Most organizations have many reasons for underachieving: managers can't agree on a strategy, managers can't agree on priorities or managers are unready for twists along the economic landscape. But the most glaring reason for underperformance is that most managers stink at the art of firing people.
The economic and human costs are huge. Organizations stagnate when managers are too timid to ease out employees who are underperforming -- and these employees resent the palpable sense that they're not appreciated, which leads to sniping that yanks morale down further. Worst of all, a culture of non-accountability builds. It benefits everyone if the civilized art of "employee liberation" is cultivated.
Firing will always be a sensitive matter for the recipient as well as for bystanders (which is why armadas of legal and HR representatives are involved. You should consult all of them, because I don't want to get sued for my advice not being 100 percent appropriate to your particular institution, union or mob outfit.) Still a few larger principles exist:
1. Remember that no employee needs your charity. Too often, managers suspect they're performing an act of compassion by keeping underperformers on the payroll. They should ask shareholders and other stakeholders to which they're beholden whether that charity is appropriate. They should ask high-achieving colleagues if they feel such charity to underachievers is appropriate. Just as importantly, a manager would do an underperformer a favor if she instead gave him a new lease on their career, at a place that might be a better match for their talents.
In one corporation, a senior manager had little faith in the ability of a middle-manager but was too kind (or too cowardly) to terminate him. Instead, she moved him around from one department to the next over two years, while hiring new staff to compensate for his deficiencies. He in turn, understandably, felt unappreciated. When she finally dismissed him after having had enough, he turned around and filed suit. Consider her mistakes here: She bloated the organization's headcount irresponsibly; she failed to give him the proper feedback in real time that could have allowed him to make peace with the notion that he was a bad fit at the company; and she treated him too long like a charity case, which only increased his resentment and readiness to sue.
2. Clean up your own act. Judge not lest ye be judged, Jesus said, and cast not the first stone unless you're without sin. Everyone has had an easy enough time ignoring the good Lord's advice, save when we become a manager. Then, suddenly, we become humble at all the wrong times, unable to push an incompetent employee out, since we realize that we're not perfect either, and because we worry that holding someone accountable will lead to us being held accountable. Make up your mind to hold yourself to the highest standard, then you'll be able to hold your employees to a standard that your organization should expect from them.
3. Define success clearly. Your organization won't value you for just treading water. It will value you as a manager if you raise productivity or quality in your area. If you can't define what that looks like, you shouldn't be a manager. And if you can define it, for yourself and your employees, you now have clear, guilt-free parameters for addressing underperformance.
4. A firing, ideally, shouldn't be a surprise. There may be times when a firing has to be sudden. But for the most part, human beings resent the idea of the ambush firing or layoff. In companies, the "human" in "human resources" often yields to the "law" in "lawyer." This is understandable. But in too many cases, this leads to managers only having the guts to fire an underperformer for an irrelevant technicality rather than for the actual underperformance. If a valuable employee gets caught Facebooking during regular work hours, in a violation of company policy, her violation will likely be quietly reprimanded or ignored altogether. If a ne'er-do-well does the same, he may get canned. This approach is cowardly, as it allows expedience to take the place of honest discussion about overall performance issues.
5. You can be friends after a termination. In most cases, I've had good relations and friendships with those whom I've had to move out the door, mainly because they knew it was nothing personal -- just a matter of them and our organization being better served by a change.
I used to believe that nonprofits aren't as effective at firing than corporations, because corporations are more ruthlessly interested in maximizing profits. I later found that to be untrue; a classic example was a friend's PR firm, which organized workshops instructing managers on why never to fire employees, lest the firm get dragged into court.
It's certainly the job of lawyers to minimize legal exposure, and we can all respect that. But one key job of a manager is to maximize her unit's performance, and a pure obsession with lawsuit-avoidance doesn't allow for that. But the more pressing reason for effective firing isn't a legal or business issue, but a moral one: We owe it to one another to be honest about where we need to improve... and when we might need to move on. It's the human thing.
Follow Rob Asghar on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rasghar
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We went to HR several times, which was always a waste of time, other than for documenting the situation.
At the end, I was so frustrated, I decided to just do her job and my job both, it would just be easier than having to clean up her messes afterwards. I asked her to grab her bag and meet me in HR, I was simply going to drop her off, she'd be their problem (charity case), but I didn't want to see her again. Well, she never made it there, she went home and filed some kind of medical claim! Once the benefits ran out, twelve weeks later, she quit.
Sometimes you can’t fire someone because HR takes on a charity case, not the manager!
I know from personal experience the pain and utter devastation that being let go from a company can cause. I've lost my home, my family, and most of my belongings, and I can't pay next month's rent. I can't support my kids, and they're about to go back to school. My self-confidence has been battered so much that it's incredibly hard to get out there and "sell myself."
Firing someone or laying them off should ***absolutely*** be a last resort, when *no* other alternatives exist. I think the yardstick companies use when measuring that necessity is broken. Seriously, if the company's survival or safety isn't at stake, saving the pain of dismissing someone is worth more than losing some productivity, money, performance points, etc. Work with them. Train them. Develop them so their performance improves. Do anything possible before showing them the door. Or to put it another way, we should treat employees as we would like to be treated. If we wouldn't want someone to inflict the pain of job loss on ourselves, we shouldn't do it to others. This is a HUGE blind spot in our consciousness and our humanity right now.
Having said this, if I have, as a manager, provided training, goals, support, retraining, conversation and feedback, and the employee is not a good skill or cultural fit, it is best for the employee and employer that the employee be fired or laid off to find a better fit.
It may sound cold and inhuman, but it is not a company's responsibility to make sure that all of their employees have permanent, full-time employment regardless of how they perform. This is the not the business structure in America. I had being fired and I hate firing my own employees, especially when I know the potential pain and struggle they will suffer. However, as an agent of the company, paid to do a job, it is inevitable that I will eventually have to fire someone at sometime.
I also, as a conscious manager, make every attempt to support great performers, support their growth and development as employees and human beings. I want my employees to succeed!
Of course, the senior leadership of an organization ultimately needs to be brutally honest with itself about whether there is a systemic issue, and then needs to decide whether and how to handle it.
The fact that "the forty hour work week" is now considered "part-time" by corporate management shows that quality of life comes second to profits. Are they not a "fit" because they want to see their children?
The fact that salaried employees are forced to work 70 or 80 hours, is proof that the corporate machine will continue to exploit workers. Combining two jobs into one, forcing one person to work twice as hard for the pay of one job, is similar to slavery, and just increases the overall unemployment rate, and is really bad for morale, and the mental-health of the general population. It's also bad for children, who never see their parents and who are being raised by non-family caregivers, in some mass "day care" situation that workers can afford.
Firing that person, in order to find someone desperate enough to work as a slave to corporate interests, for twice the work and half the pay, is what is fundamentally wrong with corporate culture. This is why the people need Unions to fight for workers rights.