How to Build a Team of All A-Players with Rick Crossland

10 snips

Jul 23, 2025

In this engaging conversation, Rick Crossland, a talent expert and founder of A Player Advantage, shares invaluable insights on building a team of high-performers, or 'A Players'. He discusses the importance of hiring based on coachability and the CART traits: Coachability, Accountability, Results, and Tenacity. Crossland also examines the role of AI in enhancing team performance while emphasizing that human intuition remains irreplaceable. With practical systems and tools, he outlines a path to elevate your organization's talent density and success.

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ADVICE

Key Traits to Recruit A Players

Prioritize recruiting fewer, better people with high talent density, focusing on coachability, accountability, results, and tenacity.
Coachability is the most critical trait and can be assessed by probing real-life stories and interests that require practice, like sports or music.

ADVICE

Testing Candidate Coachability

Test coachability by asking candidates to define it and share multiple real-life examples where they demonstrated it.
Avoid hypotheticals; value recent, factual evidence of coachability over general philosophies.

INSIGHT

Business Should Operate Like Sports

Running your business like a sports team with clear rules, playbooks, and meritocracy fosters high performance.
Unlike families, businesses shouldn't tolerate poor performers as they demoralize top talent and hinder success.

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What if 90% of your team were high-performers, and your revenue tripled?

In this episode, Bill is joined by Rick Crossland to break down what it really takes to build a high-performance team. Rick shares his system for recruiting, coaching, and retaining A players who consistently outperform their peers and elevate your entire organization. From hiring secrets to accountability culture to a powerful new tool for talent evaluation, this conversation is packed with ways to truly cultivate an extraordinary team.

Rick Crossland is a talent expert, the founder of A Player Advantage and the author of The A Player: The Definitive Playbook. He’s worked with brands like Johnson & Johnson, Ford, and Lifesavers, and now helps companies of all sizes build talent-dense organizations using proven systems and playbooks.

Topics explored in this episode:

(10:05) How to Test for Coachability

Why hypotheticals don’t work
Using real-life stories and hobbies to find the truth for ‘true’ coachability
The red flags of performative coachability

(18:00) How to Move to an All A Player Team

A normal business typically has only about 30% A Players.
How clear roles, accountability, and merit-based playbooks outperform “relational management”
Stop tolerating C players—they demoralize your top talent

(27:00) Can You Replace People with AI?

Can you use AI to enhance your team and your people’s performance?
Why top grading alone isn’t enough; you need a system and great recruiters

(33:15) The A Player Talent Analyzer

How to measure A player percentage accurately
Monthly evaluation: effort, results, and coaching logs
Why 50% of Bs can become As—but only if they want to

(44:30) Purpose Magnets and Coin-Operated Players

Why end-user-focused purpose matters most
How purpose-driven teams outperform paycheck-driven ones
Aligning personal purpose with company mission

Thanks to Rick Crossland for being on the show!

Learn more at: https://aplayeradvantage.com/

Get the book: The A Player

Connect with Rick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickcrossland/

Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast, is an international business coach who works with C-Suite leaders to achieve breakthrough growth.

Join Bill in the Growth Navigator Coaching Program: https://ScalingCoach.com/workshop

Bill on LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/BillGall

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Visit https://ScalingUp.com to learn more about Verne Harnish, our team of Scaling Up Coaches, and the Scaling Up Performance Platform, which includes coaching, learning, software, and summit. We share how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail. We help leadership teams with the biggest decisions around people, strategy, execution, and cash so that they can scale up successfully and beat the odds of business growth.

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