A Simple framework For Deciding When It’s Time To Fire
Sometimes it’s easy to know when an employee needs to be fired. You don’t have to debate it. The “difficult conversation” isn’t so difficult. Maybe it’s been a long time coming or maybe it was finally the last straw. The idea of removing them from the payroll and the culture brings you relief. Those are the easy ones. Those aren’t the ones we’re going to focus on.
Instead, we’re going to talk about the hard decisions. The employee who has been with you for 20 years, but lately you’re wondering if the position has outgrown the person. The employee you care about deeply but you feel like they’re always on a different page than the rest of the team. The new employee you hired because of their ambition, but now you’re finding the same ambition causing issues.
The hypothetical scenarios are endless and sometimes it’s not clear whether you need to fire the employee or invest more in them. The decision keeps you up at night. You don’t want to let go of a "good" employee but you also don’t want to hold your company back. Your pros and cons list is even. You fear that if you let them go, you’ll be setting yourself back months. It will cost you more… and you still have to worry about getting the right person on the bus. You also fear that if you keep them, you’ll be delaying the inevitable. You’ll be pushing off a decision that will only get harder. The more you invest in them, the more time and money you may waste.
There’s no debate, firing decisions are some of the toughest decisions you’ll ever make as a business owner. While the hard decisions are never black and white, there is a framework, a thought process, you can use to help determine what to do.
Before we give you a few practical ways to evaluate the situation and make a decision, let’s take a step back and first look at what should be required to be part of your team.
Values - the person must be a values fit. While we don’t have time to fully dive into it here, your company should have a set of (clearly defined) core values that are non-negotiable. By non-negotiable, we mean every employee, by working at your company, is agreeing to live by those values, and when they repeatedly choose not to - they need to be removed from the team. No exceptions. As long as you allow exceptions, you don’t have values and you are allowing toxicity in your culture.
Competency - the person must bring an adequate level of competency (in skill, knowledge, ability or the potential to learn) to the position in order to excel in the role. You get to set the standard for what excelling looks like, but the most important thing is that the standard is clearly communicated to the employee. They have to know exactly what is expected of them and what success looks like in their role. If you are not communicating clearly, you may be setting them up for failure.
Those are the requirements. If you knowingly hired someone who didn’t meet that criteria, then there’s a different conversation that needs to happen. But if at the time of your hiring decision, you felt like the person was a values fit and had an adequate level of competency to excel at the position but now you are unsure and questioning your decision, then let’s proceed…
The first step in evaluating whether or not to let go of an employee is to answer these three questions:
Are they still a values/culture fit?
Are they succeeding in their role?
Are you (and/or their direct manager) giving them everything they need to be successful in their role?
Here are the two most important guidelines to making a decision based on these three questions:
If your answer to #1 is no, they need to be let go.
If your answer to #1 is yes but your answer to #3 is anything but an emphatic yes, then before firing them, you need to make sure you’re doing your part.
Let’s quickly break down each question…
With the first question, we want you to think about the individual’s behavior, both towards you, other employees, customers, vendors, everyone they have interactions with and also how they approach their work. Simon Sinek defines culture as a simple equation… culture = behavior + values. Your values need to guide the individual’s behavior. For example, you have the value of Helpful, but you noticed the employee never goes out of their way to help their coworkers. They are too focused on their individual success. You’ve had several conversations with them but the behavior always reverts back after a few days. That person is not living out your value of Helpful, they’re not driving your culture, and they’re holding your company back in more ways than you likely realize.
A major clause with the values/culture question is this… *If you’re not regularly talking about your values, celebrating employees for living them out, and having difficult conversations when they don’t, then it will appear hypocritical and unreasonable to fire an employee because of your values. You can’t expect your employees’ behavior to be guided by your values if your values are never talked about. Before you fire an employee for being a “No” to Question #1, ensure you have done the work to create a culture that is based around your values.
With the second question, “Are they succeeding in their role?” The real question we’re trying to answer is, “Are they meeting expectations?” For production staff this is usually easier to answer. For example, if your employee has a quota of selling $10k/month of your service and your other seven salespeople are regularly meeting it but they continually fail… by definition, they’re not succeeding in their role.
This question may become more difficult to answer for non-production employees however. For example, your receptionist / administrative personnel shows up, manages email, packages, phone calls, general correspondence, orders office supplies, keeps the office organized, but… you’re always having to ask if something has been done, if a report is ready, asking them to redo their work, or supportive deadlines are being missed. Or, perhaps it’s just a matter of seeming like they could be doing more (is it a lack of initiative?)… or at least doing better (is it a lack of diligence and care?). These are usually the tougher ones and that’s why with Question #2, it’s vitally important to make sure that your expectations for what success looks like are clearly communicated to the employee.
The third question, “Are you (and/or their direct manager) giving them everything they need to be successful in their role?” is essential to answer, especially in relation to Question #2. One of the best, easiest, and most effective ways of doing this is ensuring the employee has monthly 1-on-1’s with their direct manager. During the 1-on-1, the manager needs to ask the employee what they need from them over the next 30 days in order to succeed in their role. By asking this question, you are putting the responsibility on the employee to let you know what they need. Therefore, if their response is “nothing,” then there is no legitimate excuse for not meeting expectations.
One of the tougher situations is when they’re a really great person, they seem to hold to your values, you’re giving them everything they need to be successful, and yet, they continue to struggle to perform at a high level.
More often than not (if you have a great set of values), the “lack of performance” actually ties back to not living out one of your values. For example, one of our values is Diligence. We define it as, “we bring the right amount of work to the task.” If we had an employee who was repeatedly falling short of expectations, there’s a high probability they weren’t living out our value of Diligence. In that scenario, the person not succeeding in their role but having everything they need in order to, more than likely can be tied back to not living out our values, hence making the answer to #1 a no.
Along the same lines, our first suggestion for this scenario is to make sure unacceptable performance is clearly communicated to the individual. Not during an annual review or after the tenth time it happens but each and every time. This is a coaching opportunity, it should not be missed. There are very few things more demoralizing for a person’s career than when they think they’re doing a great job and their job is secure, than to be shocked with a firing that seemed to come out of left field. If your employee doesn’t know they’re not meeting expectations, that’s on you or their direct manager. Don’t let it be a surprise.
Instead, you (or their manager) should be meeting with the employee and communicating how they are not performing the job at the level expected and giving them the opportunity to share why, as well as making sure they have everything they need to succeed. This is where having leaders who know how to listen, empathize, and coach is so essential. If this type of meeting continues to happen and nothing improves, it shouldn’t come across as a surprise to the employee when you decide to let them go.
Another tough scenario is when you’re giving the employee everything they need, they’re performing at an extremely high level, but they’re not really the best values/culture fit. The reason business owners usually struggle with this one the most is because they’re afraid of losing the production or efficiency the employee brings to the company. They justify their behavior, “Sure, they may get heated towards coworkers sometimes and occasionally yell at a vendor, but overall they’re a good person and they bring in the company a ton of money.”
We won’t pretend like this one is super easy. The first thing to realize is that if you’re allowing an employee to have lower standards of behavior because of their production, other employees notice it and it’s creating a cultural toxicity. The next thing to realize is that everyone’s production is replaceable. There is someone else out there who can produce at the same level your current employee is and hold to your values. Don’t fool yourself into thinking there isn’t. If you’re unsure if the person is a great culture fit, ask the other leaders on your team. Get their honest uninhibited feedback. Ask them to answer the question, “Would our culture be better without this person on the bus?” And be prepared to truthfully answer the question yourself.
You might be asking, “Well, what about when the answer to all three questions above is yes, but for some reason, you still feel like it may be time to move on?”
We don’t want to pretend this never happens. It does and we’ve had the conversation with business owners.
Let me lay out a hypothetical scenario. The person has been on your team for 20 years. They hold to your values. They continue to do what is expected of them in their role, but… you feel like you’re falling behind the competition due in large part to their position. You wonder if the role has outgrown them or if they’ve lost the motivation and ambition they once had. On top of that, you met someone from a competitor in the same position who completely wowed you after one conversation. You left thinking, “Dang! If we had that person, we would be such a better company!” What do you do?
There isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” answer like some of the other scenarios. This one is more specific, more personal, more relative. While we don’t want to make a broad generalization, we will make a few suggestions.
First, realize more than likely (and buckle up because this may sting a little) your employee isn’t the problem, you are. Anytime you have an employee who is doing everything you ask of them and helping build your culture, and you consider removing them for a shiny object - you may need to take a harder look in the mirror before making any rash decisions.
Secondly, realize that you get to set expectations. If you’re setting external expectations that the employee is meeting, but you have internal expectations they’re not… that’s a different issue. Is that fair to the employee? Absolutely not. You think, “Well, they’re meeting my expectations, but what if there is someone out there who would exceed them… who would leave my expectations in the dust?” Meanwhile, the employee has no idea they’re not meeting your actual “internal” expectations, because according to their stated expectations, they’re doing great.
If that’s the case, the best thing to do is meet with the employee and discuss what it would look like to increase the scope of their expectations. Hear their ideas, concerns, thoughts. See how they respond. Who knows… maybe the increased responsibility excites them, invigorates them, and motivates them to accomplish way more than you imagined.
Let’s say that isn’t the case. Let’s say hypothetically, you have that conversation, and they realize they're not the person to take the company to the next level like you’re asking. There’s a decent chance that the person may still deserve a seat on the bus… but may need to change seats.
What we mean by that is that the individual is fit for your team, but perhaps the role has outgrown them. It could be that they would love the opportunity to try their hand at a different position in the company. You could get creative, not for the sake of being nice, but because this employee can still bring a high level of value to the company, but in a different seat. This solution doesn’t always work but if the employee is open to it, it’s worth exploring.
The key takeaway is that unless you are setting clear expectations, communicating clearly, and giving the employee everything they need to be successful, you should evaluate your leadership or their manager’s leadership before moving on from them.
Some may find this approach too soft and be of the mindset, “After all, isn’t business all about profit? If there’s a person who can help you make more profit than your current employee, why not replace them? You're a business, not a charity…“ If this is your mindset, we’re not going to try to argue you out of it. But if you’ve spent any time around us, you know we believe business can be and should be about more than this.
Business is an opportunity to impact lives, especially employees' lives. You have an obligation to your employees, whether you like it or not. They are devoting over 2,000 hours a year to your business. Sure, you give them a paycheck in return, but they can get one of those anywhere.
Everyone desires vocational fulfillment, and you have the ability to help make that happen. You have the opportunity to help them develop into better versions of themselves. As a result of this impact, your employees will go home to families, friends, and communities with a desire to express the same love and care they are receiving at your company. That’s a huge opportunity!