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Nobody loves paying for insurance until they need it. I’m sitting in that exact situation right now. I signed an agreement whe

Your company and the way you implement the rules are absolutely draconian. That was in the resignation letter from a senior engineer I’d I had brought in. I scooped him from another company. We were in a small town with limited resources and limited engineering talent available. Just over a year into the arrangement, he resigned.

The standard operating procedures we used, the ones we built a very successful company on, the ones he was coming into were draconian, according to him.

Last episode was about running a premortem on a contract. This one is about running one on a new hire. The same mechanism, different commitment.

And this one happened almost 15 years ago, so the lesson has had time to set. Here’s the story: experienced engineer, strong technically, personable. He was at a shop where he’d been for a while and he wasn’t happy. He felt they didn’t have a great handle on their business, their numbers, their project execution. Detail was missing, particularly on the financial side.

That happened to be one of the strongest points of the organization I worked for. Financial discipline, systems in place to track things, and an overall culture of discipline that kept the company growing.

Our conversations were good. The interview went well. He talked about what wasn’t working in his current gig. He never knew where projects were until they were over budget and in trouble. He needed the details. The lack of those details was driving him crazy. I listened and I heard a great values match. Someone who had been

Frustrated by a lack of discipline and a lack of financial insight, sounded like someone who would appreciate the flip side.

But here’s what I missed.

There are two readings on there wasn’t enough financial information. The first reading is that they wanted a lot more data. The second reading is that they wanted the ability to dictate what information they were getting or to have more control over it through write-offs, through how proposals were written up front, whatever the lever was.

Both are legitimate, both describe real people, but they describe different people. And those people, they need different roles.

I ran the first reading, but I didn’t run the second. That was the premortum that I didn’t do.

Here’s how you run it. Imagine the hire failing in the first six months. What’s the most likely reason? Then apply it to your candidate. His complaints in the interview weren’t about structure and discipline and data being wrong. They were about not being the one who authored or controlled them. Same words, but a different signal.

If I’d asked the question, the answer was sitting in the interview transcript. I’d been given the data. I read it as alignment because I needed to hire someone and I needed the alignment. I wanted it to be true. So I saw what I wanted to see and disregarded what I didn’t. Just over a year in. Draconian. That word still sticks with me.

It keeps coming back because it’s not one you hear every day. The processes that built the company.

It was obvious by then that he wasn’t looking to be part of our system. He was looking to be at the top of one, defining it, or someplace where he could completely ignore it all. When he wasn’t at the top, He read that constraint as oppression rather than structure.

The situation wasn’t recoverable through better management once he was in. It was preventable in the interview.

This is a design failure, not a character failure. His complaints weren’t lies. He was telling me exactly who he was. Maya Angelou said, if someone shows you who they are, believe them. I just wasn’t reading the axis he was actually on. The engineering instinct is to hear complaints as diagnostic of the environment being complained about. But in hiring

They’re often diagnostic of the person doing the complaining.

So for your next hire, when a candidate complains about their previous role, run both readings. Do they want the opposite of what they had, or do they want to be the one in charge of what comes next? Both are valid, but they map to different roles.

If you can’t tell which it is from the interview, ask directly. if you joined us, what would you want to keep the same about how we operate? And what would you want to change? Their answer, that’s your premortem.

The pre-mortem doesn’t cost much up front it costs a lot to retrofit once the hire is in contracts and hires work the same the commitments that look easy to make when everything is going well are the ones that bite hardest when the assumptions shift now not every mismatch is going to get caught in the interview

Some show up as friction after the hire is already in. What to do when that friction appears? That’s where we’re going to go next.