Low diatribe

There's something unsettling about the questions we don't ask about the questions we do ask.

How often do we assume we understand what someone really wants to know? How quickly do we fill in the gaps with our own best intentions, answering the question we wish they'd asked instead of the one they actually did?

One recent Wednesday, I had what felt like a great interview. The kind where the conversation flows naturally, where you can represent your most authentic self without performance or rehearsed answers designed to hit keyword checkboxes. Just honest stories about the teams I'd built, the challenges we'd navigated together, the quiet satisfaction of watching people grow into roles they didn't know they were capable of.

The energy was good. The questions felt thoughtful. We talked about next steps with what seemed like mutual alignment, and I left the conversation feeling genuinely positive about the experience.

The next Monday morning came. A friendly message, polite tone, and a clear no.

No next steps. No feedback. Just the familiar silence that follows a door quietly closing.

For a while, I replayed the call in my head, searching for red flags. Did I say something off? Miss a signal? Talk too long? Too little?

But it wasn't until I was telling a friend about the rejection that I started to see the real disconnect. As I walked through the questions they'd asked, something clicked. The problem wasn't how I answered — it was what I was answering to.

I had filled in assumptions, based on best intent, that the subtext of their questions didn't actually support.

They'd asked a number of standard leadership questions: "What is your go-to interview question?" "How did you keep the team motivated through the acquisition?" All of which I had answered thoughtfully, hoping that my passion for building cohesive teams would come through clearly.

But as I tapped out the questions via text, one of them stuck out:

"Can you talk about a time when you had a team member who wasn't performing and had to be let go? What did you do?"

In the moment, it had felt like a straightforward leadership question. I told the truth with the bravado of thinking I had the perfect answer: I've never had to let someone go purely for underperformance. In the few cases where someone was struggling, we worked together to find out why. We got them coaching, training, or clarity. In one case, we moved them to a different role that fit their strengths better. The only person I've had to let go was for HR violations — creating a hostile environment that harmed the team.

During the call, this felt like the right answer. It demonstrated care, development focus, and attention to root causes. I thought it showed leadership.

But telling my friend about it later, I heard something different in my own words. A disconnect between what I thought they were asking and what they might have actually wanted to know.

I should have asked for clarification, rather than assuming they wanted what I would want. I should have asked if current issues were driving the question.

Because for many organizations, that question isn't really about empathy or development — it's a proxy for decisiveness. They want to know if you can pull the trigger. If you're comfortable enforcing the hard line. If you'll protect the company from liability, even at the cost of individual compassion.

What I had answered was the question I wished they were asking: How do you develop people? How do you build systems that prevent performance issues?

What they may have actually been asking was: Will you fire people when we tell you to?

The gap between those two questions is everything.

Because my experience has been that by the time someone's "not performing," the system has already failed them. The support wasn't there. The expectations weren't clear. The environment wasn't safe enough to ask for help. Fix that, and most "underperformance" stories disappear before they start.

The next question confirmed what I could only see in retrospect.

"How would you describe your management style?"

During the interview I had paused, not because I didn't know the answer, but because the question felt incomplete. I don't really have a management style. I have a leadership philosophy.

So that's how I answered, describing my generalized theories about leadership and productivity, starting with, "If people need managing, they wouldn't be here. They need leading."

In the moment, it felt like a thoughtful distinction. But hearing myself say it again, I could imagine how it might have landed: as someone who doesn't understand the practical realities of getting work done. Someone who deals in abstractions rather than execution.

That's when I realized I'd been answering the questions I wanted them to ask, not the ones they were actually asking.

They wanted to know: How do you control outcomes? I answered: How do you cultivate capability?

They wanted: How do you manage performance? I answered: How do you build trust?

What they wanted was a manager.

What I described was a leader.

There's a big difference. One is about control. The other is about connection. One enforces expectation. The other expands potential. One protects systems. The other builds trust inside them.

Both are important. But they operate on different frequencies.

The manager asks: How do I make people do their best work? The leader asks: How do I create conditions where people can't help but do their best work?

The manager requires authority. The leader requires trust.

The manager focuses on performance. The leader cultivates capability.

In my experience, the second is harder, slower, and infinitely more rewarding. It builds teams that outlast you. It turns processes into habits and habits into culture. It doesn't require constant supervision because people internalize the "why," not just the "how."

But that kind of approach doesn't always fit cleanly inside traditional job descriptions. It doesn't sound assertive in a thirty-minute interview. It's hard to measure and easy to misunderstand.

Especially when a company says "Head of Engineering" but still means "Senior Project Manager with veto power."

After the rejection, I sat with that discomfort for a day or so.

I was still disappointed. But the more I reflected, the more I realized this wasn't really about me at all. It was about something much bigger — a fundamental disconnect in how we think about leadership itself.

I started to wonder how many other conversations I'd misread this way.

Maybe we keep asking candidates about firing people and oversight styles because we've confused authority with accountability. We measure decisiveness instead of discernment. We equate being "in charge" with being in control.

But genuine influence doesn't always look decisive. Sometimes it looks like listening longer, sitting with ambiguity until the right next move becomes clear. It looks like trust — not dominance.

When done well, it can even make management feel unnecessary. Because a well-led team manages itself.

That's the quiet irony. We say we want one thing, but somehow we still build systems that reward the other.

Leaders build teams who don't need supervision. Managers build systems that can't function without them. Leaders work themselves slowly out of a job. Managers design roles that reinforce their necessity.

So when someone asks, "What's your management style?" and you answer, "I build teams that don't need managing," it sounds risky. Radical, even. It shouldn't be.

Perhaps we've gotten so used to crisis-based authority that calm, capable autonomy reads as absence. We interpret trust as neglect, freedom as chaos, humility as indecision. But real influence isn't about holding control — it's about holding space.

I don't regret my answers. They were honest, and they reflected the kind of systems I want to build:

Where people grow through clarity, not pressure.

Where performance problems are signals, not punishments.

Where process serves people, not the other way around.

If that disqualified me, so be it. Because misalignment at the interview stage is mercy, not loss.

This rejection clarified my own signal. It reminded me what I stand for — and what I won't compromise to fit in. It was resonance feedback: a soft "not here" from the universe.

Still, it leaves me thinking about the bigger pattern. Why do we keep hiring for the old paradigm? What makes us so afraid of teams that run without handlers? How did "authority" become synonymous with "control" in most org charts?

Maybe because control feels safer than trust. Trust requires vulnerability, and vulnerability doesn't scale neatly. It can't be scheduled or delegated. It has to be modeled. It has to be nurtured.

And that's what I've learned through years of trying again and again: the most sustainable organizations are built on trust, not supervision. On shared purpose, not pressure. On the quiet rhythm of people doing work they care about, together, without needing to be watched.

So yeah, I didn't get the role.

But maybe I dodged something worse — a position that wanted compliance where I build collaboration, oversight where I practice stewardship, hierarchy where I cultivate resonance.

Sometimes the interview isn't an audition. It's a mirror.

It shows you not how well you performed, but how clearly you've defined your own frequency.

And sometimes the right "no" is just your signal finding its way home.