But here's what really impressed me. Most companies would take a best practice like Ralph's whistle and say, "That's a great form of recognition. Let's give out whistles in every store." Best Buy did something much smarter: It extracted and spread the core lesson from Ralph's best practice, rather than institutionalizing the practice itself.

Attitude Adjustment #5

Don't assume that everyone wants your job -- or that great people want to be promoted out of what they do best.

There are two myths about talent that feed the conventional -- and misguided -- approach to career tracks and leadership development in most companies. The first myth: Talent is rare and special. Wrong. We all have talent. What's rare and special is a worker who finds a role that suits his or her talents. The second myth: Some roles are so easy that they don't require talent. Wrong again. We hear a lot about developing more respect for frontline workers and customer-facing employees, but peel the onion and you run into a rigid hierarchy of jobs. The compensation system evolves out of that hierarchy. So do titles and careers.

We say that we want to build world-class organizations. That's meaningless if we don't value world-class performance in every role. Yet the people who touch customers the most -- hotel housekeepers, outbound telemarketers -- get the least respect and the lowest paychecks. The assumption is that anyone can do that job and that nobody would want to do it if they were given a choice to do something else. Frontline talent has a prestige problem, and it's turning into a corporate-performance problem.

We studied the 3,000 housekeepers of a 15,000-room luxury-hotel chain. It turns out that great housekeepers are not beaten down by the relentless grind of cleaning rooms. On the contrary, they seem to be energized by doing the work. In their minds, the work they do asks that they be accountable and creative and that they achieve something tangible every day.

Unfortunately, the only way we have to reward excellence on the front lines is to promote people out of the very roles that they do best. We turn great housekeepers into supervisors, virtuoso shelf stockers into salespeople, and managers into leaders. A major challenge for CEOs is to define excellence in every role -- and pay on it, award titles on it, distribute prestige on it, and make it a genuine career choice.

Satisfaction at work depends on nothing more than self-knowledge. And that gets leaders right back to their main task of engaging their employees at every level. What are you doing to turn your people's talent into the kind of performance that thrills customers, whether those customers are internal or external? The beautiful thing about a culture that is built by focusing on individual strengths is that no one can steal it. And any advantage that's hard to steal is an advantage that lasts.

Polly LaBarre (plabarre@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor based in New York. Contact Marcus Buckingham by email (mbuckingham@gallup.com).

Sidebar: 12 Questions That Matter

If you want to build the most powerful company possible, then your first job is to help every person generate compelling answers to 12 simple questions about the day-to-day realities of his or her job. These are the factors, argue Marcus Buckingham and his colleagues at the Gallup Organization, that determine whether people are engaged, not engaged, or actively disengaged at work.

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment that I need in order to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the past seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission or purpose of my company make me feel that my job is important?
9. Are my coworkers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the past six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This past year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?