Your frontline is sitting on gold. Your leadership meetings are sifting through gravel.

I can meet with a cross-section of your customer-facing employees for ninety minutes and know instantly whether you are as good as you think you are. These can be wealth managers, client advisors, flight attendants, front desk agents, or janitors.

This week proved it again.

I led an advisory session with ten top performers from a major brand. Three questions… then I let the room breathe. Listen. Probe. Watch the space between what they say and what they believe.

And here is what always surfaces when we probe on how they create memorable experiences for their customers:

"You are not describing great experiences. You are describing operational excellence."

A pause.

"That is expected business behavior in your sector."

Silence.

Then comes the flood.

"What if we…?"

"Why have we never…?"

"Why does no one…?"

A surge of possibility buried under years of habit.

The reality gap is never where leaders think it is.

You cannot lead change if the frontline is not creating with you. You cannot claim innovation if the people closest to the customer feel unheard.

And the unpopular truth is that you will never unlock their strongest ideas internally.

No matter how much psychological safety you believe you have built, you are still the boss. People edit themselves around hierarchy. It is human nature. Most leaders don’t want to admit that.

Put someone in the room who is outside the hierarchy and the real conversation begins. You get the real stories. The unfiltered truth. The ideas that have been waiting for an opening.

My favorite line this week came from a leader who has spent four decades in their industry:

"Forty years of entrenched behaviors. Finally someone who speaks my language, respects my wisdom, and fires me up to change for the better. I never thought that would happen here.”

And then the numbers I care about most.

A client PM sent an update yesterday:

Twelve months into implementation. Customer sentiment up double digits. Referral business jumping. Revenue pulling ahead while their sector declines Year-over-Year. And no parallel initiatives. No shiny side projects. Just one bet and the willingness to follow through.

This is what happens when smooth operations stop being the finish line and become the starting point.

When the frontline becomes a source of intelligence instead of compliance. When transformation becomes a discipline, not a talking point. So stop sifting through the gravel, and start mining the gold.