If you look up the word mediocre you will probably end up with something like average quality. I prefer a broader explanation, for me mediocrity is someone with average skills and zero talent. You will get bby in life meeting mediocre people almost in every organization, family, school everywhere you look. In the most successful companies and the absolute failing ones to.
The surprise will come when you find those people in leadership positions, with decision making power and the ability to alter the course of life for people and organizations, with such limited capabilities and no talent at all, the writing is on the wall on what will happen next.
You will stop to question your evaluation of such individuals maybe they are not, which is to be fair a possible scenario none of us are immune to mistakes but let’s for the sake of argument assume that there has been a consensus on a certain individual’s mediocrity. Why are they in the place they are in? From my standpoint answer is pretty simple. Let’s go back to the definition I laid out up front. The first part said “Average Skills” exactly as the word implies there will be spikes above the average every now and then, there will be spikes below the average and it really depends on where you catch that person.
If is very reasonable to assume that a mediocre individual managed to display a spike of above average skills at the right time or possibly in front of the right people resulting in a fake realization that they are capable of performing in that manner all the time, and that’s all it takes really, if you are the at the right place in the right time, good things are bound to happen even to mediocre people.
Thinking deeply into this you can easily fall into a trap of thinking that this a discriminatory way of looking at people, but if you dig deeper into your thinking, you will realize that mediocre people by themselves are not the issue, the issue is leaders who pick mediocre individuals to leadership positions, most probably because they remind them of themselves!