Remember that there are three areas of competence on the job — your job skills, your motivation to do the work, and your ability to integrate and work well with your manager and coworkers. One needs all three to have success on the job.

There are times when all we see is the “integrating well with management and coworkers” part and assume a “Hail Fellow, Well Met” person when, in fact, they do a lot of valuable work that we just don't see. The Great Recession *probably* found most of the non-valuable managers out there, though I have no empirical evidence to point to it. But I would dig a bit deeper past a first impression of a person right now to see if there is valuable work being delivered.

Hail Fellow, Well Met doesn't deliver that value.

I really enjoyed your post.

Believe many of us have worked for or with Hail Fellow, Well Met at one time in our lives. Quite often, those of us (engineers, technicians, project managers, etc) charged with providing value (fixing things…….) run afoul of Hail Fellow, Well Met because our solution isn't “packaged” (the likeable quotient) correctly for the customer. Therefore, it is also incumbent upon those charged with adding customer value to do so professionally, with diplomacy, with an understanding of internal customer politics and with a keen understanding of how our customers may perceive our solution/advise. Oh yeah, and if we can do all of these things in a likeable manner, better for us as well.

Regardless, Hail Fellow, Well Met will keep doing what they've always done because that is what they do.

Great post Scot.

Best Rgs,

Steve

Nice post Scot.