Don’t fire employees, fire your company
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by Rick Joi Rick Joi is the founder of The Workiversary Group and author of the award‑winning book, Inspiring Work Anniversaries. |
No one likes getting fired. And no one likes firing someone. The assumption is that efforts will be made to get things to work. But sometimes those efforts fail. This blog post is for when they fail.
Firing (or laying off) employees is brutal
When I started my career, people getting fired horrified me.
My father was laid off while I was in college, and seeing the pain he went through is one of my worst memories.
Then, earlier in my career than I would have ever expected, I found myself in the room when others were being fired. Those were the most emotionally draining days of my career.
The message that the employee wasn’t good enough, that they weren’t wanted, was always so brutal, so devastating.
I wondered, how does anyone really fully recover?
Why does this have to happen?
What if we have the story wrong?
But as time has gone on, something unexpected and interesting has happened. I’m now old enough to have seen lots of people get fired, and, then, go on to have amazing jobs and amazing careers!
In the firing moment, it feels like a judgment that the employee is somehow inherently “bad”. But now it’s so obvious to me that that was a very misguided story.
Now I see that the real story is that it’s just not a match. While the employee isn’t performing, the other half of the story is that the company isn’t figuring out a way to get that performance. Heck, sometimes it’s just that the employee isn’t perceived to be performing because the company is blind to that kind of performance.
It’s time to flip the script
In firing, it’s communicated in terms of what the employee hasn’t done.
They don’t show up on time. Their sales numbers aren’t great. They don’t work well on teams.
But you can flip it.
The company hasn’t figured out how to inspire them to be excited enough about their job to show up early. The company hasn’t come up with a product that matches their selling skills. The company hasn’t hired the kind of people they work well with.
Blame your company.
Fire your company from their life.
Everything that was going to happen 15 minutes later will still happen. They’ll be asked to sign a waiver in exchange for severance. They’ll find out how to get their stuff. They’ll leave early. They won’t ever come back again.
But in the 15 minutes before that, a completely different, truer story can be told.
And the magic is that story will better encourage them to go on to the next, exciting chapter in their adventure with their head held higher.
In that 15 minutes, tell them, they will find a place they belong. And when they do, it will be amazing. But, your company just isn’t the place, and every moment that you and they hold on is further delay from them getting to the place where they belong.
Or, as Einstein is sometimes credited with saying:
Everybody is a genius.
But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,
it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Your company is the tree. 🏝️
The employee you’re parting ways with is the fish. 🐟
There are a lot of great streams and lakes and seas and oceans out there.
With genuine kindness and compassion, force them to find one.
Why is this in a blog about work anniversaries?
Work anniversaries are celebratory! 🎉
An employee getting fired is just about the exact opposite. 🥺
But firing well is important to work anniversaries.
One way for a work anniversary to go wrong is for the manager to not actually value the employee. The manager knows that they should fire the employee, but they keep putting it off. The employee already knows the manager doesn’t value them, but the work anniversary magnifies the pain.
And even though the employee knows it, the manager may still try to hide it. And how do they hide it? They acknowledge every other employee’s work anniversary in the same mediocre way. Pretty soon, more employees than should are questioning whether they’re valued.
Maybe, if parting ways was less painful, less stigmatized, then it could happen sooner. Maybe this blog post will help with that.
For both the employee’s benefit and also for you getting value for the compensation you’re paying, but especially for the employee’s benefit, send them on their way to find where they belong.
Where they can contribute the most.
Where they will be truly valued.
Where they’ll shine brightly. ✨
Where someone will be excited about their work anniversary.
And then, celebrate every one of your remaining employees’ work anniversaries like you truly mean it.
Because you do. 😊