Winning - Jack Welch [43]
The official dismissal meeting could not have gone worse. To say Richard was surprised is an understatement. He blew up in anger, shouting, “You’ve got to be crazy. We don’t fire people at this company!” and “You’re going to pay for this.” He then stormed out, ran back to his office in another part of the building, and called an impromptu meeting with his own eight-person staff. Even though he cleaned out his desk and was gone within hours, a hate-management movement had been launched. Some of the unit’s employees—in particular, Richard’s circle of friends—felt that he had been fired without enough warning, and they complained they no longer trusted the boss or the organization. In the fraught weeks that followed, productivity dropped by an order of magnitude as people spent inordinate amounts of time gathering behind closed doors to talk about Richard’s departure, how it was handled, and who might be next.
It took my friend about three months to restore equilibrium and get her unit moving again.
The second firing mistake is a variation of Richard’s case, and it involves lack of candor and a misunderstanding about fairness.
Say you’ve got an employee named Gail. She can’t reach her sales quotas, and her coworkers really can’t count on her for one reason or another. She’s damaging the unit’s performance and morale. But Gail’s friendly to everyone, she tries hard, and she’s been with the company for years. Every time you attempt to tell her how badly she’s doing, she’s so cheerful and oblivious that the conversation gets muddled, and you end up hiding your negative feelings behind a forced smile and a mixed message about “working smarter.”*
Then the situation reaches a crisis stage. Gail really screws up, and in a burst of impulsive anger, you fire her. She’s shocked and starts to remind you of all the positive feedback you’ve given her over the years. You respond by coming up with a severance package that feels pretty rich to you, given how much she’s underperformed. She hates the package—it’s insulting, she says—and she gets angry. You get angry back because you can’t believe she’s angry. You feel she should be grateful you carried her for so long! The next thing you know, Gail’s gone from shocked to angry to bitter as she walks out the door.
This may not be the last you hear of her. Think about the last time you lost a promising hire or a potential customer. They might have been talking to Gail, who went out to become an “ambassador” for your company.
Every employee who leaves goes on to represent your company. For the next five, ten, or twenty years, they can bad-mouth or praise. In the most extreme cases, people fired take their anger public, and a few become so-called whistleblowers. I say “so-called” because I’ve seen too many companies “exposed”—wrongly—by people seeking nothing more than revenge for a firing conducted by a manager who should have and could have done it better.
And now for the third mistake. It occurs when a firing happens too slowly and you get a kind of Dead Man Walking effect. Everyone knows a person is about to be fired, including the person himself, but the boss waits a long time to pull the trigger. The result is enormous awkwardness in the office that can lead to a form of paralysis.*
I’ve seen the Dead Man Walking effect more times than I care to remember. I can recall a staff meeting at headquarters when I was a division VP. About ten people were there, including one of my peers—“Steve”—who had been having consistently bad results. Before the meeting even started, everyone already sensed that Steve was a goner. But once the meeting began, the discomfort got worse. The group’s boss picked apart Steve’s quarterly results and wouldn’t allow Steve to open his mouth for a rebuttal. Steve could do nothing right. At the coffee break, everyone milled around, avoiding Steve as much as possible. None of us could look him in the eye.
Unfortunately, it took about a year before Steve was let go. At every staff meeting, we watched