Deciding when it's time to fire someone
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One of the hardest things to do as a manager is decide to fire someone.
Particularly if you're a new manager, you tend to spend a lot of time blaming other things -- blaming yourself, blaming the goals, the business, other people. One of the things you realize after you've managed a lot of people is that if you get that feeling in your gut, then something is wrong. It doesn't automatically mean the person needs to be fired, but it does mean that you need to do the work — do the work to figure out what's wrong and whether it can be fixed.
Here are some tools I’ve used in the past both for myself and others that have helped me navigate these moments:
The first questions I ask when someone is underperforming are (a) is their role clear and do they know what it is? and (b) do they understand your expectations of them? These are the top two reasons why a lot of people underperform in startups. That should be the framework for your first conversation with the person after you get that gut feeling: reclarify the role and reset expectations. This is your first set of steps to try to figure out where the gap is.
If things don't get better with a clearer role and expectations, then I have three "exercises" I do to figure out how extreme the situation is:
1) Write the job description for the role as if you were hiring someone new. To do this, start by asking yourself, “if I had this person's salary and could hire someone new, what would they own and drive?” Often, this is the only exercise you need to do. We get stuck in trying to improve the person that’s already in the seat. But typically thinking and writing from a blank slate immediately makes it clear that your current person isn't cutting it AND that the gap is too big for them to close. (Side note: this is also the exercise I do if I need to write a PIP.) It’s also important for your sanity. As a manager, you can feel like a failure when you can’t coach someone to success — that is both a normal feeling and it’s usually either wrong or at least unhelpful. So the most important thing to do is get some perspective on how big the gap is. It often isn’t iterative or coachable.
2) Next, ask yourself, “if x/y/z changed, would you want this person in the role?” Here’s how I do this one:
Wave a magic wand and fix the key problems with the person's performance one by one. It tells you how many problems there are.
After you fix one problem with your wand, ask yourself, “IF that problem was fixed, would I want to continue working with this person?” That typically exposes the next problem, so use your wand to fix that problem until you feel like you have a complete list.
Once you have a complete list of problems, ask yourself how likely it is for those problems to get fixed. This will give you a sense of whether the issues are coachable or not.
Finally, ask yourself how fast you need to see that change happen. Sometimes, the problems are fixable or coachable, but not on a timeline that works for the business. That is often the reality in high-growth startups — you don’t have time for someone to do what it takes to fix the issues or grow and learn as much as they would need to to fill the gap.
If the answer is that you'd want to work with them if they fix X and Y, but the change needs to happen fast, then that's a great conversation to have with them. Often though, you discover that there are more problems than you thought and it's unlikely that they are going to be fixed.
3) Final exercise if you feel like it is unlikely that the person is going to be successful in their current role: Look at the person's challenges in their current role and ask whether there is any other role in the company where they might be successful. This one works some of the time. Sometimes their scope needs to be smaller, so you need to hire their boss. Sometimes they might be successful working on a different team or with a different manager. I like giving people 2 chances to be successful at a company before parting ways IF you can afford it and IF the issues with the person aren't cultural. I have seen people thrive on the second chance. It doesn’t happen every time but I’ve seen it happen often enough that it is always worth considering.
I hope these are helpful to you if you’ve got that gut feeling that something isn’t working.
Shout out to all my new/first-time managers out there... It’s normal to spend an irrational amount of time blaming yourself but it’s not a good use of time! So the faster you realize this isn’t a problem you can fix, the better.
I also just want to say that it is almost always possible to part ways with people with dignity and care. What I try to do in these situations is (a) figure out what’s going on for them — what’s their experience? (b) make the problems I’m seeing and feeling extremely clear, multiple times and (c) when it comes time to part ways, figure out how to take care of them as best you can while still protecting the company (which is part of your job). If you have an HR team, get them involved early and often.
Hope this helps!