... [P]eople are usually more or less capable at a given task... True. But few if any “jobs” held by knowledge workers are just a single, repetitive task, over

... [P]eople are usually more or less capable at a given task... True. But few if any “jobs” held by knowledge workers are just a single, repetitive task, over and over, like Demming was observing when he studied productivity on assembly lines. So while you may find a team has variation among members when looking at a single skill, as a manager it’s really hard to pin down the success of the team to one thing done by one person. In fact, from a management point of view, “success” is often “we got the job done” and not “everything was done perfectly”, so a team member who does one or two things really well is treated more or less like an outlier, and their work averages out.[1] Unless... Unless the manager has unwittingly pitted the members of the team against each other, in order to find the “top performer”! This will reduce productivity of the team overall as they waste time defending against each other. A net loss overall. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when competition is healthy, but quite often it’s applied as a kind of micro-optimization that doesn’t really benefit the organization overall. (Many orgs have enough money to allow this nonsense, unfortunately.) [1] Try and write a job description for someone on your team, and you’ll quickly realize how complicated it is to even know what skills are key, which are nice to have, etc.