The Hiring Leak | Article 5: The Lone Wolf Signal
When interviews reward individual performance, a certain pattern starts to look attractive.
We notice the people who say:
“I took it over myself.”
“I rebuilt the system.”
“I just went ahead and fixed it.”
These stories sound like strength. They feel decisive, efficient, and competent.
So we start to select for them.
That’s the Lone Wolf Signal.
Individual Brilliance Is Easy to See
Solo work is legible. A person can point to a system, a feature, a rewrite, and say, “I did that.” There’s a clear line between effort and outcome.
Collaboration is different. It’s messy:
- Influence is shared
- Decisions are negotiated
- Credit is diffuse
- Progress is slower but more durable
When time is limited, we gravitate toward what’s easiest to measure.
Organizations Are Distributed Systems
Most real systems are not built by individuals. They depend on:
- Shared context
- Handovers
- Reviews
- Tradeoffs
- Long-term maintenance
Success comes from coordination, not isolation.
But hiring stories often skip that part.
When someone says, “I just did it myself,” we rarely ask:
- Why was that necessary?
- Who was bypassed?
- What knowledge was lost?
- What dependencies were ignored?
We hear speed. We miss the cost.
Lone Wolves Create Hidden Drag
A strong individual can move fast in the short term. But over time:
- Knowledge concentrates
- Decisions bottleneck
- Others disengage
- The system becomes fragile
What looked like efficiency becomes dependency.
And when that person leaves, the organization pays the interest on that debt.
The Signal We Accidentally Send
When we reward lone-wolf narratives, we send a quiet message:
- Collaboration is optional
- Teaching is overhead
- Asking for help is weakness
- Speed matters more than sustainability
Even people who aren’t lone wolves start to behave like them. Not because they want to — but because the system rewards it.
The Interview Trap
Interviews make this worse.
We ask individuals to explain impact without showing the system around them. Candidates compress the story:
“Here’s what I did.”
The more someone emphasizes independence, the stronger the signal appears.
The Downstream Surprise
Later, inside the organization, we notice:
- Review deadlocks
- Knowledge silos
- Poor handoffs
- Fragile ownership
And we wonder how this happened.
But the logic is intact. We selected for people who could succeed alone, then asked them to thrive together.
The Core Insight
Individual strength is not the same as system strength.
When hiring favors isolated success stories, the organization slowly optimizes against collaboration — without ever intending to.
The next leak happens when we assume experience automatically fixes this problem, and that seniority travels cleanly across systems. It doesn’t.