First, Break All the Rules

ROAD warriors — the army’s pithy phrase for those sleepy folk who are happy to “retire on active duty”?

The manager role is to reach inside each employee and release his unique talents into performance. This role is best played one employee at a time: one manager asking questions of, listening to, and working with one employee. Multiplied a thousandfold, this one-by-one-by-one role is the company’s power supply. In times of great change it is this ro

Everyone has certain recurring patterns of behavior. No one can take credit for these talents. They are an accident of birth, “the clash of the chromosomes,” as the ethologist Robert Ardrey described them. However, each person can and should take credit for cultivating his unique set of talents.

Second, this solution is supremely efficient. The most efficient route that nature has found from point A to point B is rarely a straight line. It is always the path of least resistance. The most efficient way to turn someone’s talent into performance is to help him find his own path of least resistance toward the desired outcomes.

But it does mean that great managers are aggressive in trying to identify each person’s talents and help her to cultivate those talents. This is how they do it: They believe that casting is everything. They manage by exception. And they spend the most time with their best people.

The solution is as elegant as it is efficient: Define the right outcomes and then let each person find his own route toward those outcomes. This solution may sound simple. But study it more closely and you can begin to see its power.

An employee may join Disney or GE or Time Warner because she is lured by their generous benefits package and their reputation for valuing employees. But it is her relationship with her immediate manager that will determine how long she stays and how productive she is while she is there.

Striving talents explain the why of a person. They explain why he gets out of bed every day, why he is motivated to push and push just that little bit harder. Is he driven by his desire to stand out, or is good enough good enough for him? Is he intensely competitive or intensely altruistic or both? Does he define himself by his technical competence

Talented employees need great managers. The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.