I love a good watermelon. In fact, last night I cut two of them up, trying to find one that was juicy and sweet, and unfortunately they were both just not great.
The thing about watermelons, or any fruits that you have to judge by the outside, is that you just have no clue what you're going to get. You can pick out the most beautiful watermelon in terms of color, grain, and appeal, and yet it can taste like an old sock. You have no clue what you're going to get until you do the work to see what's really inside.
The same goes with the people you encounter in your career. There are going to be some people who look really great on the outside, who show up packaged just right with the right look of support and intentions, yet when you start to see the real person, you learn they're very different than the outside sheen they put on.
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The hard part is that people are often a hell of a lot better at packaging themselves than watermelons are. They know what to say. They know when to smile. They know how to make you feel like they have your back. They know how to tell you exactly what you want to hear in the moment, and sometimes it takes months or even years before you finally cut through the surface and figure out what you've actually been dealing with.
I've worked with people who interviewed like absolute rock stars and turned out to be terrible teammates. I've worked for leaders who talked endlessly about culture, transparency, and putting people first, only to disappear the second things got difficult. I've also met people who didn't look particularly impressive on paper, weren't the loudest person in the room, and didn't have some polished corporate persona, yet they ended up being some of the best people I've ever worked with.
That's the problem with judging people too quickly. We are naturally drawn to presentation. The great resume. The perfect LinkedIn profile. The confident person in the meeting. The executive who knows how to work a room. We see the outside and start making assumptions about what's underneath it, even though we haven't actually cut the damn thing open yet.
Character doesn't usually show itself when everything is going well. You learn who someone is when there is pressure, when money is involved, when a promotion is on the line, when someone screws up, or when there is suddenly an opportunity for them to protect themselves at someone else's expense. That's when you start finding out whether the inside matches the outside.
Pay attention to how people behave when they don't need anything from you. Pay attention to how they talk about people who aren't in the room. Pay attention to whether they take credit when things go well and suddenly find someone else to blame when things go badly. Those little moments will tell you more about someone than almost anything they'll ever say directly to you.
The opposite is also true. Don't dismiss people simply because the packaging isn't perfect. Some of the best employees I've ever had weren't the most polished interviewers. Some of the smartest people I've worked with weren't great at selling themselves. Sometimes the watermelon with the ugly spot, weird shape, and questionable coloring ends up being the sweetest one in the entire pile.
Your career will get a lot easier when you stop placing so much weight on packaging and start paying attention to patterns. People will eventually show you who they are. They almost always do. Your job is to actually believe what you're seeing instead of continuously talking yourself out of it because you liked what you saw on the outside.
People will eventually show you who they are. Your job is to actually believe what you're seeing.
Last night I threw away two shitty watermelons. There was no fixing them. No amount of staring at them, hoping they would somehow become sweeter, was going to change what was inside. There are probably a few career relationships like that too. Sometimes you cut something open, finally see what you're dealing with, and the smartest thing you can do is stop trying to convince yourself it's good.