For many years now, American business culture has fostered a form of star worship that even a Hollywood agent might find excessive. Starting in the early 1980s with the first waves of corporate restructuring that sent millions of company men and women into the streets, the American work force's steady-Eddie performers gradually lost status to corporate hotshots and those with star potential. In the so-called war for talent, A-list players were showered with cash, stock options and perks. And in the boom years of the late 1990s, they could do no wrong. Yet it was mostly the A players who failed spectacularly at firms such as Enron and WorldCom and countless dotcom wonders.
Now companies that have been overlooking their B players may start to regret it. When job demand picks up, those solid-performing workers who constitute the heart of a business are likely to start migrating to places that make them feel more appreciated. "Long-term performance depends far more on the contributions of B players than many firms have come to realize," says Thomas DeLong, a professor at Harvard Business School. DeLong describes B players as the middle 80% of a company's work force, employees who are neither the hotshots (the A's) nor the weakest links (the C's).
But they are the angriest. "People are so undervalued here--we feel like commodities," says a software engineer in General Electric's medical-systems division whose gripe echoes those of millions of mid-level professionals in corporate America. She says employees like her have been pressured to put in longer hours and take on more work to help her unit make its bottom-line numbers. GE's corporate elite are facing the same pressures, of course. But as anointed members of the GE star track, they're likely to spend 18 months to two years at a particular business before transferring to another--often leaving problems among the B's, a less mobile group, for another set of stars to address.
"GE is a great company in terms of benefits, and I'm glad to have a job," she says. "But in two years, when my kids are gone, I doubt that I'll put up with this." Responds GE medical-systems spokesman Patrick Jarvis: "We do employee surveys every year to find out what employees are thinking and to improve the environment."
B players, says DeLong, are a company's critical caretakers as firms go through the typical upheavals: CEO shuffles, corporate mergers, abrupt strategy changes. Because the B players tend to think of the company as a family, they often take the time to nurture and train inexperienced employees. The B's can save companies from disastrous oversights and unethical corner cutting, since their ties to the firm tend to be stronger than those of free agents who hopscotch from job to job. And they know how to unjam the copier. One reason Enron, a company packed with hotshots, went bankrupt was that good, solid employees--like whistle-blower Sherron Watkins--were shunted aside in the gold rush. "B players strive for advancement but not at all costs. This attitude is anathema to most A players," DeLong and co-author Vineeta Vijayaraghavan recently wrote in the Harvard Business Review.