Failure

Terminating somebody’s employment (also often referred to as “separation from the company”) is going to raise some deeply uncomfortable feelings within you. Assuming you’ve ever been terminated from a job before, you’ll remember how it upended your life, ruined plans, brought up feelings of failure in your head, and more. Your immediate reaction is, “I can’t do that to my employee!”

To be clear, you aren’t doing anything to your employee. If anything, they are doing it to themselves, because it’s their performance, not yours. Or, if you prefer, consider the separation of individual from company to be more of a no-fault divorce: After some period of time, it’s clear that “things just aren’t working out,” and it’s time to end the relationship without blame or (hopefully) bitterness.

When veteran managers sit around the campfire and speak of their mistakes, they often admit to a common rookie move: not firing somebody soon enough. Keeping a poor performer around longer accomplishes nothing positive, and sends a horrible message to your team: “As your manager, I’m not strong enough to make the hard call.”

However, you can’t make this decision from out of nowhere—at any company of any reasonable size (basically any company with an HR department), terminating an employee can only be the result of a stepped series of actions, as we discuss in the “Corrections” chapter. You must have documentation to support the decision to terminate, and you must have given your employee opportunities to improve (via a performance improvement plan, for example). Failure to do this will usually result in HR coming to you and informing you that you cannot separate the employee without having done this.

Never say “fired”: Reality-TV show hosts aside, the phrase “You’re fired!” should never leave a manager’s lips, and they most certainly should never come out of yours. If you’re in a tense situation with an employee, tossing that off as the ultimate trump card (pun intended) will actually whip around and backfire on you when the HR department informs you that no, you can’t fire them, not without cause, where “cause” means documentation and PIPs and so on. Then, when the HR team talks to the employee to inform them that no, in fact they’re not fired, you will have undermined your authority completely, and probably given yourself the boot as well. You may feel like this undercuts your authority with your team—but if you need this kind of authority to get things done with your team, you’re trying to manage by fear, and you really need to rethink being a manager.

For this reason, if you’re even thinking that you’re approaching termination/separation status, you need to connect with HR.