The Middle Majority

In 2009, CA Technologies acquired a company I built with my wife, Cathy, over 10 years.

We had always been proud of the people who helped steadily build the company through their consistent performance.

But after the sale to CA, something surprising occurred. The team we had so carefully assembled seemed to lose its magic. Engagement, as measured by the Gallup Q12, plummeted. The culture wasn’t at all the same. Predictably, people began to leave.

I realized then that our advantage hadn't just been our people—it had been that those people were properly managed. Our company took a proactive, structured approach to people management, and once that system was gone, replaced with the baggier, less consistent approach of a behemoth like CA, our team started to look pretty darn average.

What happened? I see now that, by failing to offer structured management practices, CA failed to capitalize on our most critical group of employees.

Broadly speaking, a company’s employees can be divided by perfor…