Are You Too Good? You’re Not Alone

Captured By The Agile Bamboozle ‘Would You Reconsider Your Assumptions?’

Are You Too Good? You’re Not Alone

Or: How Excellence Became Our Beautiful Problem

I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I’m pretty sure I’ve cracked the code on one of life’s more paradoxical challenges: you can absolutely be too good at things. And before you roll your eyes at what sounds like the world’s most privileged complaint, hear me out.

The Excellence Problem

Here’s what happened to me, and I suspect it’s happened to you too. I got really good at my job. Like, uncomfortably good. Not just competent—genuinely excellent.

And that’s when the problems started.

When Good Equals Different

Here’s what they don’t tell you about excellence: it doesn’t fit into systems designed for average performance. When you consistently operate at a level above the established norm, you’re not just doing good work—you’re operating outside the parameters the system was built to handle.

Think of it as a bell curve. Far to the left are people so unsuited that they never get hired. Far to the right are people so excellent that they’re way out of place in most systems and organisations.

Most systems—whether deliberately designed or naturally evolved—optimise for the statistical middle because that’s where the majority of the distribution exists. The left tail gets filtered out through hiring processes, performance standards, and correction mechanisms. But the right tail? They get hired. They meet all the standard criteria. They even exceed them.

Then they discover they’re trying to operate in environments that were never designed for their level of capability.

Your capabilities exceed what the infrastructure can process. Your output doesn’t match the categories available. Your performance breaks the framework that was designed to manage predictable competence within anticipated ranges.

The Cost of Being Different

The really insidious part is how excellence gets systematically wasted. When you consistently operate at a higher level, you discover that most environments simply can’t utilise what you’re capable of. Your competence exceeds what the system can leverage or accommodate.

The Architecture of Mediocrity

Most organisational structures are designed around one primary function: managing average performance. They have elaborate systems for performance improvement plans, disciplinary processes, and managing people who aren’t meeting standards. Average performance is treated as the invisible baseline—expected, unremarkable, requiring no particular attention or infrastructure.

But here’s the deeper issue: most managers never even dream that some people could be genuinely excellent. Their mental models of human capability simply don’t include the possibility of someone operating at a truly excellent level. They think in terms of ‘good enough,’ ‘above average,’ and ‘solid performer’—but genuine excellence is outside their conceptual framework entirely.

So when they encounter it, they don’t recognise it as excellence. They treat excellent people as if they’re just slightly above-average performers, completely missing the magnitude of the difference.

Excellence breaks the system because the system was never designed to recognise or accommodate it. There are no processes for what to do with someone who consistently operates well above the mean. No clear paths for people whose capabilities don’t fit predetermined categories. No frameworks for accommodating genuine competence.

We have elaborate mechanisms for dealing with the left tail of the performance curve—training programmes, performance improvement plans, remedial support. But we have almost nothing for dealing with the right tail. Excellent people are left to figure out how to function in systems that simply weren’t built with them in mind.

Excellence is as much of an edge case as incompetence, just on the opposite end. Both are equally problematic for systems calibrated for the statistical middle.

The organisational chart doesn’t have a box for ‘person whose work output consistently exceeds expectations in ways that create systemic discomfort.’ The budget doesn’t have a line item for ‘managing the disruption caused by actual excellence.’

There have been exceptions. Sun Microsystems famously created the Distinguished Engineer track—recognition that some of their best technical people shouldn’t be forced into management just to get advancement and compensation. But these approaches were rare anomalies, not industry standards. Most organisations never bothered to build infrastructure for genuine excellence.

So instead, these systems do what all systems do when encountering something they weren’t designed to handle: they try to force the anomaly back into familiar patterns. They become uncomfortable with the disruption. They find ways to neutralise or eliminate what they can’t categorise.They view the excellent performer as a trouble maker.

The problem isn’t the excellent performer. The problem is that most organisations simply never build infrastructure for genuine excellence, preferring to force everyone through the same patterns regardless of where their actual capabilities lie.

In Lean methodology, they call this the Eighth Waste: underutilisation of people’s talents and capabilities. Organisations obsess over eliminating the traditional seven wastes in their processes, but completely ignore that they’re systematically wasting their most valuable human capital by not building proper infrastructure for excellence.

It’s particularly ironic—companies will spend enormous resources optimising their supply chains and manufacturing processes whilst simultaneously underutilising the people who could most improve their operations. They’re paying for excellence but designing systems that can only extract average value from it (at best).

It’s like having a master chef on staff but only letting them make fries and burgers, then hiring expensive consultants to figure out why your restaurant isn’t performing better.And then firing the master chef for complaining too much.

The Frustration

Being too good means operating in systems that consistently underutilise your capabilities. You can see solutions that others can’t. You can execute at levels that the infrastructure wasn’t designed to support. You can deliver results that exceed what the organisation knows how to handle.

But none of that matters if the system can’t process it. Your excellence becomes irrelevant in environments that can only extract average value from it. You find yourself constrained not by your abilities, but by the limitations of everything around you.

This is Deming’s 95/5 rule in action: 95% of performance problems stem from the system, not the individual. When excellent people find themselves frustrated or underutilised, it’s not because there’s something wrong with them. It’s because the systems around them weren’t designed to handle their level of capability.

But Here’s the Thing…

I’m not suggesting we all become deliberately mediocre. Excellence is still worth pursuing, and capability is still a superpower. But we might choose to recognise that the problem isn’t with us—it’s with systems that evolved for the statistical middle and literally cannot grok what we represent.

The issue is simply being excellent in systems that aren’t designed for it. You’re a statistical outlier trying to operate in environments calibrated for the statistical middle.

The Fellow Travellers

If you’ve made it reading this far, you’re probably in the same boat. You’re probably really good at things, and it’s probably causing you problems.

You’re probably discovering that your competence itself is the source of your professional challenges. Not what you’re asked to do with it, but simply having it in the first place.

You got through the hiring process because you met all the standard criteria. You even exceeded them. But now you’re discovering that excellence is as much of an edge case as incompetence—just on the opposite end—and equally problematic for systems that weren’t built with you in mind.

So here’s my question: what if we got really good at being strategically selective about where we deploy our excellence? What if we reserved our ‘too good’ for the things and places that can actually handle it? Or are there so few that this consigns us to unemployability?

Because the truth is, the world needs people who are really good at things. But it doesn’t need us to be excellent everywhere, for everyone, all the time.

Sometimes the most excellent thing you can do is choose where to be excellent.

Are you too good for your own good? I’d love to hear about it. Would you be willing to share your stories of ability-related problems—the weirder, the better.

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