My team has only “A” players. Why should I fire someone?

You shouldn’t. If you have evidence that your team is truly an all-star team then don’t fire anyone. My point here is less about firing than it is about on focusing on the stars. As Qui-Gon Jinn told the young Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars Episode I, “Always remember, your focus determines your reality.” I see this with my four young kids. It’s very tempting to give the misbehaving one a lot of attention but it’s actually better to focus on and praise the one who’s behaving well. It raises the bar for everyone.

If I fire someone, won’t I be constantly churning my team?

This is an unfortunate consequence of “forced ranking” where you have to fire, or at least, dock pay on individuals at the bottom of every team. You want to pay for performance but this can cause you to lose the wrong people. I think it makes more sense to identify the bottom 10% at the functional manager level (e.g. VP Engineering) rather than at the workgroup level. So if you have 50 engineers, identify the bottom 5 and take action. See Guy Kawasaki’s article on the Art of Firing. Another good resource is Will Herman’s "When To Get Rid Of The Best People That Work For You" which is a variant from “Jack Welch and the GE Way”

Is it really fair just to focus on the stars? Do they really need it?

Well, I cover this in my earlier post on Leading High Performance Teams. But here’s a fantastic article from Charlie Feld, an EDS executive I met this week. I thank Brad Feld (his nephew) for his blog entry where talks about this too. The point here is that these are your team's leaders and it's in your interest and theirs to nuture them in their career development.