When Judging Coworkers: People Are a Package Deal

I've seen this pattern come up so often in the work world that I thought I'd mention it here.

Co-workers[1] will say they love one thing about you, X, but then ask whether you could also be better at another thing, Y; and often this happens when being good at X implies being bad at Y.

Take an introverted programmer. Many introverts self select for careers like programming. Some could argue that introversion makes you better at programming, that's your X.

But the first thing a company will want from such a programmer is to be more social, to do more presentations, to work all day in an open plan office, in other words to be an extravert[2], the Y, which is incompatible with being an introvert.

I've noticed that many qualities in a person come in clusters. It's rare to find a person that has a random combination of qualities from all over the spectrum. People are a package deal, and their qualities cluster.

Especially when you are really really good at something, in other words when you have an outlier quality, that outlier often pushes aside many other incompatible 'normal' qualities.[3]

If you like one skill in an employee or co-worker, but wonder why they can't just be better at another skill, consider that it might just not be in their nature.

[1] Managers mostly.

[2] Or at least to act like an extravert.

[3] This is my theory for why really smart people are often 'eccentric.'