‘Be rigorous, not ruthless’: Advice on firing from 10 world-leading entrepreneurs

Nothing is more difficult than telling an employee they have lost their job, but almost no business or senior manager can avoid it. The crucial ingredient is to do it with transparency and humanity.

“When you’ve reached the demarcation line and have decided to replace someone in a key seat, keep in mind an essential distinction: Be rigorous, not ruthless,” writes business guru Jim Collins in Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0.

“Rigor means applying self-honesty and confronting head-on the need to remove someone from a key seat. But being rigorous in decision making doesn’t mean being ruthless in how you go about making the change. To be rigorous, not ruthless, requires a blend of courage and compassion.

“The courage comes in being direct and straightforward, not hiding behind made-up reasons or delegating the hard task to someone else. If you don’t have the guts to take personal responsibility for making the decision and delivering the news, then you don’t have the right to lead. The compassion comes via tone and respect. Are you handling the change in such a manner that you’d feel comfortable calling this person on his or her birthday next year, and years down the road? And would the person warmly welcome the call?”

“It is very difficult to fire people you care about,” entrepreneur and business thinker Ray Dalio writes in Principles: Life and Work.

“Cutting someone that you have a meaningful relationship with but who isn’t an A-player in their job is difficult because ending good relationships is hard, but it is necessary for the long-term excellence of the company.

“You may have a need for the work they’re doing (even if it’s not excellent) and find it hard to make a change. But they will pollute the environment and fail you when you really need them. Doing this is one of those difficult, necessary things. The best way to do it is to ‘love the people you shoot’ — do it with consideration and in a way that helps them.”

Here’s the one question that reveals if it’s time to cut someone from the team, Patty McCord, the former chief talent officer at Netflix, author of Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, told Inc magazine: “If this person walked in the door and interviewed for the job they’re doing now, would you hire them? Knowing what you know about their performance, would they still be qualified?”

“Companies evolve. Especially high-growth ones. Their needs change and they demand different skills of their workforce. You may have hired an employee to do a certain kind of job. They may have done that job very well. But the exact job requirements may have changed. It may require a different skill set or expertise. Was your employee able to evolve and fill those gaps? … It might not even be the person’s fault that they’re no longer qualified for the job. So you could just put them on probation, giving them the opportunity to improve and keep their job.”

Patty McCord. Source: Screengrab taken from TED Talk/Ted.com

“You are laying people off because the company failed to hit its plan,” says Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

“If individual performance were the only issue, then you’d be taking a different measure. Company performance failed. This distinction is critical, because the message to the company and the laid-off individuals should not be ‘This is great, we are cleaning up performance’. The message must be ‘The company failed and in order to move forward, we will have to lose some excellent people’.”

“Admitting to the failure may not seem like a big deal, but trust me, it is. ‘Trust me’. That’s what a CEO says every day to her employees. Trust me: This will be a good company. Trust me: This will be good for your career. Trust me: This will be good for your life. A layoff breaks that trust. In order to rebuild trust, you have to come clean.”

“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind”, says Brené Brown in a 2018 blog post drawn from her book, Dare To Lead.

“Over the past several years, my team and I have learned something about clarity and the importance of hard conversations… It’s simple but transformative. Feeding people half-truths or bullshit to make them feel better (which is almost always about making ourselves feel more comfortable) is unkind. Not getting clear with a colleague about your expectations because it feels too hard, yet holding them accountable or blaming them for not delivering is unkind.”

“I believe in firing fast, which is very different from my measured approach to vetting a potential hire,” says former emeritus chair of the United Nations Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council, Elizabeth Gore, in this article for Inc. 

“I’ve been slow to fire before. I’ve made the mistake a couple of times, thinking that the situation with an employee would improve. It never does,” she said.

“The main reason that I’m swift to fire when necessary: I want my employees to respect me. Everyone knows who their worst coworkers are. If it’s making its way around the cubicles that one particular person isn’t carrying their weight, and I’m not doing anything about it, that makes me look ineffectual. And that’s bad for the whole company. I’m supposed to be the leader and if I’m not leading, I’m no better than that weakest link. If that ever happens, I’ll be the one who deserves to be fired.”

“There have been several times when I’ve had to deliver bad news to accomplished people, some of whom were friends, and some of whom had been unable to flourish in positions that I had put them in,” writes former Disney chief Bob Iger in his memoir The Ride of a Lifetime.

“There’s no good playbook for how to fire someone, though I have my own internal set of rules. You have to do it in person, not over the phone and certainly not by email or text. You have to look the person in the eye. You can’t use anyone else as an excuse. This is you making a decision about them — not them as a person but the way they have performed in their job — and they need and deserve to know that it’s coming from you,” he writes.

“You can’t make small talk once you bring someone in for that conversation. I normally say something along the lines of: ‘I’ve asked you to come in here for a difficult reason.’ And then I try to be as direct about the issue as possible, explaining clearly and concisely what wasn’t working and why I didn’t think it was going to change. I emphasise that it was a tough decision to make, and that I understand that it’s much harder on them.

“There’s a kind of euphemistic corporate language that is often deployed in those situations, and it has always struck me as offensive. There’s no way for the conversation not to be painful, but at least it can be honest, and in being honest there is at least a chance for the person on the receiving end to understand why it’s happening and eventually move on, even if they walk out of the room angry as hell.”

Bob Iger, Disney chair. Source: The Walt Disney Company website

“It’s not just because firing someone is awkward for many people,” explains Mark McCormack in his practical book On Managing.

“It’s also because letting people go raises doubts about a manager’s judgment. Generally speaking, all managers believe their people are talented. That’s why they hired them, promoted them, and gave them raises. In a downsizing, it’s tough for a manager to admit that people he has been praising for years are suddenly dispensable. It’s a blow to [their] managerial acumen.”

“The default mode is to think that maybe this person will turn around,” says Jay Conger — co author of The High Potential’s Advantage: Get Noticed, Impress Your Bosses, and Become a Top Leader — to the Harvard Business Review.

“So many managers have a tendency to wait and give the individual more leeway,” he says. But, “if you are already thinking about terminating someone, that’s a bad sign.”

Think about the “root cause of the employee’s poor performance,” he says and ask yourself: “Does this person fully understand all of their responsibilities? Have they received enough training? Is there not enough supervision? Are expectations not clear?”.

Conger also recommends seeking input from trusted colleagues, suggesting saying something like: ‘I notice that our team is not performing in this particular area. What do you see as the reason for it?’.

“Ask for their observations, and see if they bring up the individual. If they do, ask for specific, concrete examples of what the individual has or has not done,” Conger adds.

Your goal, he says, is to get perspective on the situation and to think about where this employee falls on “the sliding scale” of performance.

“If this person has eight goals and does well on most but has two that are worrisome, then [their] career at your organisation might be salvageable,” he says.

“You need to define … the overall workplace behaviour that is acceptable to you,” says Ann Barnes, co-founder of Canada’s first licensed medical cannabis company, Peace Naturals Project, in a TED talk on managing narcissistic personalities.

“The more specific you are, the better off you are. This again has to be reinforced frequently. People need to be reminded that this is what you require,” she says.

“Documentation is also important as a protocol for this type of personality. We know that narcissists tend to be highly litigious. So you need to protect yourself, your employees, and your business by documenting poor work behaviour and clearly advising what next steps are. There needs to be clear disciplinary processes in place… consistently applied at all levels. This means from the CEO down. By doing so you can increase morale in the company itself…”

The principles to remember when you let someone go, from the Harvard Business Review:

DO:

• Consider your organisations’s future business needs and whether the employee in question has the necessary skillset.
• Try to understand the root cause of the underperformance — it will give you useful information that will aid in your decision.
• Be transparent with your employee about your concerns.

DON’T:

• Rely solely on your own observations; seek input from trusted colleagues.
• Leave HR out of the process — seek their input and advice on your decision.
• Dawdle once you’ve made the decision to fire. The cost of procrastination is high for everyone.