This transcript was produced by robots and left as-is. Accuracy and elegance are not guaranteed.

Episode eleven told you to act before you’re sure. Early before the evidence is airtight. I want to tell you about a time I did exactly that and it still didn’t work.

Back in 2008 or nine, somewhere in there, I hired a junior engineer straight out of school. It was into a firm that was built around raising the bar on the profession, dress code, etiquette training for the staff, a standard most shops don’t bother holding. He fit on paper to a T. Presentable, smart, efficient, hardworking.

The early mistakes read as normal junior mistakes, the kind everyone makes on the way up. Nothing a higher premortem like the one I talked about last episode would have flagged. Because the behavior that mattered hadn’t shown up yet. It didn’t exist at higher time.

Now fairly early in his tenure, probably within the first year, year and a half, we landed a big project and he got deployed onto it. And he stepped into one of the lead roles. He showed real leadership potential, hardworking enough that a colleague of mine used to describe him as a missile. Point him at a task and he’d get after it and destroy it in all the best ways.

Now that promotion came before he’d been pressure tested. And that’s where it came out. He was racing through work at roughly double the team’s pace.

I asked him about it. His answer? They make as many mistakes as I do on each of these tasks, but in twice the time it takes me. So why would I slow down to match their accuracy when I can hit the same accuracy at double the input?

I could see the logic in that. It wasn’t terrible logic, but the repercussions rippled out from there.

What got managed was the visible mess. He was pushing the team, overstepping, creating friction, especially with people more experienced than him. That’s what everyone saw, and that’s what got addressed.

But what never got named directly was the belief underneath it. His definition of good enough versus mine.

Over the first two or three years, I ran the correction two or three times at least. Sat him down, told him plainly he wasn’t meeting the standard, that either something had to change or we’d be looking at other options. He didn’t argue. He went quiet, nodded, agreed. It seemed like he was going to comply, and maybe he did, at least for a little while.

Then it drifted back to the same approach. That pattern has a name I didn’t have yet at the time. This is is episode nine territory. Compliance in the room, nothing changed outside of it.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then. Correction fixes a skill gap. Someone who doesn’t yet know better, but it doesn’t fix a values gap. Someone who thinks they’re already right.

He wasn’t hiding a shortcut. He genuinely believed it.

Around 2015, I stepped away from the company for a short stretch. When I came back months later, the org chart had flipped. He was no longer reporting to me. I was reporting to him.

What did this mean? Well, his output was no longer mine to manage. So I stepped back and I let him run. Honestly, I was half expecting it to catch up with him. I figured a client would push back or a supervisor would.

Part of what I was watching for was specific. I’d always believed that polished professional writing, documentation, and proposals with real command of the language was what clients wanted and what won the work. His writing read as high school level, casual. He’d open a message to the company president with, hey guys, for a firm built on elevating the profession, that felt like a mismatch to me.

As I watched, nothing blew up. No client feedback came back to me at all. Purchase orders kept coming. He was good at maintaining relationships, not growing them, but maintaining them by being personable and easy to talk to. That seemed to outweigh the writing, the polish, those standards, and everything I thought that mattered. Years of that.

Nothing but silence.

Then in about twenty twenty four, fairly recently, a former client, someone who’d worked with both of us, told me flat out. This guy wasn’t doing work there anymore. Some purchase orders had kept flowing on relationship alone, others had dried up completely. And there’d been an overwhelming

reaction to underwhelming deliverables. Roughly a decade after I first raised it with him, almost a decade and a half, the cost was real. It just took that long to surface. Now, it would be easy to tell you that I meant I was now it would be easy to tell you that meant I was right the whole time.

And I should have trusted my own read instead of second-guessing it when things stayed quiet. But that’s not quite it either. What I think actually happened is my time horizon was too short for this evaluation. I was watching for a failure that had a longer cycle time than I gave it credit for. Silence for a few years isn’t proof a standard doesn’t matter.

It’s proof you haven’t run the test long enough to see the failure mode.

So here’s what I’d take from this one. If you had the real conversation, timely, specific, more than once, and nothing moved, stop repeating it a fourth time. Step back and ask if this is a skill gap or a values gap. If it’s values, another talking to isn’t the fix. That’s a structural call. A different role, a different fit.

Or maybe no fit at all. And the other half of it, if you made that call and the fallout never showed up, don’t take the silence as proof you were wrong to worry. Some systems just take longer to fail than your patience holds out for.

Last episode, the pre-mortem had one job. Catch the mismatch before you hire. But some mismatches don’t exist yet at hire time. They only show up once someone has real authority, real stakes, real pressure on them. That’s where they come out. Sometimes it’s years later.