Being good at firing people — from your company, and your life — is foundational to collaborating with high performing people, and building world class teams, and shipping incredible work.
Here is why
1. You have to experiment with people. No one, not ever, has ever had a 100% success rate at hiring great team members. No matter how good your recruiting, screening, and selection process is, you’re going to have misses. If an Premier League team never cut players, never made adjustments to their starting lineup, and never made substitutions mid-game, they would quickly become the worst performing franchises in the league. If you are bad at identifying when someone you hired is a poor fit for your company, you dramatically increase the stakes of each hire, and make the inevitable mis-hire far more costly. There is no championship team without a lot of cuts.
2. Being good at letting people go, builds trust and reduces fear amongst the rest of your team. When you let someone go, other employees watch how you treat that person. Everyone on your team at some point thinks a version of, “I might get let go some day.” Watching you be clear, respectful, and supportive to the person you are letting go, will elevates fear. Fear destroys personal and team performance. Fear is a bad motivator. Being good at off boarding someone when they are not a good fit, is key to enabling the rest of your team to feeling secure, trust your decision making, and focus on doing their best work.
3. You have to get the wrong people off the team, to make room for the right people. This is one of the biggest hidden costs to keeping someone on longer than you should. You close yourself off to the possibility of hiring a rare talent to fill their role. Each day that you keep someone on past the point where you were clear they are a bad fit, is a day you could be working with someone else who is truly great. It’s an active vote against the future success of your company.
4. People who are currently failing at their job, are not having fun, and will drag down the energy and performance of the rest of the team. If you have a good screening process, it’s unlikely that you hired someone who is truly incompetent. They are likely just not a good fit for your company’s culture, or the role you hired them for. They will be happier at a job or company for which they are better matched. You are doing everyone a favor by graceful and supportively off boarding them.
5. If you’re the founder, CEO, or part of high-level leadership, one of your core responsibilities is making decisions no one else in the stack can. This means that you get all the hardest, stickiest decisions. You have to get good at making hard choices — even with imperfect information. There are few areas that better exemplify this, than firing and layoffs. If you want to be a great leader, you have to get good at letting people go.
6. Off boarding people is just like any other skill; you can’t get good at it without practice. Just like no one has ever been perfect at hiring, no one was born perfectly skilled at ending relationships. You have to learn through trial and error (mostly error). It’s going to suck more in the beginning. You’re going to feel bad, and they might feel bad. But you’ll never learn how to do it gracefully and with a high level of integrity, unless you fucking try.
7. My experience has been that the majority of my stress comes from not taking action over something that I could have some impact or control over. To say it another way, my stress is mostly from ignoring things that I should not be ignoring. Avoiding letting someone go, when the time has come, is a near perfect example of this. Take action.
8. Our culture is conflict adverse. But conflict is where all the really important change and growth happens. High performance companies have good cultures around conflict, and use it as a feature, not a bug in their team dynamics. If you want to be good at leadership, you have to get good at conflict. We convince ourselves that putting off dealing with a low performing collaborator will enable us to avoid the uncomfortable feelings, shame, and self-doubt we are experiencing. Address the situation — take the needed action of getting the person out of their current role, either into a different position in the organization, or more likely, letting them go.
9. Fear gives bad advise. When you are feeling afraid or avoidant of a situation, usually the solution involves moving towards that thing, as a way to get through it to the other side. The more you do this, the easier it will get. This is one of the big gifts of being responsible for of lot of hiring and firing — it makes you face your fears and build experience having hard conversation that are necessary to moving your company’s mission forward. If your a founder or high level executive, this is one of the most important skill you can develop.
10. Putting off firing someone, means you are dealing with the same problem over and over again, rather than moving on to new problems. You are reinforcing failure. Do you know what the a good working definition of insanity is? Doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. You are taking up valuable time and capacity dealing the same shit, when you could be solving new and more important problems. Move this one off your plate. Let the person go.
12. This one in particular goes out to the founders. Early stage startups are weak link sports: when the team is small, total effectiveness and morale is going to be dramatically impacted by the lowest performing person. Your chances of success are less than 10%. Whatever you’re afraid of around letting someone go, is nothing compared to the failure of the entire company. You’re job as the founder is to make the hard decision that no one else can — to cut through the noise, and emerge clear signal. Everything sucks, some of the time. You wanted this job and getting good at letting people go, is part of that job.
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This morning, as I’m writing this, this sun is shining, in a way that is making me feel like anything is possible. Life is short, let’s be in the joy of doing big, important, hard things — fully and authentically.
I’m moving into the week, excited to be challenged, excited to be asked to grow. I started my day by climbing in the cold plunge for three minutes, because everything feels easier after I’ve done that. My calves are sore from a the hard run I did yesterday, and my dopamine levels are high. Here’s to this day, this week, this life.
Now let’s get after it.
Sean Ritchey 