Weâre sitting around the living room drinking super smoky Laphroaig Quarter Cask and talking about the first time we had to fire someone. One of our friends works in HR. Sheâs recounting terminations from her early career (without specific details, of course) and grimacing.
I tell her about the first time I had to fire someone. I was so nervous that the HR guy in the room did most of the talking (still grateful). When it was over, I went to the womenâs bathroom and threw up. The person whom I fired hit a pole on the way out of the office parking lot. Small fender bender but still, pretty disastrous.
I sit there, cross-legged on my couch, 10 years smarter, and Iâm overwhelmed by how many things I wish Iâd known then. The conversation sticks with Johnathan too.
Why youâre failing at your job
Someone, maybe Dan Portillo, once told me that people fail in their jobs for one of three reasons: Attitude, Aptitude, or Skills. Sometimes they fail for more than one reason, but if things arenât working, itâs usually at least one.
When you let someone go, you give them an opportunity to reset their day to day and find something thatâs a better fit.
Attitude is how you show up for the job. Sometimes people get in their own way. Sometimes you get a new boss and that person rubs you the wrong way. Sometimes someone else gets the promotion you thought youâd earned and you feel grumpy. Sometimes you never liked the job but took it because you needed the money or didnât feel like you had other options.
Attitude is pretty straightforward. Itâs not that you canât do the job or learn to do the job. Itâs that you donât want to.
And I hear you saying, well, I would want to if Iâd gotten that promotion. Or I would want to if my boss werenât such a jackass. Or if I didnât have to work on the lamest projects. Or with idiotic team members. Maybe thatâs true. ButâŠ
If your rider for coming to work excited to get shit done includes a bunch of things being different than they currently are, your attitude is likely standing in the way of you being successful in your role.
Aptitude is about whether you are capable of doing the role you are in. Do you have the smarts to do the job? Can you learn? This isnât simply a case of whether you are clever or quick, this is about how you adapt to the needs of the business.
Are you one step ahead, can you (as Canadians are fond of saying) skate to where the puck is going to be?
This is about problem-solving, troubleshooting, understanding the business, and optimizing for success. Expectations of aptitude will vary from organization to organization and from role to role.
The good news is that if attitude and aptitude are in a solid spot, skills is the easiest to resolve.
Skills is often about training. When skills are a problem, sometimes itâs because an employee is being asked to do something theyâve never done before or something that wasnât explicit in the job description. This is particularly common in early stage startups where many of the first hires are generalists.
You were hired as a marketing manager because you could manage social media and pull together great campaigns but when the company pivoted to enterprise sales, you now need a really different playbook. Suddenly it doesnât matter that you are a solid B2C generalist, you find yourself totally out over your skis.
The good news is that if attitude and aptitude are in a solid spot, skills is the easiest to resolve. This can take a variety of formsâââfinding mentors, classes, informal or professional coaching. There are many ways to train up on new skills.
Okay, time to put our boss hat on…
As the manager, once you can pinpoint the disconnect, next steps should come into focus. If youâre staring down a combo of attitude and aptitude mismatch or attitude and skills, I feel for you. Itâs hard enough to help someone develop their professional skills when conditions are optimal. Let alone when they are struggling to be vulnerable enough to accept your feedback.
You can spend a bunch of cycles stressing about how to share the feedback so the person can hear it, worrying about hurting their feelings, and scenario-testing how they might respond. If thatâs where you are right now, I have some news for you…
If itâs not working for you, itâs not working for them either.
It took awhile for me to understand the two-sided nature of employment. Everyone always says, âitâs not only that theyâre interviewing you, youâre interviewing them too.â That turns out to be true for more than just the interview phase. Itâs true for the annual review phase too.
Your employee who struggles with attitude doesnât feel good about how they are showing up at work. They may have a long list of reasons that focus on their context and not their actions but in the quiet moments of self-reflection, they know this isnât sustainable.
Everyone deserves an opportunity to be awesome
If itâs not at your company or itâs not in that role, the kindest thing you can do is give someone a firm nudge toward finding a role where they can do amazing things. It sucks to go to work everyday and feel like youâre phoning it in, struggling to get through the day, or otherwise mismatched to your work.
When you let someone go, you give them an opportunity to reset their day to day and find something thatâs a better fit. Okay, this may sound a bit Pollyannaish, but consider this: in the short term it feels awfulâââlike someone is breaking up with you. In the long-term you are saving both the company and the employee from years of being stuck in an unhappy marriage.
Organizations are self-healing
You want this to be false. Especially if you believe in tenure and you feel like being in the same place for a long time should count for something. It does, but probably not the things you think. It counts in that youâve mastered an old version of the organization.
You want this to be false if youâre a superhero and you feel like you are the only person who can save the organization. You want it to be false if you feel like without you, everything will come crashing down.
You want this to be false because the other version sounds really heartless. It cuts dangerously close to people being unimportant and interchangeable and replaceable.
This isnât about swapping out cogs. This isnât an empathy-free approach to human resources. This is about the first rule of full time employmentâââhelp the business succeed. This is about optimizing for the team and the organizationâs wins. This is about not tanking the group to save the individual.
[In retrospect] I never regretted pulling the trigger, I regretted not doing it sooner.
There is a point where itâs clearly not going to work out because of a failure in attitude, aptitude, or skills (or some combination thereof). This is about the decision not to sit in that space, not to stay in that space, not to quietly hope that the situation will improve on its own, that the person will find another job, that they will understand the subtext and address the root causes on their own.
As a new manager, I dreaded letting someone go. I would feel a small knot in my stomach and I would carry it with me. I prayed for passive resolution that didnât require any action on my part.
In the retrospective of all the past terminations Iâve either conducted, been part of, or been on the receiving end of, one thing sticks out:
I never regretted pulling the trigger, I regretted not doing it sooner.
Failing sucks. Firing someone sucks. Getting fired sucks.
If you have to go through any or all of it, I hope 10 years out you find yourself with Laphroaig in hand, surrounded by friends who have lived through it too.
This article was syndicated with permission from The Co-Pour
Feature photo via Unsplash