This is my mistake. I am not distributing it elsewhere.
What happened in those eight weeks was that Luke began attending account meetings I had previously run myself, initially as an observer and then increasingly in a leadership position. He was charming in these meetings, which is his genuine gift. He remembered names. He asked interested questions. He created the impression of engagement and follow-through.
The follow-through was where it got complicated.
The first time I noticed was a carrier exception that came in during a week when Luke and I were both copied on the relevant email chain. The carrier was requesting a substitution on a lane that serviced Alder Home Supply’s eastern stores. The substitution would require notification under a protocol we had built specifically for that lane after a delivery timing issue in 2019. The protocol was in the exception log.
Luke approved the substitution by reply email. He did not check the notification protocol. He did not see the entry in the exception log, or if he saw it he did not understand its application to this specific substitution.
I sent him a separate note explaining the protocol. He said thanks and corrected the approval. The carrier was notified in time. The exception resolved without incident.
I wrote up the exchange as a training note and sent it to him. He acknowledged it.
The second time was a client inquiry from a smaller account, a chain of hardware stores in our region. The inquiry was about rate adjustments for the coming calendar year. Luke drafted a response that used figures from the previous year’s rates without checking whether carrier costs had changed. They had changed. Our carrier in that lane had increased rates in June.