How To Think About Firing People (Kindly)
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: not everyone you hire is going to perform well in their role.
As a leader, this means that you’re going to have to fire people. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s necessary.
If you’re hiring 20 people today, you should expect that at least one of them is going to depart the company due to performance reasons within the first year. This isn’t a sign that your hiring processes are bad, or that you aren’t “raising the bar” in your assessments. Interviewing is an imperfect way to predict future success. And, companies change a lot within a year.
I’m always surprised when companies share stats like “we’ve never had to fire anyone!” or “we don’t have any developer turnover” in their interview processes. Some might take this to mean that the team has outstanding culture and very high performance. But working with dozens and dozens of companies, I know this just isn’t the case.
Teams that have no turnover are most likely dealing with unaddressed performance issues.
Performance management is a tough job, and it can be very difficult to address performance issues when a team is in a state of growth. You’re under pressure to hit hiring goals, so it’s a tough argument to remove someone from your team.
This is a paradox: when you hire more people, the likelihood that someone won’t perform well increases. It’s the time when you need performance management the most.
I often see companies make the mistake of thinking that a rigorous interview process leads to a high performing team. This is almost never the case. A challenging interview process is not a replacement for performance management, though some companies treat it as such.
Onboarding and probation periods
Many countries have probationary periods when a new employee begins a work contract. This is a period of several weeks or months where the employment contract may be terminated with minimal consequence. Sometimes things don’t work out, so the probationary period is an escape hatch. Unfortunately, short stints at a company or gaps in your resume are still stigmatised, so if you join a company and the role turns out to be something very different from what you were sold, there’s still a consequence for you as a job seeker.
In the USA, probationary periods are extremely uncommon because most US states are a “right to work” state. You can be fired at any reason, for any time, with little legal recourse. On the other hand, you theoretically have the right to quit your job with 0 notice period, but it will be next to impossible to get a recommendation from your colleagues if you did that.
If you are in a country where probationary periods are used, it’s a time to keep open communication with your new employee about expectations and performance. If you have to terminate employment in the probationary periods, the legal clauses provide you the ability to do it quickly, so both the employee and your team can move on.
Don’t fire for failure
How do you know when it’s time to fire someone? This usually doesn’t happen like it does on TV, where someone royally screws up and then gets marched into their boss’s office to get raked over the coals. Contrary to TV advice, firing someone for failing at a project is bad practice. It will lead to
lack of experimentation
unwillingness to take accountability
fear-based culture
Instead, failure should be a part of growth. This kind of failure is different to a persistent failure to deliver on business results, despite having coaching and other support at their disposal.
A skill gap that can’t be sufficiently be addressed with the resources and time available to the team or company
Violation of core principles of respect
Demonstrated lack of willingness or ability to change and adapt
My own belief that they will not be successful
There’s no perfect formula here, but this is how I assess whether termination is the right choice.
If someone is struggling to perform, but has a high willingness and ability to change, I will continue to support them.
Conversely, if someone demonstrates neither a willingness nor an ability to change, the decision is very clear to terminate them.
There’s a big “it depends” area in here, where a team member might show a reasonable willingness to change, and they’ve started to show some results. Time is an important factor here. If their willingness to change after seeing results does not increase, I would err on the side of termination. Similarly — although I hate this situation - if they’re very willing to change but just lack the skills and capacity to do so, it’s also time for a difficult conversation.
These are the hardest situations, but it’s important to think about the team that will stay. You’ve shown that you’ve given as much support as possible to the struggling team member, but they were still unable to get over the learning curve and perform well. Your team has been carrying the weight of their underperformance that whole time.
Hire fast, fire faster?
On May 31, I joined some spectacular engineering leaders at CTO Craft’s conference on the complete hiring arc. If you missed it, you can check out the recording here (my talk at 1h50m, Roy’s at 2h24m).
Roy Rapoport from Netflix spoke about “Hire fast, fire faster.” He shared that Netflix has ~3% termination rate within the first year. That’s reasonably low. He explained that “fire faster” is not about firing a lot of people. It means that the time between your decision to fire someone and the termination conversation should be as short as possible. It should also never be a surprise to them.
Conversations before firing
After you let someone go, your team will have questions. One of those will be “did the person know about the performance issues?” If you can’t answer this with an emphatic yes, you are doing your team a disservice.
When I have performance conversations with someone who is at risk of losing their job, I say very clearly “I will have to let you go if we are unable to address these performance issues.”
Roy mentioned that he will explicitly use the phrase “your job is at risk” in performance conversations with people who are at risk of losing their jobs.
Clarity is kindness. It’s unkind to be less direct, let the person guess where they stand, and then ultimately surprise them with a termination.
Firing is part of your job
It’s not anyone’s favorite part. But managing your team’s performance is a critical component of your job.
Be kind, be clear, and ask for help when you need it.
