"Fidel," Sam Mendes, and Phil Jackson

There are many things you can do to avoid failing as a manager. You can set clear expectations. You can highlight the underlying purpose of people's work. You can correct people when they do something wrong. And you can praise people when they do something right. If you do all these things often and well, you will not fail as a manager.

However, neither will you necessarily succeed. To excel as a manager, to turn your people's talents into productive powerful strengths, requires an additional, all-important ingredient. Lacking this ingredient, no matter how diligently you set expectations, communicate purpose, correct mistakes, or praise good performance, you will never reach excellence. The all-important ingredient is Individualization, and this is what it sounds like:

Ralph Gonzalez works as store manager for Best Buy, the phenomenally successful consumer electronic retailer. A couple of years ago he was charged with resurrecting a troubled store in Hialeah, Florida, and with his passion, his creativity, and his slightly disconcerting resemblance to a youthful Fidel Castro, he made an immediate impression. To give his people an identity and a purpose he named his store The Revolution and dubbed each one of them a revolutionary (a particularly daring decision given the anti-Castro sentiment in south Florida, and yet it worked). He drafted a Declaration of Revolution and required that certain project teams wear army fatigues. He posted all the relevant performance numbers in the break room and deliberately overcelebrated every small improvement. And to drive home the point that excellence is everywhere, he gave all employees a whistle and told them to blow it loudly whenever they saw any employee or supervisor or manager do something "revolutionary." Today the whistles come so frequently that they drown out the Bob Marley CD playing over the loudspeakers, and the store's numbers confirm the whistling: No matter which number one uses -- sales growth, profit growth, customer satisfaction, or employee retention -- the Hialeah store is one of Best Buy's best.

But, surprisingly, when interviewed, Ralph didn't attribute his success to The Revolution, to the whistles, or even to his likeness to a young Castro. Instead, he said this: "Everything comes down to knowing your people. I always start by asking each new employee, 'Are you a people person or a box person?' In other words, is this person drawn to strike up a conversation with our customers, or does he love arranging the merchandise so that each product looks as if it's about to jump off the shelf? If he is a people person, I will keep watching to see whether he is just a natural smiler, in which case I'll probably put him on a checkout register or in customer service, or whether he also has the talent to sell, in which case I'll set him up to give multiple presentations of our newer, more complicated products during our busiest times. And then I'll watch to see how he likes to be managed. Right now I have a merchandise manager who needs me to be firm and challenging; he's that kind of guy, and he expects the same from me. But I also have an inventory manager who needs something very different from me. He wants me to explain myself very clearly and to talk about exactly why we need to do something. I keep watching like this, getting to know each of them. If I didn't, none of the other stuff would work."

Ralph Gonzalez, toiling away in relative obscurity in south Florida, is only one of the great managers who have founded their approach on the concept of individualization. During our interviews we discovered tens of thousands like him in factories, sales departments, hospital wards, and boardrooms. In fact, no matter where we looked, no matter how anonymous or glamorous the environment, when we studied great managers, they all seemed to share this passion for individualization.

When Sam Mendes, the young Oscar-winning director of the film "American Beauty," was asked by the British newspaper The Independent to describe the secret of his success, he said, "I am not a master-class director. I am not a teacher. I am a coach. I don't have a methodology. Each actor is different. And on the film set you have to be next to them all, touching them on the shoulder, saying, 'I'm with you. I know exactly how you're working.' . . . Kevin Spacey likes to joke and . . . do impersonations right up to the moment of action, on his mobile phone to his agent or whatever. The more relaxed, the more jovial he is, the more he's not thinking about what he does. When you say, 'Action,' he's like a laser beam. His relaxation leads to spontaneity. So to Kevin you're saying, 'Give me a Walter Matthau impersonation.' Annette Bening, on the other hand, is on her Walkman half an hour before the cameras roll, cutting off the set, focused down, listening to the music that the character would listen to. . . . All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate." He summed up: "My language to each of them has to suit their brain."

When Phil Jackson, the coach of the six-time NBA championship-winning Chicago Bulls, went to the L.A. Lakers, he brought with him all of the techniques that had served him so well in Chicago, the Zen philosophy, the meditation sessions, the triangle offensive system. But he also brought books -- a different book, it turned out, for each player. To the young superstar Kobe Bryant he gave a copy of "The White Boy Shuffle" by Paul Beatty because he felt that the story -- of a black boy raised in a predominantly white community -- reflected the challenges of Kobe's own upbringing in suburban Philadelphia. To Shaquille O'Neal, one of the most recognized and celebrated basketball players in the world, he chose Friedrich Nietzsche's autobiography "Ecce Homo" because it dealt with the subject of a man's search for identity, prestige, and power. Rick Fox, who is said to have aspirations as an actor, received a copy of the noted Hollywood director Elia Kazan's autobiography.

Why select different books for each player? According to Jackson, "The books are to show that I appreciate them and am focused on who they are."

In your role as manager you have the same opportunity. You will need to focus on who each employee is. You will need to learn each one's behavior and, as Sam Mendes did, find the right language "to suit their brain." The expectations you set will be slightly different for each person. The way you set them will also be different for each, as will the way you talk about your company's mission, the way you correct a mistake, the way you nurture a strength, and the way you praise, what you praise, and why. All your moves as a manager will need to be tailored to each individual employee.