In my opinion, extremes are bad in most things, and the same is true here. High self-monitoring is good when it means being in tune with social situations and adjusting to fit the situation; but it becomes bad when it reaches the extreme of being completely different people depending on whom one is interacting with.

By the same token, relatively low self-monitoring is fine in some jobs, when it means being genuine with everyone; but it becomes bad when it reaches the extreme of inability to adjust to social situations at all.

The idea that all low self-monitors are jealous of high self-monitors is ridiculous on its face. In fact, there are excellent reasons to be disgusted with extremely high self-monitors - they are almost never genuine and will tell you anything to get what they want.

Balance is the key. If one is interested in climbing the corporate ladder, the ideal is probably moderately high self-monitoring. If one is more interested in doing a particularly job (engineering, programming, whatever) for the long run, the ideal is probably moderately low self-monitoring.

We think these 'chameleons' are nothing more than lying sacks of dog poop who will do anything, say anything and be anything just to get ahead, and will fold, spindle and mutilate the truth till it conforms to their temporarily molded image.

I've observed people for a long time, and a number of things about your article and comments ring false:

* The division of people into high and low self-monitors

* The assumption that someone being their best self will get along with everyone

* The assumption that people designated here as 'low self-monitors', when criticizing people designated as 'high self-monitors', are simply un-self-aware and jealous.

* The apparent privileging of the ability to get along with people over all other abilities (goes along with the idea that if you are being your best self you'll get along with everyone)

* The assumption that people who criticize office politics obviously have something wrong with them.

People might do well to remember that sociopaths — people with little or no conscience — are frequently extremely talented at social skills, and can often flawlessly make people like and get along with them in any environment. They often thrive in the world of office politics. And yet because of their lack of conscience, they are also usually doing extremely harmful things to other people in pursuit of their own selfish gains.

They are not the only people who might have high levels of social skills, of course. But they are the most extreme example of why getting along with everyone isn't a satisfactory gauge of someone's character. Some people get along with everyone because they're both nice people and socially skilled (those are two different things). Some people get along with everyone because they are manipulative and socially skilled.

I'm autistic, which most people believe means lacking in social skills, although I think it's a two-way street and research (genuine scientific research into autistic cognition, as opposed to pop-psychology platitudes about social skills being the most wondrous inventions since sliced bread) is starting to back me up on that idea.

Because I need certain assistance with things, I was once a client of an agency that provided that assistance. One of the people in management was a sociopath with good social skills.

I was the only person who could tell what sort of person she really was. Everyone else was charmed by her social skills, and thought that she was a really nice person.

She would, while being incredibly sweet and nice-seeming to most people the whole time (I don't know how all these supposedly socially-skilled people didn't pick up on how frightening she was), do a bunch of things like:

1. Start a program that locked a woman who had previously lived independently, into a bare room of her own home, and try to make it so that nobody knew this woman existed.

2. Promote people when clients reported abuse from the same people.

3. Try to pin abuse charges on the best staff there, the ones all the clients liked.

4. Either sanction abuse or neglect towards clients who questioned the power structure.

5. Win the trust of staff, enough to learn certain information about them, and then blackmail them with it later on so that they would quit instead of being fired, if they turned out to be good staff.

6. Tell one client (that I knew personally) that his staff person never wanted to see him again, tell the staff person that the client never wanted to see her again, forge emails from this client (who couldn't read or write) "complaining" about this staff person, etc.

7. When I started complaining about practices at this company, refuse to pay for any staff for me for months on end, and/or deliberately hire staff for me who were unqualified for the job (i.e. couldn't do the basic job requirements), etc.

8. Spread false rumors about people. (I'd fired exactly one staff person, who abused me, and gotten along with other staff fine, yet new staff were always told that I hated staff and went through them really fast, etc.) Lied to and about people to get them to mistrust and dislike each other, apparently for her own amusement.

There was one staff person at that company who did a very good job as staff. She even worked for me for free when she found out that this woman was not providing me with any staff. (During the time between that and when we could find a less corrupt agency.) She herself had been fired from the agency for having ethics.

Some people would say her social skills weren't so good.

Personally, if given a choice, I put ethical skills way before social skills on my list of things that are important for people to have. Ethics are really important. They are more important than whether someone can get along with everyone in the world or not.

Often, in fact, having ethics brings a person into conflict with a lot of people who are either highly unethical themselves (such as the woman I described above, who had wonderful social skills but no conscience), and also into conflict with people who do have ethics but are resistant to changing their practices. Often, having a strong sense of ethics is enough to cause some people to dislike you even if you also have a strong set of social skills.

I have spent my life being targeted by people who have a good ability to make most people like them, but terrible ethics. (At least I think deliberate cruelty is a sign of bad ethics.) There is no way in the world, after what I've seen, that my distaste for such people is borne out of jealousy. (And the reason I blame these people for what they did is not a tendency to blame people in general for everything bad that happens to me, but because I tend to think that if one person is hitting or making fun of someone else without provocation it doesn't take a social genius to figure out which person is responsible.)

In fact, I have no distaste for the ones whose sense of ethics kicks in eventually and causes them to change their ways. Nor do I have any distaste for ethical people with good social skills. I do have strong distaste for people who use excellent social skills to skate along with horrible ethics without getting caught, and pick on people whose social skills (by most standards) aren't so great, because they think it is fun.

I've met people who are genuinely nice, whose social skills are very good, and who are very ethical. But I would never measure someone's ethics or character by something as superficial as their social skills. Perhaps my lack of standard social awareness makes me blind to most of the tricks many unethical people use to fool people into believing they're really nice people. My distaste for "office politics" comes from seeing people like that continually getting ahead over people who have strong ethical convictions. (Which might explain the way corporations act in general.)

I do, by the way, adapt to people all the time. But there are genuine limitations on how much adaptation is possible given assorted ways my brain and body works. I don't think these limitations make me inferior to people who can play the game really well, and I don't think that social skills are the end-all and be-all of the world. I would rather strong ethics be emphasized whether a person has good social skills or not. Social skills are sometimes more important in the smaller picture or the short run, ethics are more important in the larger picture and the long run.

The issue of self-montioring oneself is can you read other people and adjust yourself so that you can relate well to each other.

It's in the same vein as having an optimistic outlook, but they are two different predictors of workplace success.

For example, if passed over for a promotion, they might blame affirmative action and say "I'm a white male and couldn't compete with a hispanic woman for the job" (they do this without looking at the hispanic woman's performance to recognize that she was delivering what the company wanted and they were not).

When I wrote, "Chameleons don't lose jobs for being difficult to work with," I meant that low self-monitors *do* lose jobs for being difficult or unpeasant.

Everyone should strive to be a high self-monitor. The problem is, I think, that people need help — first, to know that they are not high self-monitors, and second to learn how to change.