Winning - Jack Welch [42]
Today, the business is flourishing, and many of the CEO’s former employees have returned without bitterness.
Needless to say, this is an ideal situation—the firm was small and it too benefited from coverage of the Internet industry collapse. But even if your company is large and economic conditions are more vague, it always helps to have your cards on the table for employees to see in the event of a downturn.
FIRINGS FOR NONPERFORMANCE
Now for the most complex and delicate kind of firing, when an individual has to be let go because of poor performance.
Earlier I used “straightforward” to describe the no-surprise, minimal-humiliation approach to these situations. I didn’t mean to make it sound easy—it is not.
Unfortunately, you learn how to fire on the job, under the most stressful of circumstances. Nothing really prepares you. Managers don’t sit around talking about how to do it, comparing notes. I’m not aware of any business schools that actually teach the process, and while company training programs might talk a lot about evaluations, none that I know of offer a lot of help on how to actually let people go.*
Which leaves you to your instincts. Maybe some people are born to fire well. I know I wasn’t. I did it for years and never got used to it. I was particularly bad at it in my early years as a manager. One of my most painful memories from Pittsfield, where I ran Plastics, is of the day that a boy got on the school bus and punched my son John in the face. I had fired the boy’s dad the day before, and obviously, I had done it wrong. It didn’t make any difference that I thought I had handled the matter well. The boy’s family didn’t perceive it that way.
THE THREE BIG MISTAKES OF FIRING
Sometimes people screw up so royally they deserve to be fired without much ado.
I once had a manager in Plastics who had to be let go after ninety days because, while he had a résumé loaded with prestigious degrees and was as charming as could be in chitchat, he was completely ineffective at every single task. A friend of mine was fired from her job as a clothing store clerk in the first week because she forgot to ask half the customers to sign their creditcard slips. She says that if her boss hadn’t fired her, she would have fired herself.*
Usually, however, firings for nonperformance aren’t so black-and-white. There’s lots more gray about who did what and what went wrong to lead up to the finale.
Because of that, there are three main ways that managers get firing wrong—moving too fast, not using enough candor, and taking too long.
For an example of the first dynamic, take the case of a friend of mine who ran a sixty-person unit within a three-hundred-employee company. The company had been growing and things were generally going well. It was privately held and had a family-like culture, meaning mediocre performance was generally tolerated in the name of congeniality. It was not uncommon for employees to carpool on weekdays and socialize on weekends. As with many small companies, performance reviews were generally informal events with lots of generic pleasantries.
When my friend was promoted to head the unit, she soon realized that one of her chief lieutenants, the man in charge of distribution, whom I’ll call Richard, was not up to the demands of the growing business. To exacerbate matters, Richard was a true disrupter, as described in the last chapter. He never missed an opportunity to challenge the authority of the new boss or her boss; usually, his negative comments came in the form of sarcastic humor with peers in the hallways.
Richard’s performance wasn’t terrible, but it was pretty close. He regularly missed deadlines and seemed unable to handle increasingly complex logistics. My friend spoke to Richard several times about his shortcomings, to no avail. Finally, after a particularly tough period of Richard’s corridor sniping, an important customer called to complain that his