Personality in Depth

Story · all 20 words

The Reference

Last March somebody I used to manage asked me to write him a reference. I said yes immediately, and then spent four evenings failing to write it.

The problem was not that Karim had been bad at his job. The problem was that every true thing about him needed a second sentence.

He is ambitious – visibly, unapologetically ambitious, in a way that made two people in that office uncomfortable. He wanted my job within about six weeks of arriving and made no serious attempt to hide it. That is a strength. It is also exactly why those two people found him difficult.

He is determined. Once he decided something was worth doing he would not let go of it, which twice rescued a project everybody else had quietly abandoned, and which once meant we spent nine days on something that did not matter at all.

He is not modest, and I want to be fair about this: he is not big-headed either, which is a different thing entirely. He simply knows what he is good at and says so out loud, and in most offices that comes across as arrogance far more often than it deserves to.

He is sensible about decisions and sensitive about criticism, and those two words are worth keeping apart. He made careful, practical choices under pressure all year. He also took one small correction personally and was quiet for most of a Tuesday.

What I could not fit into a reference was November. A junior colleague made a genuinely serious mistake, and Karim stood in my office and argued for twenty minutes that it was partly his own fault – which was not true, and which he knew was not true. He is the most loyal person I have managed.

He was moody on Mondays. He could be bossy with people younger than him at eleven in the morning and completely considerate with the same people by one. He was thoughtful in the original sense – he noticed things, and remembered them – and oddly self-conscious about his English, which was better than he ever believed.

His attitude to the work was the best I have seen in nine years. His behaviour in meetings was, on three occasions, the worst.

In the end I wrote four paragraphs and sent them to him before I sent them to anybody else, which I have never done for another person. I told him I had included one weakness, because a reference with none in it is worth nothing, and that he should tell me if he thought it was unfair.

He replied in eleven minutes: “Add that I interrupt people. You were being kind.” That single sentence told the reader more than my four paragraphs had. He is open-minded enough to hear it and down-to-earth enough to say it first.

He got the job. He is not an easy-going man and he will not be an easy colleague. He will be an extremely good one. I said so, and eighteen months later they have promoted him twice.