Not everyone is equally talented

Everyone is talented. Certainly not everyone is as talented as everyone else, but every individual has certain things they are good at, and certain things they suck at. Assuming you are a manager, your first task is to figure out what talents each of the people working for you have. This is not easy. It requires more than looking at their resume. Most of the important talents that people have live underneath the over processed job descriptions and functional roles most organizations have created for talented people to live in. Good managers must step back from the hierarchy, bureaucracy, and formalization, and actually see people not just for what they do, but for what they can do, that they currently are not. This includes things that they may never have had the chance to do, as well as talents that they may not have recognized themselves. A manager that treats his reports as cogs in a wheel is guaranteed to get the performance of a cog in a wheel. But a manager that develops and grows people into new strengths and abilities will always get more out of their team that their cog minded peers will of theirs.