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Organizations often pour enormous energy into fixing weaknesses, solving failures, and rescuing underperformers. Conventional management wisdom teaches leaders to spend most of their time helping their strugglers improve. On the surface, this seems fair and responsible. After all, preventing mistakes appears essential for protecting customers, results, and reputations. Yet decades of research suggest that this instinctive approach is fundamentally misguided. Excellence does not come from repairing what is broken. It comes from studying and investing deeply in what works extraordinarily well. The greatest managers understand that the only way to build a truly exceptional team is to learn from their best people — not their weakest. Excellence has its own patterns, its own motivations, and its own surprising behaviours, none of which can be discovered by analysing failure.
This blog explores why the path to greatness runs through your top performers, how organizations unintentionally suppress excellence, and why focusing on average performance limits growth. Drawing from insights popularized by Marcus Buckingham in First, Break All the Rules, it reframes what it means to lead people well and offers a compelling argument for spending the most time with those who show the most promise.
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker
Why Studying the Average Leads to Average Results
Across industries, the concept of “average” dominates how organizations think and operate. Customer service centers calculate the average number of calls a representative should handle each hour. Restaurants plan their staffing based on the average number of diners. Sales territories are carved up based on what the average salesperson can manage. At a systems level, averages help predict workloads and allocate resources. But when “average thinking” creeps into the management of people, it becomes a trap.
Many managers use average performance as the bar against which individuals are judged. Employees are ranked by how far above or below average they are. Bonuses are calculated as multiples of the average. Most damaging of all, managers devote disproportionate time to lifting their weakest performers up to a minimally acceptable middle. Meanwhile, their best employees — the only ones with true potential for excellence — are often left to run on autopilot.
This approach feels safe because it focuses on problem prevention. Yet it eventually leads to mediocrity. Average benchmarks can never reveal what excellence looks like; they only show what is typical. The greatest managers reject this mindset entirely. They evaluate performance not by the middle of the bell curve but by the right-hand edge. They understand that only those who are already above average have the capacity to grow into exceptional contributors. Improvement is not evenly distributed; it accelerates where talent already exists.
The goal should not be to raise everyone to average. The goal should be to push the talented toward greatness. This requires a fundamental shift: managers must spend far more time with their best people, studying how they work, what motivates them, and what conditions allow their strengths to flourish.
Why Failure Cannot Teach Excellence
There is much value in understanding why systems fail or why employees struggle. From errors and inefficiencies, leaders learn where processes break down, where customers lose trust, and where bottlenecks form. But none of this teaches what excellence looks like. Failure and excellence do not exist on a single continuum. They are fundamentally different states with different causes, patterns, and drivers.
If a manager devotes most of their attention to failure analysis, they will become extremely articulate about what doesn’t work. However, they will be no closer to understanding the unique behaviours that produce outstanding results. Excellence is not merely the absence of problems; it is the presence of distinctive strengths that cannot be uncovered by fixing weaknesses.
The most striking examples of excellence often look nothing like what traditional management wisdom expects. Outstanding housekeepers, for instance, may lie on a guest’s bed to test the ceiling fan — a behaviour that inexperienced cleaners might also do for entirely different reasons. Top table servers express clear opinions to customers, something mediocre staff might be warned against. The best salespeople routinely experience call reluctance, a trait that would normally be misinterpreted as insecurity. Great nurses form strong emotional bonds with patients, despite many organizations discouraging such closeness.
Without studying excellence directly, managers frequently impose policies to prevent behaviours they believe indicate poor performance, unaware that those same behaviours may be integral to high performance. By focusing on failure, they inadvertently suppress success.
Learning from Your Best: The Nursing Example
One of the strongest illustrations of this principle comes from Gallup’s research with a major European healthcare provider. The goal was to identify what distinguished their best nurses from their average ones. Using supervisor ratings, researchers selected one hundred top nurses and one hundred typical performers, then conducted extensive interviews to understand what talents the best nurses shared.
One of the most powerful traits discovered was something Gallup termed “patient response.” For great nurses, caring was not just an obligation; it was a psychological need. They instinctively noticed opportunities to care, and their emotional reward came from seeing patients respond. Every small improvement fuelled their energy and resilience. This single talent protected them from emotional exhaustion and gave meaning to their demanding work.
But when Gallup shared this insight with the hospital’s management, leaders responded with discomfort. They insisted that nurses should not become too close to patients, because fast-moving patient rotations meant nurses might return from a single day off to find their patients moved or discharged. To avoid nurses feeling hurt or destabilized, management instructed them to maintain emotional distance.
This policy, though well-intentioned, created widespread suffering. The nurses were stripped of their most powerful source of motivation. Patients felt more isolated, weakening recovery outcomes. Managers faced the consequences of low morale, declining patient satisfaction, and rising costs.
The deeper issue was not that the hospital lacked a perfect operational model. It was that decision-makers failed to consult their best people — the only individuals who fully understood what excellence required. If those top nurses had been asked how to balance emotional connection with operational needs, they might have designed a system far superior to the cold, assembly-line approach that ultimately harmed everyone involved.
The lesson is clear: whenever an organization ignores the voices of its most effective performers, it risks dismantling the very conditions that allow excellence to exist.
Excellence Grows Fastest Where Talent Already Exists
Another compelling example illustrating the explosive potential of top performers comes from the story of Jean P., a data entry employee whose achievements redefined what was considered possible in her field. The national average for data entry was 380,000 keypunches per month. Many managers would use this figure to set expectations, calculate staffing, and forecast productivity. Jean, however, started her job already punching 560,000 keys per month — about 50 percent above average.
Instead of congratulating her briefly and then shifting focus elsewhere, her manager invested time in understanding her strengths and motivations. He observed how she worked, how her speed seemed to increase her accuracy, and what emotional drivers kept her engaged. Jean, fiercely competitive and delighted by measurable progress, responded enthusiastically to challenges.
Within three months, she reached one million keypunches per month. Shortly after, she set a personal goal of averaging 110,000 keystrokes per day — enough to reach two million in a month. Within six months, she surpassed that milestone as well. Eventually, she achieved an astonishing 3.5 million keypunches in a single month. Meanwhile, the average performance of her colleagues rose dramatically because the organization used her profile as the model for hiring and development.
Jean’s journey proves a critical truth: top performers have the greatest potential for growth. Average performers can be coached to avoid mistakes, follow rules, and meet standards, but they rarely leap into extraordinary territory. In contrast, those with true talent can improve exponentially when given focused attention, meaningful goals, and a supportive environment.
Managers who devote their time to their strongest people unlock performance levels that far exceed what average-driven planning can ever imagine.
Conclusion
Excellence is never discovered through the study of failure, the pursuit of average, or the constant rescue of weak performers. It emerges when managers choose to spend most of their time with their best people — watching them, learning from them, listening to them, and nurturing their strengths. The most extraordinary insights in any organization are hidden in the everyday actions of its most exceptional contributors. Their talents reveal what is possible, what needs to change, and how systems should be designed.
When leaders stop focusing on what is broken and start investing in what is brilliant, teams grow stronger, standards rise, and innovation flourishes. The fastest path to improvement is not to pull struggling performers up the middle, but to help gifted performers soar far beyond it. Great managers do not chase average. They chase excellence — and they find it by spending time with the people who embody it.
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