Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve

Lead each person on your team up the learning curve.

What's the secret to having an engaged and productive team? It's having a plan for developing all employees--no matter where they are on their personal learning curves.

Better morale and higher performance happen through learning, argues Whitney Johnson. In over twenty years of coaching, investing, and consulting, Johnson has seen that employees need continuous learning and fresh challenges to stay motivated.

The best bosses know this, and they know how to make it happen by thoughtfully designing people’s jobs around the skills they have today as well as the skills they'll need to be even more valuable tomorrow. That's how entire organizations stay competitive in an unpredictable, rapidly changing business environment.

In this book, Johnson explains how to become one of those bosses and how to build your A-team by:

• Identifying what your employees already know and what they need to learn
• Designing their jobs to maximize engagement and learning
• Applying a seven-step process for leading each person up their learning curve

We all want opportunities to learn, experiment, and grow in our jobs. When our bosses work with us to help us leap to new challenges, the result is a team that knows how to thrive, no matter what the future holds.

Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors, a tech-enabled talent development company, and an expert on smart growth leadership: growing your people to grow your company. Thinkers50 ranked her among the top ten management thinkers in the world in 2021, and in 2020 she was a Top Voice on LinkedIn, where she has 1.8 million followers. Johnson is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business Publishing's Corporate Learning division, and an award-winning executive coach and adviser to CEOs. She is the author of several bestselling books, including Disrupt Yourself and Build an A-Team, and hosts the weekly Disrupt Yourself podcast. You can reach her at wj@whitneyjohnson.com.