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Enough about the CEO! What about the rest of us?

In the August 2001 issue of Fast Company, Marcus Buckingham, a pioneering researcher and a global-practice leader at the Gallup Organization, identified five "attitude adjustments" that redefine leadership in business -- and rewrite the job description of the CEO. His interview showed him to be a truly rare thinker and consultant: He makes it his job to speak truth to power.

But most of Buckingham's research and writing, especially his two best-selling books, focus not on the performance of CEOs, but on the creativity, productivity, and job satisfaction of the rest of us -- the rank-and-file knowledge workers who are the difference between corporate success and failure. Indeed, his most recent book, Now, Discover Your Strengths (The Free Press, 2001), with coauthor Donald O. Clifton, may be remembered as one of the most quietly revolutionary -- and relentlessly useful -- books of its time.

The best you can hope from most business books is to learn a new way of looking at the world. Buckingham's latest book offers you something far more valuable -- the opportunity to learn something about yourself. In fact, you can take the book's title as an invitation. Each copy comes with a personalized ID number granting the reader full access to Gallup's StrengthsFinder Web site and a 180-question test that promises to identify your very own "dominant strength themes." More later on those strength themes -- and my own encounter with Buckingham's Web site. The first order of business is to understand what Buckingham's arguments mean for us and for our approach to work, professional growth, and job satisfaction.

It's possible -- and useful -- to boil Buckingham's worldview down to a single argument: The best way to do good work is to do what you're intrinsically good at. Yet chances are that none of the people in charge of your career -- your boss, your HR liaison, even you -- has a clue about what makes you tick. "We don't look in the mirror very often because we're frightened we won't see very much," Buckingham says. "We're not that special. We're not that good. We're not that smart. It's the old imposter syndrome. But the fact is, we're all filled with naturally recurring patterns that make us unique -- they're called talents. And our charge is to bloody well use them."

That is not another feel-good incantation to self-help. Like his earlier book, First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, 1999), Strengths draws on decades' worth of data on performance and productivity from the Gallup Organization. In this case, he starts off with a massive survey of 1.7 million employees in 101 companies from 63 countries. When asked the question "At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?", just 20% answered positively. In other words, 80% of workers feel miscast in their role. What's more, the longer an employee stays with an organization and the higher she climbs the traditional career ladder, the more negative the response to that question. No wonder, Buckingham goes on, given two of the most basic assumptions guiding our education system, training and development programs, and the traditional career path. The first assumption is that "everything is learnable." The idea is that a person is basically an empty vessel. Add reading, writing, arithmetic, and later, strategic thinking, people skills, and results orientation, and -- presto! -- one employable adult.