Hire to Fire
I don’t think anyone hires someone intending or expecting to eventually fire that person. But it happens. A lot. And that’s a problem for both sides.
For the hirer, because it wasted resources – time, money, energy and opportunity cost. For the person who got fired, same deal. And depending on severance and circumstances, the ordeal may leave them in a precarious position.
At the risk of sounding brusque, if you got fired it’s likely other people did not believe you were doing your job well. And while the world is occasionally unfair and moving on from people can create risk, my experience is that when someone is fired, it’s rarely because something just recently stopped working. It’s because something has been off for a while.
That said, that’s not necessarily an indictment of the person.
Sometimes it’s because the timing was bad. Sometimes because the fit was a reach in the first place. Sometimes because the role (or person) changed.
I’ve written before about our CEO Brent’s guidance to be kind, not nice. This is the idea that nice is avoiding discomfort, while kind is doing the more difficult thing in service of a better long-term outcome.
For the most part, when I’ve fired people in the past, while it never felt great, I believed – and still believe – I was doing them a favor. That may sound self-serving, but the fact of the matter is that staying in the wrong role is corrosive. It’s bad for the person, the team, the organization, and performance. And the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.
Yet that happens because it’s easy to get stuck. But know that if you get stuck, on anything, the only right thing to do is get unstuck.
– Tim
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