I was asked recently, "How should I fire someone?" I thought others might find my response of value. I'm not going to address this issue in the context of an reduction in force or layoff, but around a performance related issue.
In a perfect world you shouldn't have to fire anyone, they should fire themselves or be fired by their peers. Short of getting caught with one's hand in the cookie jar, getting fired should never be a surprise. If it is a surprise for the person, then shame on you as a manager. You haven't been doing your job.
What is your job? Among other things, it is facilitating feedback to your employees so they:
- Understand what success looks like
- Function in a system in which delivering successfully is possible
- They have the information, knowledge and skills to deliver successfully
- Choose to deliver successfully to their internal customers
Notice I said internal customers, not boss. More about that in a minute. Let's take these one at a time.
Understanding what success looks like isn't necessarily what you think success looks like. Of all the transactions you employee enters into daily, transactions with you may be less than 10%. It's worth remembering that you may know less about your employee's performance than anyone with whom she or he interacts. Facilitating feedback means pulling together your employee's primary internal customers and getting them to define what successful service from your employee looks like. Now your employee has a charter for success. For more information on this see my blog post Performance Review Madness.
If you've studied the quality disciplines you know that all employees work in a system they don't own and don't control. The system is owned and controlled by a manager who doesn't live in that system. Organizational systems are virtually never optimized so that each part effectively supports the well-being of the whole. Employee behavior is usually carefully calibrated to the realities of the ecosystem in which she or he works but may look spurious from the perspective of the manager who is adapting to an entirely different ecosystem. So when expectations are set, you have to be very sure what is expected is in fact possible for the employee to deliver.
A corollary is that your employees have the information, knowledge and skills necessary to be successful. This seems obvious but in fact our employees are dismally ignorant of the basics of business. Few can read a financial statement, fewer still know where the money comes from, what things cost and how business actually works. Further, the ecosystem of business does not support employees being candid about what they know and don't know. Again, you work in a system that is different than that of your employees. You may be assuming your employees have access to the information you do, which may not be the case.
Finally, we come down to brass tacks. Does the employee choose to be successful. If you have done all the above, and your employee is not being successful then there are relatively few conclusions to draw. First, they don't have the capacity to be successful, therefore you have put them in the wrong job. It is your responsibility to move them somewhere (if you can) where they can succeed. Second, they may not want to succeed for any number of reasons. They may be cynical, they may be angry they may have low self esteem, they may just be lazy or they may just not care. At this point, the why's don't really matter. Now you have to do the termination drill. Coordinate with HR. Document the issues, have your come to Jesus meeting, lay out the changes that are needed and by when, document the results, provide ongoing feedback and if no improvement is forthcoming, sit down and deliver the bad news.
Pay whatever severance you can, but get the person off the premises as quickly as decorum will allow. Then get your team together and within the bounds of what is legally and ethically permissible, explain what happened and why. Do not assume they know. Chances are, everyone will be glad the misery is over.
A couple of final thoughts. Keeping someone on when they are failing is not an act of compassion. It is a misery for everyone. Get it over with. Finally, ambiguity is the enemy of healthy relationships. Be clear, create an ecosystem rich in feedback from the right people, provide clarity of expectations, tools and resources to do the job and it should be rare that you find yourself bracing yourself to deliver "the bad news".
