Mats Uddenfeldt

Because that’s how ego works. It doesn’t show up as arrogance. It shows up as confidence. You have a great call. The buyer’s nodding. You walk out thinking you’ve got this one in the bag. And the moment you think that, something shifts. You stop pushing. You skip the extra stakeholder, the hard question, the next step you’d normally nail down. You take the easy path to the close. That’s the B-player move: Coasting on a lead. The A-player does the opposite. The better it looks, the harder they work it. They assume nothing. They close out every risk precisely because the deal feels won. Same deal. Two completely different approaches. And only one controls the close. The trap is that coasting doesn’t feel like a mistake. It feels like being ahead. So the deal slips. And because you were never really paying attention, it doesn’t register as a lesson. It just quietly goes away. You tell yourself the buyer went dark. You move on. That’s why I can’t name the deals. Ego doesn’t just lose them. It hides the evidence. What I’ve learned: the moment you feel you’ve got one in the bag is the exact moment to do the opposite of relax. The best sellers treat “this is going great” as a warning, not a reward. When do you catch yourself coasting on a deal?

It was a Friday afternoon. I pushed a fix to a production server on the other side of the world, closed my laptop, and headed for the train. Done for the week. Five minutes later, my phone rang. The system I’d just touched ran their revenue assurance and fraud management. It was down. Every hour it stayed down was a real risk of money quietly leaking out of the business. My early Friday became a very late one. No one else was going to fix it. I sat back down and worked the problem until it was solved. Hours of it, alone, with that number in my head. Here’s what I took from it, and still carry now. I was lucky the damage was contained. But the lesson wasn’t about luck. It was about ownership. I broke it. Nobody needed to tell me to stay and fix it. You don’t get to push the thing and walk away from what it does. Years later, in sales and then leading teams, that’s the trait I trust most in people. Not that they never break anything. Everyone does. It’s whether they’re still at the desk until it’s fixed.

But when it was our turn to nominate someone for the pitch contest, I put her forward. Not the most senior person. Not the safest pick. The best one. She got up there and fumbled the first attempt. Nerves, pressure, a huge room. Completely understandable. She got a second chance. And she absolutely nailed it. She didn’t win. That’s not the part she remembered. I know that, because yesterday, all these years later, she reached out. She told me that being seen that day, being pushed onto that stage, changed something in how she saw herself. Her friends know who I am. Her family knows who I am. Her mum knew she was talking to me yesterday. Over a thirty-second gesture I’d half-forgotten. Here’s what stayed with me from that conversation. Most of what sticks with us from work is the bad stuff. This was the opposite. A push that was uncomfortable, but aimed at a real strength, in the right direction. And it stuck just as hard. When you’re senior, you’re handing out these moments all the time, whether you mean to or not. Most of them you’ll never remember. The person on the other end might remember them for the rest of their career. So make them the right ones.

I’d done the reference call that isn’t on the list, the one you make to someone who actually worked with the candidate. A concern came back. Serious enough that I should have stopped. But I was eager to fill the seat. The person had aced both interviews and every challenge in the process. They checked every box. So I talked myself out of it. Surely the concern was overblown. Surely the performance was the real signal. It wasn’t. The hire was a clear mistake, and the warning I’d waved away was exactly right. Here’s what that taught me: the back-channel isn’t a formality. It’s often the only place the truth shows up. Because nobody hands you a bad reference. The names a candidate gives you are, by definition, the people who will say good things. The real picture comes from the calls they didn’t suggest. Those calls have surfaced things no official reference ever would: A six-month role quietly deleted from a CV. A very different reason for leaving than the one shared. Brilliant with customers, a nightmare internally. None of that shows up in an interview. All of it shows up in the job. Notice what those have in common. They’re not about skill. They’re about honesty. A deleted role, a softened reason for leaving, a version of themselves that only holds up in the room. The real red flag was never the gap on the CV. It was the willingness to hide it. You can coach a skills gap. You can’t coach someone into being honest. The hardest lesson in hiring is that performance is only half of it. A top performer you can’t trust isn’t an asset. They’re a problem you now have to manage, often for a long time. So back-channel every serious hire. And when something real comes back, don’t talk yourself out of it. One more thing, if you’re the one interviewing. Do the same with your future manager. Ask around. Talk to people who’ve worked for them. Not just the ones in the process. A bad manager will cost you more than a bad job ever will, and nobody puts that on a job description either. References run both ways. Use them. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about checking references?