firing

The Evil HR Lady, Suzanne Lucas, took the words right out of my mouth with this column:

Why Mitt Romney likes firing people

Update: Since this came up in the comments, I thought I’d address it here. This is not a political attack or endorsement. This is not intended to be political at all. Suzanne was taking something that’s been getting some news coverage recently and using it to talk about a very difficult management topic: firing. It’s not really about Romney at all; it’s about management, using Romney’s remarks as a springboard.

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You might figure that if you do good work, you don’t need to worry about being fired. But there are some habits that can jeopardize even the best employee’s job — from getting angry at work to being more concerned with having friends in the office than with doing your job, and much more. Over at U.S. News & World Report today, I talk about habits that can get you fired. You can read it here.

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A reader writes:

I have an employee who has performance issues that are well documented. In fact, he has been slated for termination several times and, in each instance, managed to convince a former manager that he should be allowed to retain his position. However, after making a major mistake which could cost us a large client, the time has come to part ways.

Given that we are just two weeks short of Christmas, I am curious as to how other individuals and organizations have handled such a situation? Do you terminate immediately, wait until after the holidays, or wait until the new year? In addition to doing what is right by this individual, we obviously don’t want to have any adverse affect on morale by terminating someone on Christmas Eve. Real life experiences would be appreciated. Thanks.

Here’s my take on it:

If keeping him on a few more weeks would cause harm to your business (i.e., he’ll cause real damage in that amount of time), then you need to act now. (And be generous with the severance if you can.)

But otherwise, deal with it for a couple of weeks more and do it right after the holidays. Reasons for this:

* Compassion. You don’t want to be someone who fires people right before Christmas, as long as you can avoid it without real harm.

* Morale of others. You don’t want your other employees to conclude that you’re a jerk who fires people right before Christmas.

By the way, this is yet one more good reason not to put this stuff off (which it sounds like was allowed to happen here). If you put it off rather than acting when you know you should, then you sometimes run into a situation which ends up making it harder to terminate — and not just the holidays. Imagine if you’d put it off and then he happened to file a claim for FMLA or ADA accommodation (unrelated to the performance issues) just as you were about to act. You could still proceed, of course, but now you’d have a sticky legal landmine to navigate, and your risk factor would go way up. So when you know you need to terminate, don’t drag it out.

And yes, most managers, being human, like to give people additional chances and like to avoid telling people that they’re not meeting our needs. And as a result, many managers prolong these situations when they shouldn’t. But you’ve got to do it, so resolve to resolve this as soon as the holidays are over.

P.S. I do not advocate this approach for relationship break-ups! If you’re waiting to break up with someone until the new year, stop leading them on and deal with it now.

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A reader writes:

Recently I had to fire one of my employees. There was a history of tardiness, no-call/no-show behavior, and lack of performance at work. All of this behavior was documented, and the employee was put on at least two action plans. I tried sharing tips from my own life (because I am a person whose internal clock runs five minutes late), writing notes when I saw a job well done, or heard a customer talk about how much my employee helped solve a difficult problem. I really wanted my employee to succeed. I knew that she was the sole provider for her family. Her son is very young, and her husband a stay-at-home Dad. 

I feel that the firing was just, and quite frankly, the right thing to do. Her performance was starting to affect her co-workers. My co-managers and I did all that we could to modify the employee’s behavior before it came an issue. In the end, however, the employee choose not to change her behavior. 

I am grieving for her. I know that her life has been made very difficult by this termination. I’m just wondering how long this feeling of being “bummed” will last.  This is the first time I’ve had to fire an employee. 

Firing someone sucks. It sucks even if the person has been warned repeatedly and had every chance to improve. It’s just a bad feeling to be the person who takes someone else’s job away from them. In fact, if it ever doesn’t suck to fire someone, it’s probably worth looking inward to figure out where your compassion went.

However, as hard as firing someone is, it’s also critically important to your job as a manager. Having the right people on your team makes an enormous difference in how effective you are and how much you achieve.  And so holding a high bar and expecting people to meet it, warning them when they’re falling short, and taking action when that doesn’t change anything are some of your most basic and crucial responsibilities as a manager.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not hard. So you’ve got to remember that you didn’t fire this employee on a whim or without warning or for an unjust reason. It sounds like you clearly told her what she would need to change in order to keep her job, and she chose not to make those changes (changes that sound pretty simple to make).

You also need to remember that she’s an adult who makes her own choices, and those choices have consequences. Maybe this will be a wake-up call for her that will help her do better in the future. Or maybe it won’t. But again, you treated her fairly and honestly, and you made the right choice for your team, and that’s all you can do.

By the way, it’s worth noting that there are two different types of firings:  There are firings like this one, where the person could have saved their job if they were motivated to but choose not to do what that would require (whether it’s coming in on time, or meeting deadlines, or following directions — i.e., things within their control). And then there are firings where the person is trying really hard and just can’t meet the bar you need.

The second type is a lot harder. As much as it sucks to fire anyone, it sucks a lot more to fire someone who tried as hard as they could to make it work. It sucks less to fire someone who, say, falsified a timesheet or blew off work.

So you’re actually kind of lucky that she made it so clear-cut for you. And she did make it clear-cut; her behavior sounds pretty damn far over the line. Not showing up to work and not bothering to call?  That would have gotten her fired on the spot in a lot of places (and probably should have with you). She was being pretty flagrant in her disrespect for you and her coworkers.  In fact, it sounds like you might be spending more time feeling bad about firing her than she spent thinking about her job in the first place.

All that said, it’s okay and normal to feel compassion. But please make sure that you’re also feeling good about looking out for the health of your team, holding people accountable for their own behavior, and enforcing fair and reasonable consequences. Because there are managers out there who don’t do those things, and believe me, they’re the ones who no one good wants to work for. So hard as this was, you’re a better manager for doing it.

And now hopefully you can give that job to someone who deserves it.

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For reasons that I will never understand, one of the most popular searches on this site is “how to announce an employee is leaving.” We’ve talked in the past about how to announce that (be straightforward and just say it), and we’ve talked about the even more inexplicable fact that some companies don’t announce it at all.

But we haven’t talked too much about the mechanics of announcing that an employee has been fired, and that can be a lot trickier. Over at the Intuit QuickBase blog today, I give some advice on how to communicate a firing to the rest of your staff. Please check it out here.

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A reader writes:

I am a daily reader and great fan of your blog. I have a question about something I read in a Sue Grafton novel. (If you don’t want to answer a question about what somebody wrote in a novel, I understand!)

One of the characters, Walker McKnally, is the VP for new accounts at a bank in a small town. He drives drunk and kills a young woman. His car was found at the scene of the crash because his car crashed into the other one, obviously, and he was found a short distance away, drunk. He pleads not guilty, but really? Everyone knows what happened.

My husband and I were arguing about whether he should have lost his job and whether that would be considered wrongful termination. I said that if it were my bank, I would not want to have an accused drunk driving killer where there is not much doubt about his guilt working in a high-profile, public-facing position. My husband said employers shouldn’t be able to fire people just because they are accused of a crime. I reminded him that “innocent until proven guilty” applies to the government, not to private employers.

Neither of us know the proper definition of “wrongful termination” in an at-will state. I was just curious about what you might have to say.

I was SO EXCITED to get this question, and it made me want to have an entire week devoted to career/management questions from plot lines in literature, movies, and TV. Does this interest anyone other than me?  I am ON FIRE for this idea.

(By the way, speaking of books, I just finished reading The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and it is utterly fantastic. Highly recommended.)

Okay, so back to this scoundrel Walker McKnally. Yes, his employer could have fired him even though he wasn’t convicted, because in at-will states employers can fire employees for any reason at all (or no reason), as long as it doesn’t violate a specific law.

People often think that “wrongful termination” means that you were fired for a wrong or unfair reason, but it really just means that you were fired for an illegal reason — that you were fired in violation of some legal right that you hold. For instance, wrongful termination would include being fired because of your membership in a legally protected class (race, sex, religion, etc.), or because you complained about harassment or some other legally protected conduct, or because you refused to perform in an illegal act. It would also include being fired in violation of the terms of a contract, although most people don’t have contracts. (And even if you do have a contract, it sometimes includes a “morals clause” that lets the employer fire you if you engage in behavior that tarnishes the reputation of the employer.)

But there’s no law preventing an employer from firing you because now the whole town thinks you killed a woman, even though you weren’t convicted.

So you win this bet.

More questions stemming from books/movies/TV? Email them to me at alison@askamanager.org, being sure to give sufficient context in case I don’t know the work (like this letter-writer did), and I’ll print answers in the next week.

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