Optimize Your Team for Rapid Growth and Sustainable ROI

Every great team rises or falls on one simple truth: performance is collective. You can’t win if the wrong people are in the wrong seats. But when talent aligns with role, everything clicks.

Consider how this plays out in different arenas.

Turns out, in soccer (or football for the rest of the world), having a weak link is bad. Weak links get exploited. One defender drifts out of position, the formation collapses, and the opponent scores. You can’t hide poor alignment.

Even in the military, there have been lots of studies on what builds a high performance team.. German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord once classified officers using a brutal but brilliant matrix: clever or stupid, industrious or lazy.

• Clever and Industrious – These make excellent staff officers.

• Clever and Lazy – These make the best commanders.

• Stupid and Lazy – These are useful in routine duties.

• Stupid and Industrious – These are dangerous and must be removed immediately.

What about business?

Yep, turns out we have a playbook to creating a high performance team too.

Success isn’t about hiring more…surprise!…it’s about alignment. You win when your best players are in the right seats, your formation stays tight, and you remove the wrong energy from the field.

That’s the art of modern team design…knowing who to build around, who to coach up, and who to let go.

Let’s unpack this…

Why This Matters Now…

Markets reward lean, fast, operator-led companies. Gallup (2023) recently found that only 23% of employees are engaged, with disengagement costing the global economy $8.8T annually (about 9% of global GDP)...wow!

When energy is misallocated, growth stalls, margins compress, and A-players quietly leave.

Quick story…

A founder at $8.5M ARR thought he had a “selling problem.” Sales was stuck, ops was drowning, and meetings felt like molasses.

We ran a 2-week audit and suggested the following: moving a high-initiative problem solver into fixing Inventory forecasting, moved the two best sellers off weak product lines, and exited one consistent blocker (more about this later).

In 45 days: sales cycle time went down 38%, close rate up went 26%, and the founder got his Fridays back. Same team. Better seats.

How To Optimize People Performance…

Most small business owners don’t understand how to optimize their team for the best performance.

The right people are often sitting in the wrong seats, while the wrong ones quietly shit on momentum and morale.

Optimizing your current team starts with seeing clearly who multiplies value and who drains it.

The best leaders develop a mental model for spotting performance…not just who’s “good” or “bad,” but who creates the highest return on energy (ROE).

Every team has three types of people: builders, stabilizers, and blockers.

🔹 Builders are the growth engines:

🔹 Stabilizers provide the reliability layer:

🔹 Blockers create drag and noise:

In plain english…

Impact is what delivers results.

Energy is how they affect others while doing it.

High Impact + Positive Energy = Multiplier.

Low Impact + Negative Energy = Liability.

Think of it this way…

📡 Radio tower vs. static: Builders transmit clear signals that align actions; blockers add static that scrambles decision quality.

🏎️ Pit crew vs. loose lug nuts: Stabilizers are your pit crew. They don’t drive the car, but you don’t win races without them tightening everything down.

What to do this week…

Run a 60-minute ROE scan on your team.

LEGEND: Simple scoring lens

• Impact (I): 1–5 — shipped outcomes tied to revenue, margin, or risk reduction.

• Energy (E): -2 to +2 — how they affect the team’s clarity, speed, and morale.

• ROE Class:

Remember…your objective as the founder is to:

Develop the ecosystem so multipliers compound, stabilizers stay steady, and blockers don’t stick around.

Implementing the full system…

After assessing your people, then you’d want to move into each of the next stages…

Re-seating your top 20%.

Shielding and systemizing your stabilizers through living and owned SOP’s, performance roles, visible SLA metrics, exception handling.

Structure a turnaround plan for blockers with specific changes and success criteria, meeting cadence and binary path to move forward or out.

Optimizing your operating rhythm through specific changes designed for your builders and stabilizers to flourish.

Identify small bets that could compound through builder missions, guardrails, and incentives.

Final Thoughts

Most small businesses are not optimized for people performance. To get there, you need the right staff in the right formation.

As we talked about above…promote the multipliers, protect the stabilizers, and remove the blockers.

This is Issue 25 of Modern Operators. We help founder-led businesses scale smarter by turning clarity into their ultimate growth lever. Reply with your #1 operations headache and I’ll send you a custom playbook.