Why Your First Year as CEO Should Be Spent Building a 100% A-Player Leadership Team

A business coach from Tenfold Advisors, speaking directly to camera in a black branded polo, lays out a specific mandate for CEOs: get to a 100% A-player leadership team within your first year. The advice is grounded in client experience and aimed at founders who are still stuck in the day-to-day instead of operating through their leadership layer.

The CEO's Real Span of Control

The core idea is structural. The CEO runs the leadership team. The leadership team runs the company. That means the CEO's span of control is limited to a handful of key people, and every organizational problem needs to be solved through that layer. If accountability is missing or problems keep recurring, the fix is either coaching the responsible leader or replacing them. There is no path around this.

Freeing up the CEO to spend more time on strategy and coaching, rather than firefighting operational details, depends entirely on the quality of that leadership team. The CEO still needs to understand what is happening day-to-day and still coaches their direct reports. But the operating model only works when those direct reports can carry the weight independently.

What an A-Player Leader Actually Looks Like

The video gets specific about what qualifies someone as an A-player at the leadership level. It goes well beyond hitting targets. An A-player leader:

• Embodies the core values of the organization in how they work and lead.
• Hits KPI-driven goals consistently.
• Acts as an extension of the organization's will, aligned with its direction.
• Operates free of politics and drama.
• Holds themselves and others accountable without being managed into it.
• Knows how to coach and develop their own team members.

That is a high bar. The coach acknowledges it directly: "There is a lot we expect of those A-player leaders." But meeting that bar is what separates leadership teams that scale from ones that stall.

What Changes When You Get There

Drawing on direct client experience, the coach identifies three things that happen once an organization reaches a full A-player leadership team. First, problems get solved in ways that were previously impossible. Second, people development accelerates because strong leaders invest in growing their teams. Third, profitability scales with the organization in a way it had not before.

He describes this moment as transformational, and extends the principle beyond the C-suite. Any leader with a team underneath them should be asking the same question: do I have a 100% A-player group of leaders reporting to me? Getting to A-player leadership teams at every level of the organization is what unlocks real growth.

Key Takeaways

• The CEO's job is to run the leadership team; the leadership team runs the company.
• Every organizational problem should be solved through the lens of the leader responsible for that area, either by coaching them or by making a change.
• Set a hard target: 100% A-player leadership team within the first year.
• A-player leaders embody core values, hit KPIs, stay free of politics, hold themselves accountable, and develop their people.
• Once you reach that standard, problem-solving capacity, people development, and profitability all improve at the same time.
• This principle applies at every level of the organization, not just the top.