Naila Conita for Unsplash+
I've been interviewing a lot lately, and it resurfaced something I've known for a while: the things that quietly bother you early never disappear, they expand.
Not always in a dramatic fashion, or in a way that forces your hand… but they do show up later. Sometimes they show up bigger or slightly harder to manage but completely unsurprising once you're honest with yourself about what you saw at the start.
A couple of years ago, I interviewed someone I wasn't sure about. I kept getting confused by their answers, but not in an obvious way, just enough that I'd pause and wonder if my question wasn't clear enough. I liked them though. They'd done their homework which impressed me. So that stuck with me more than the confusion did.
I hired them.
And it was fine, mostly. They were likable and a good fit for the team. But there were always these small moments of friction like confusion around projects, between team members and with clients. Nothing egregious. Just... drag that was hard to articulate, you know the kind you can't quite name until you realize you've been managing it for months. Sometimes that can be worse.
Here's what I didn't connect until much later: the confusion I felt in the interview was the same confusion that eventually showed up in the work. It wasn’t a coincidence as much as it was a preview.
People are not fake in interviews, they're performing at their absolute best. This is the best they will ever be! Attention, intentionality, self-management, all of the good things all at their highest. But the rough edges that still surface under those conditions don't disappear when the stakes get lower. They always expand.
The person who subtly redirected conversations toward themselves eventually struggled with accountability. The one who ignored small boundaries eventually ignored larger ones. The one who was slightly confusing to follow confused the team and then the clients.
The pattern wasn't the revelation. The harder thing to admit was that I saw it every time, I just kept talking myself out of it.
I told myself stories. Maybe they're nervous. Maybe I asked the question poorly. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. And the last one—maybe it's on me—is the most seductive, because it sounds like self-awareness when it's actually just self-doubt wearing a cute outfit.
Malcolm Gladwell calls it "default to truth" (see above book reco). It’s our natural assumption that people are honest and well-intentioned until something overwhelmingly and repeatedly proves otherwise. I think something similar happens here too, when we default to assuming the thing we noticed couldn't possibly mean what it appears to mean. Especially good-intentioned people (like you and me). We project our own alignment onto others and explain away the incongruence because we want the situation to work.
This is the part I want you to actually hear: You aren't crazy. That feeling you had after the first meeting, you know that small thing you noticed and then immediately talked yourself out of? It was real and it won't go away. It'll just go quiet until conditions make it loud again.
The reason this is hard to learn is that the signals are rarely dramatic enough to force action. Most are subtle enough to explain away, and for a long time, you will. But over time you realize the issue usually wasn't that you missed the signal. It's that you kept arguing with yourself after you saw it.
Discernment is less about what you notice and more about what you stop dismissing.
The leaders I respect most have learned to stop negotiating with themselves once they see a signal. They aren’t cynical, they’ve just learned the hard way that their first read was usually right.
So, let’s stop gaslighting our own pattern recognition. What we sensed is real. We are intuitive and observant and the faster we learn to trust that the less often we’ll be managing a problem we saw coming.
Discernment requires the willingness to accept what you already sensed and move forward accordingly.
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