How I talk to leaders about firing people

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By Johnathan Nightingale

I remember the first time I fired someone. Every manager does. Mine happened about a month before Christmas.

I’d managed him for 6 months, after inheriting him from another manager. When I got him, he was already in trouble. A remote employee 9 months into his employment and with very little to show for it.

The experienced managers know what happened next. I tried to help any way I could. I bent standards and over-celebrated small successes. I gave him quick fixes to put up some wins. I was motivated, and I think he was too. Our investment paid off a little, but not enough.

We wrote up a PIP — a Performance Improvement Plan. I hated it. It started with,

This document serves as written notice that your current level of performance is unacceptable.

Wretched. After walking him through the pieces of the PIP he agreed it was accurate and fair. He signed it and we got to work.

At first, he was transformed. In September he picked up work left and right, interacted more with teammates than he ever had prior. He had questions, got answers, and put up code. I got feedback from his colleagues that it was great to see more from him. As his manager, it was such a relief to see his burst of energy. I had hope and he did, too.

But by October, it fell apart. His pace collapsed because he’d never worked at this level before and he was exhausted. We were trying to catch him up on more than a year of development and team engagement. He missed his October targets by a wide margin.

In November, he was clear with me that he wasn’t going to get anywhere close. I was clear, too. When I told him we were done, he just said “I understand.” My HR partner talked to him about the mechanics of the next week. How to return hardware and get set up with COBRA coverage. He said he felt fairly treated. I went outside and vomited in the parking lot.

It’s Not About You, but it’s Also About You

It’s self-indulgent to focus on the hardships of managers in this. The employees being fired have the hardest time, here. I don’t want to diminish that. But because of that, or maybe because everyone involved just hates the whole mess, it’s hard to find much good writing about firing. We’re afraid to even say the word. She was terminated. I heard they exited that whole team. We let him go.

In the time since that story I’ve hired many people, and fired a few. I’ve helped managers administer their own first PIPs and, sometimes, the firing that comes at the end. I’ve also celebrated their PIP graduations. A solid PIP graduation is a wonderful thing. It’s a second chance for an employee, their manager, and the rest of their org to do a better job working together. There’s an uneasiness to them for a while, but it’s happy and hopeful.

IMHO, YMMV

I don’t love that Tolstoy line as much as other folks do, but it’s apt here.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It’s hard to generalize on the subject of performance issues and firing. Every case is different, and usually the product of many screw ups in hiring, onboarding, management, and communication. It is far better to fix things at any of those stages — to hire well and manage well — than to find yourself here. Still, when you do, there are some things I’ve found helpful to repeat to my managers and myself.

Performance Plan Theater

The worst trap I see managers fall into is thinking that performance plans are a lost cause. It’s an awful, self-perpetuating loop. Not only do you guarantee that this PIP won’t work, you then go on to teach new managers the same lesson. I’ve heard people senior enough to know better say that a PIP is just a tool to cover your ass and establish a paper trail on the way to dismissal. They should be ashamed of themselves.

I’ve dealt with labour law in a lot of different countries. It’s complex; full of nuance and a significant amount of well-meaning idiocy, too. Your jurisdiction might even require a PIP before any termination. It’s usually at least a prudent thing to do to reduce risk. But, to me, that whole conversation is beside the point.

You bet on this person. You interviewed them, hired them, paid them, and introduced them to the team. They’re not performing the way you expected them to, I get that, but why treat the PIP as dismal, predetermined theater? It’s a tool. Use it.

Impossible Plans and Polite Passes

A good performance plan needs three basic elements. First, a clear statement that performance isn’t where it needs to be. You can’t dodge this piece. Second, a set of clear expectations about what success looks like. Measurable and objective targets that anyone in this role ought to hit. And third, a rigorous measurement and check-in plan to track those expectations. It’s a more explicit version of what any good manager should be doing anyhow.

My two tests for any PIP a manager puts in front of me are:

• Is it impossible? Do I believe that this PIP can succeed? Is there a clear definition of success, and is it in keeping with the expectations of the role we hired this person to fill?

• Is it a polite pass? Will a person who graduates this PIP be back to a clean bill of health? I don’t want someone to squeak through and wear it for the rest of their time on our team. If you graduate and sustain that level of performance, you should be back firmly in the “solid” camp.

A PIP that passes those tests can be written by any manager who cares about seeing their employees succeed. If you can’t write a PIP that does, then a performance plan isn’t the right tool for your situation. A PIP can’t solve “We hired marketing too early and don’t know what to do with them,” or “We don’t handle remote very well.” A PIP also can’t solve, “I don’t like you.”

Start Early

Managers who haven’t fired are usually afraid of it. They should be, it’s no fun. But the fear makes them do a dumb thing. It makes them delay. Waiting makes everything worse, because the problems deepen and the hope of recovery fades.

When a manager tells me that a member of their team is under performing, I start a clock. Poor performance can come from a lot of places, and is often pretty easy to correct with a single direct conversation. Usually that conversation, in a regular 1:1, pulls out something situational — maybe not even related to their work. Life happens and, as Melissa says, “People bring their whole selves to work.” In those cases, the performance is self-correcting and I cancel the clock. In most other cases, the problem is work related, but honest conversation identifies changes we can make, or expectations that we can correct. And again, I cancel the clock.

But if a direct conversation yields little change and, a month later we’re in the same spot, it’s time. Remember, a PIP is not a firing. A PIP is a tool to either bring performance into line with the expectations, or confirm that this employee isn’t going to meet those expectations. There can be a hundred reasons for that but none of them are helped by maintaining the status quo.

A 1-month clock followed by a 3-month PIP means that before an employee is fired there would have been at least 4 months of poor performance. In truth, it’s often more like 6–9, as managers will try a few approaches to performance management before resorting to a PIP. Some employment cultures (Japan and France both come to mind) consider that insufficient. But in North America in general, and in a startup context in particular, 6 months of poor performance is already a long time. Hard for the team, hard for the manager, and hard for the employee. It’s selfish to drag that out because of your own discomfort.

You’re Not Off The Hook

Lots of employee departures can be mutual and positive and happen for the right reasons. But a firing is almost always the result of some screw ups. Even if you manage the process well, it shouldn’t ever feel good to reach that point.

How did someone get 9 months into their employment with so little work done, and so little team integration? If he was never going to work out then we made several errors in hiring. If we were right to hire him then we clearly messed up onboarding and integration. In either case we let problems get far too deep before addressing them. We screwed up, as a management team, but he’s the one that got fired.

There’s a deep unfairness to the fact that poor performance can be multi-dimensional, but employees bear the brunt of the consequence. Yes, our employees are grown ups, and should be capable of a degree of communication and self management. Yes, they have a responsibility to ask questions if expectations aren’t clear. But, as leaders and managers of managers, we should wear it every time an employee is fired. Whether you buy the servant leadership stuff or not, you have a power over the people on your team that you should feel, every day, like you have to earn.