The A Player cover art

The A Player

The Definitive Playbook & Guide for Employees and Leaders Who Want to Play and Perform at the Highest Level

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The A Player

By: Rick Crossland
Narrated by: Phil Schoen
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About this listen

Nothing is more important to your success than the quality of your team. In fact, they go hand in hand. Whether you are a CEO, senior executive, manager or an employee looking to raise his or her performance, The A Player is packed with proven strategies to get you to "A Player" status. Businesses filled with "A Players" are not only more profitable and able to share in that prosperity, but those "A Players" are happier and lead more purpose-filled lives as well.

The A Player will teach everyone on your team the required steps to achieve and sustain "A Player" performance and lead the charge in creating remarkable steps both personally and professionally.

©2017 Rick Crossland (P)2022 Rick Crossland Leadership Management Management & Leadership Business Inspiring Employment
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The A Player by Mark Murphy is a no-nonsense guide to identifying, hiring, and keeping top talent—the people who will actually make your business soar. In a growing SME, this book cuts straight to the heart of a challenge I live every day: great strategy and systems are meaningless without the right people in the right roles. Murphy defines an “A Player” as someone who consistently exceeds expectations, takes initiative, and aligns with your culture.

The book is packed with practical tools: scoring systems for candidate assessment, structured interview templates, and frameworks for onboarding and retention. It also emphasizes performance management and accountability: your top talent thrives only if expectations are crystal clear and underperformers are addressed quickly.

For a manufacturing business scaling from a tight team to 80+ people, this book offers a playbook for predictable hiring, sustainable high performance, and leadership leverage. The key lessons are simple but powerful: define your ideal A Player profile, assess relentlessly, onboard systematically, and manage with disciplined feedback. Murphy’s stories and analogies—like the “A Player Ladder” and “Talent Funnel”—stick because they are grounded in real-world dynamics and show exactly how top talent multiplies results.

Practical Applications for SMEs:

Build repeatable hiring systems that attract high-performers

Avoid costly mis-hires that slow growth and kill culture

Measure, manage, and retain top talent to compound performance

Align your leadership team around a single talent standard

Convert your workforce into a high-leverage engine that drives revenue, innovation, and culture

Bottom Line: Read The A Player if you want a blueprint to hire the right people, elevate your leadership, and systematically turn talent into results. It’s a commercial accelerator disguised as a leadership handbook.

A Player Will Change How You Build Your Team

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I listened to this book for work. Although, yes some aspects of the book are admirable. Easier said than done. Very cut and dry. Or black and white thinking. If you aren’t the highest most productive employee that sacrifices your whole entire world for your job and company you work for, then you are to start looking for a job elsewhere is the gist of the book. Rubbish read. Only angled to employers not employees. Would not recommend. Not a review from a “c player” a honest realistic view from a solid “b player”

Very black and white thinking

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