter—focuses on developing other people’s capabilities. Genius makers ask questions that lead others to solutions rather than providing the answers themselves. They measure their success not by how many problems they solve, but by how many problem-solvers, managers, and leaders they develop.

6. Staffing <—> Succession

Staffing-focused leaders worry about filling today’s open roles with people who can handle the current responsibilities and workload. They’re focused on job descriptions, immediate needs, and getting someone—anyone qualified—in the seat quickly to avoid a prolonged disruption to the business.

Succession-minded leaders, on the other hand, think strategically about developing people for needs and challenges that might not exist yet. They constantly coach and grow their team members, anticipating how roles will expand and evolve, and work backward to determine what development their people need to rise to the occasion over time.

The payoff is better business continuity and the ability to scale without constantly scrambling to fill critical gaps. Further, those at the succession end of this continuum build capacity for the future, which is required to sustain growth over time.

7. Producer <—> Investor

Producers do the work—they make the widgets, manage the details, roll up their sleeves, and get things done. They focus on solving problems through personal effort and expertise.

This mode of operating has its place, and it’s where many entrepreneurs begin their journey. The problem is when you don’t, can’t, or won’t evolve beyond it, you’ll eventually reach a point where you simply cannot grow or scale any more.

At the other end of this continuum, an investor focuses on risks and returns to allocate resources rather than doing the work themselves. For most firms, available resources include people, money, ideas, technology, equipment, and facilities.

Investor-minded leaders make decisions based on risk adjusted value creation, which is a far cry from where producer-minded people spend their time. Investors think about leverage and multiplication rather than individual contribution and, in doing so, create far more profitable and sustainable results.

Continually Move in the Right Direction

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” – Mark Twain

Your “A” team might indeed be someone else’s “C” team, but there’s a tremendous opportunity for improvement in the gap—both for you and for your organization. What separates the best leaders from the rest isn’t natural talent or lucky circumstances. Rather, it’s the willingness to clearly discern the reality of where you are right now, accept that reality, then do the work to improve.

Instead of thinking about leadership skills as something you either possess or lack, adopt a continuums framework and continually consider how you can shift further to the right from your present position.

The seven continuums we’ve outlined above will help you raise the bar to ensure your leadership becomes an accelerant for growth rather than a constraint.

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