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So one of the harsh realities of firing in the real world is that it usually doesn’t happen abruptly. Somebody’s underperforming for a long time, and there’s been all these ways trying to fix it, and there’s been a lot of agonizing. They’ve been called in. You’ve had conversations with them. And finally, you have the conversation, and you go back to your desk and you call your spouse and you say, “Oh my god. Thank god. It’s over. It went better than I thought. Phew. I can finally breathe again,” and you go on with your work. The hard part has just begun for the person you’ve let go. You’re feeling fine, and they’ve never felt worse. It’s over for you. It’s just started for them. And you want to wash your hands of it. You’re the manager. You agonized. You did your best, and now it’s over. But you can’t dump that person. It’s your responsibility to see them out the door with their dignity preserved. That’s the right thing to do.
There are four cardinal rules of letting somebody go. The first one is so important, and that’s no surprises. No one should be surprised when you walk into the room to say, “I’m afraid we’ve reached the end of the road.” You should have had many conversations with them up until that point about their performance and their values, which would be the two reasons that you would be letting someone go. “You never finished everything you started.” They should have known that six months ago or three months ago and been given a chance to fix it. If somebody is surprised when you are letting them go, unless it’s a sort of a gigantic cost-cutting thing and you’re letting go of thirty people at once, but if you’re letting somebody go for performance or values problem, they should have known it was coming.
The second one is that you must do everything you can to preserve and uphold the dignity of the person who’s leaving. It’s a terrible experience in their life. Often being let go is like a little death. It’s a public death. They’re embarrassed. You must do everything you can to preserve their dignity. You can’t just say, “We’re going to get you out of here in two weeks” and just just try to make it, minimize them, don’t look them in the eye, kind of whisper about how it happened. You need to have a plan.
The third is you’ve got to love them out the door, encouraging them, talking to them about their next step, making sure they have the support that your organization can afford them. You’ve got to make sure that they leave with their head held high. And the fourth and probably the most important to the person who’s been let go is pay the money. If you can, the best thing you can do when you say goodbye to somebody is give them a package that preserves their dignity. You need to go to HR, and you need to go to your boss to make sure that the package is as good as it can be. Unless they’ve done something that was an integrity violation, then that’s a totally different conversation. But if they had good values and they just couldn’t perform, that should be a very structured and gentle goodbye.
Is it easy? Oh my god. It’s incredibly hard. I get it. Because after you’ve let them go, you want to just look the other way. You want to pretend it never happened. But you’ve got to figure out a way to do the right thing so that if you were to see them in the mall parking lot a year later, you could look them in the face and shake their hand and say, “I hope you’re doing well.” And that they would smile back and say, “I landed on my feet. Thank you for how much you tried to ease my exit.”