The Executioner's Song

Friday, August 22, 2008 at 12:15am
I had to fire a guy today. Generally I don't mind firing people. When I hire a person, or take over as manager, I lay out clear expectations for my employees, frequently re-iterate my expectations, and lay out clear consequences...for example, "if you steal from the company you're fired".

Firing someone in a circumstance like that is a relatively easy task. They've clearly violated one of the ground rules, so they have to go, Both parties tend to have a clear understanding.

Today I had to do the kind of firing that I truly hate to do, and I'm quite troubled by it.

My kitchen had a staffing crisis when I came on board and I did what I've always done in the past. I hired a lot of guys with no experience who were eager to learn the trade. Often times you get better results training someone completely new than you would hiring someone with ingrained poor habits.

One of my hires wasn't working out however. He's a young guy that simply lacks the brightness for the job. He had plenty of enthusiasm, was generous, showed up on time and wanted to learn. But he wasn't learning. He was taking initiative in areas that he really shouldn't have been, and hesitant in areas that he should have been taking initiative. His mistakes were costing the company a lot of money. He did a lot of talking when he should have been listening, and just seemed to lack the necessary urgency, situational awareness and charisma that you need to have in this biz. In short, he was stupid.

I'm not saying that to try to be funny in any sort of malicious way. The guy is the nicest person in the world and had a really big heart, but he just wasn't quick-witted enough for the job. In my organization he was what we refer to as an 'uncoachable'.
Because of this I couldn't invest any more time or money in him, and had to cut him loose.

Because he's stupid he had a really hard time understanding why he was being let go. In fact he cried and was quite devastated.
I don't particularly care if someone cries when they've brought it on themselves. But with this guy it was through no fault of his own. Nature shortchanged him on some basic skills, and no amount of effort on his part can change that. It's not his fault, and I feel damn bad about it, but it had to happen.

Afterwards my boss noticed the guy was leaving and was quite upset, and asked what happened. I told him the background and said "So I let him go."

"Wow! I knew you had concerns about him and were thinking about it, but that was pretty fast and painless!"

"Yeah." I said and it was definitely fast. But this one wasn't painless.