If you are playing it alone, you can compete with an ambitious person as they stay ahead. You can ignore the slow-pokes, who lag behind. But in a team, you are stuck in a limbo.
Your work life can turn into a perpetual source of frustration like the one of Dr Watson. Sherlock Holmes always over-achieves with his sharp intellect, and Inspector Lestrade is booted around and asked to shup up when Sherlock is thinking. In this struggle between the over-achievers and the under-achievers, the average person is caught in a tussle.
The overachieving boss can make overwhelming demands from your work. You feel that there is no proper appraisal for the work done so far, job satisfaction is out of the window, unrealistic targets are being set and the whole team vibe goes sore with frustration.
The underachiever tugs the team in the opposite direction. Work is kept pending, performance is inefficient, presentations are soppy, and targets are never met, or achieved too late. These people can be the halting points in a smoothly flowing cycle.
While this diversity can make you feel frustrated, it can also be good for you. It exposes you to a variety of skills and experiences. Devising new means to motivate the under-achiever, and managing the enthusiasm of the over-achiever are tactics that can be very helpful in the long run of the professional life.
It increases innovation. The basketball term of “Helping the Helper” steps in when the work load increases. If someone is slow in making a presentation, someone else will come up with a smarter way to build a deck. All good players know they should support a teammate who’s under pressure. But the true greats know how to take it one step further. They fill the gaps left behind when one teammate goes to help another.
Though you may feel that the curve has peaked in the middle, the results are being averaged out, the mix of overachievers and underachievers can balance out the performance in a team. It helps us to calibrate our work with all sorts of team members, and that may be the secret to excellence in team work.
