How do you fire someone? Or lots of people?
Dreaded words to hear — but also dreaded words to say. This comes to mind because of a comment “JJJ” left recently on a post here about layoffs at Alcatel-Lucent:
Make no mistake: downsizing is extremely difficult. It taxes all of a management team’s resources, including both business acumen and humanity. No one looks forward to downsizing. Perhaps this is why so many otherwise first-rate executives downsize so poorly. They ignore all the signs pointing to a layoff until it’s too late to plan adequately; then action must be taken immediately to reduce the financial drain of excess staff.
The extremely difficult decisions of who must be laid off, how much notice they will be given, the amount of severance pay, and how far the company will go to help the laid-off employee find another job are given less than adequate attention. These are critical decisions that have as much to do with the future of the organization as they do with the future of the laid-off employees.
In my experience, “JJJ” is exactly right: these sorts of decisions and actions are tough for many managers, whether they’re dealing with one underperforming employee or having to implement a wider layoff plan. This is reinforced by a conversation I had a while back with my father-in-law, who founded a hospital and ran it for many years. He said that one of the hardest challenges he ever faced as a manager and chief executive was to fire people who needed to go.
He also said that, when he was trying to learn how to do a better job of firing people, he was surprised by the thin literature an the subject. But he was looking many years ago, and I don’t know what the state of how-to-fire-people resources is today.
So, folks, please, help me out:
How would you go about firing one person — or laying off many?
How HAVE you done it in the past, and what have you learned from those experiences?
Can you point me to good material on the subject?
I’ll keep looking, too, then take the best of what you suggest and what I discover to write a more comprehensive treatment of this tricky and thankless managerial chore.
Category: ManagementIf you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
6 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
I’ve done both – firing one and laid off many – unfortunately. What has worked for me seems like common sense, which is to plan, organize, think of as many variations on the employee’s reaction as you can and prepare as best as possible for them, and above all, treat the employee with respect, even if they are being fired for cause. I’ve learned that less is more, do not get into a debate with the employee, look the employee in the eye while you are delivering the message and that you can’t prepare the manager enough for this difficult conversation.
You can send them notice via email as my former company did telling them they would be laid off in two weeks. Or send guards to their desk first thing in the morning and tell them to pack up and get out as I saw my former company do to other people. Don’t tell us that managers care about how they lay people off. The company could care less what happens to laid off/fired employees.
Sue & Holly – I think it’s interesting to read your comments one after the other. Holly conveys that she really *did* care; Sue gives a direct example where managers *didn’t* care.
To me it points out the need for a sense of humanity in our business dealings. If I had to be laid off — or lay people off — I hope it would happen as Holly outlines. I would hate to work for a company that handled things the way that Sue describes.
I suppose we can hope that the current surge in layoffs will give more people experience in dealing more humanely with those who are let go for no fault of their own.
In terms of firings, the most astonishing one I know is a manager friend who found out she was fired when she tried to log into her email and discovered her accounts were canceled. That was a political firing — she didn’t agree with the new direction, etc., but very poorly handled. Her subordinates were embarassed that they had to tell her it wasn’t just a computer glitch.
Brenda — The horrible thing about firings like the one you describe (or that Sue described in her comment) is that they do horrible — but typically *avoidable* — things for the continuity of the business. Sure, *sometimes* you need to show someone the door right-now-this-instant, but usually you’re far better off to let them detach from the business less abruptly.
[...] September 15: How do you fire someone? Or lots of people? [...]