In every company there are A-players. The people who not only work hard, but actually care for the job and company. You have to know who they are and rely on them. They can be very vital to your company not only for their skills, but for their approach.

Kara Kalasky is a customer success manager at Khorus and has recently had a blog post over at Training Industry in which she details five steps to spotting the A-Players in your team. It’s a good read, and gives you a nice guide. And there are some pretty good reasons why you want to want to know them and work with them closely.

But first you have to know who these people are. Chances are, they aren’t the ones chatting to colleagues all day. Most likely they aren’t the office favorites, either. Not because people don’t like them, but because most of the time they are sitting and working.

A-Players usually are very devoted to the project they are working on. They take it to heart and want it to succeed. They can get disappointed even if their part is well done, but someone else’s is lacking. But they won’t use that for office politics. Instead, they will try to help out and offer support.

A-Players don’t run away from the problems. Since they are devoted on the job, they want the company to move forward. If they see a problem forming, they will want to talk about it. Listen to them. Really, listen and take note. Don’t simply say “yes, we will take it into consideration” and then forget about it. You will destroy your A-player like that. Tackle the problem as needed – offer additional training, set up courses, offer team support and so on.

A-Players love to set up goals and push themselves into achieving them. Often they do it sooner than expected. They are always ready to learn and use good and bad experiences to grow and develop. They can often go into great insights and details about why a project failed or succeeded. You should use this information to paint a better picture of what is going on within your company and improve the areas that need improving.

A-Players usually love to be creative. They can think of new ways to solve problems, they have lots of ideas. Maybe not all of the ideas will work, but that doesn’t matter. You should reward people who have ideas and want to be creative. This will motivate everyone to have and share ideas and before you know it, you will have a few really great, working ideas on your hands.