Back-and-forth on “When your boss tells you to terminate an employee”

From the Comments about “When your boss tells you to terminate an employee,” (Advice Line, 10/14/2007):

For some semblance of balance, may I lend some support to the minority side here (which appears to be the rather less than endearing Mr. GeorgeC), and try to do so without being disingenuous to the unfortunate situation Mr. “On the Horns” finds himself in.

First, Horns did not say the employee had “…risen all the way to adequate”, that was Bob’s editorial. Horns said the employee achieved clear performance standards. To set clear performance standards, and then fire the employee when he achieves them is indeed treating the employee as sub-human.

Second, Bob’s advice is full of “management tricks” – which may or may not also be company policy. His advice is to lie to the employee (by telling him that he is firing him for any reason other than “my boss told me to”), and to form an agreement with the employee on the appropriate story (by implication, lie) to tell everyone else. That’s a management trick – notwithstanding whether it is good advice or not. Note that the essence of preserving your credibility is choosing the best lies to tell. That ice strikes me as a little thin.

Bob and John Stork delineate Mr. Horn’s mistakes, whether it was failure to set the correct performance standards or failure to get the employees signed acknowledgement of his ‘at-will’ status. So Horn’s made a mistake as a manager, but the employee gets punished? Horn should be given an opportunity to fix his mistake, which (for Bob’s definition of the mistake) would mean setting higher performance standards including fixing his reputation, delighting his customers, or whatever.

Of course the employee will still be ‘at-will’, and can be forced to sign an acknowledgement because he can be fired if he doesn’t. Though (Tom says) the company has to prove the cause if it fires him and gives a reason, but not if stays mum on why. The company can fire him just because his face doesn’t fit – unless (according to Lee) his face is black or yellow or disfigured – in which case the company may have to pay hush-money to fire him. What part this does not fit “subhuman treatment” or “management tricks”?

Rich Clark suggests Mr. Horn’s conscience be relieved by pushing the responsibility for the action up the line. It’s called the Nuremberg Defense. But it didn’t work so well for the Nazis.

I agree that Horn arguing with the boss gets him nowhere. A famous CEO called it “push-back” and had no more time for it than Saddam Hussein had. Each step up the ladder it will be worse. Common sense and experience says that at each step up the ladder the decision maker knows less about the real situation and is more driven by ‘making the numbers.’ “I didn’t get where I am today by doing the right thing; I did what my boss told me.”

I am not a Christian, but statistically most of this discussions’ participants and readers are. Does it not worry you that the best advice we can come up with relies on “bearing false witness”, forgiving your own sins, while letting others take the consequences of them; and on a defense we didn’t let our enemies get away with?

Perhaps Mr. Horn’s first mistake was trying to get better performance out of employee rather than summarily firing him (as the ‘at-will’ management trick permits). This episode will no doubt cure Mr. Horns of that silly mistake.

We may all be just cogs in the company wheel, but in the end the company is nothing but cogs. The company behavior is no more than the sum of the cogs’ behaviors. And if you act against your principles because that’s what cogs do, you are part of the problem. No doubt, Horns will follow Bob’s reality-based sagely advice, but is that a reality you really want to live in? Isn’t that the reality GeorgeC alludes to? It may not be a reality Mr. Horn’s created, but he isn’t doing anything to fix it, if he follows that advice.

My advice is to treat your commitment to the employee as golden, including that implied commitment – “meet the performance standards I set and you keep your job.”- ‘at-will’ law, company policy and the boss notwithstanding. If you made a mistake, such as not setting the standards high enough, you fix it by setting higher standards, and you maintain that commitment if the employee meets your corrected standards. If you and the employee feel the standards are unachievable (his reputation is unrecoverable; he his incapable of delighting your customers) then help him to a mutually-agreed separation and you call it that. If you have to fire the employee because you believe he is not doing the required job, then fire him; tell him that you are firing because he’s not doing the job; and tell everyone else (who needs to know) the same truth.

If this doesn’t work with your boss (and it probably won’t), get a new boss.

– DaveP

Bob’s reply: A few points you might, or might not have considered:

• The difference between a “trick” and a “technique” is in the emotional payload, not in the behavior. Managers have a job to do. The good ones learn techniques that are effective in helping them do it. You could call the setting of clear performance standards a “management trick” if you chose to.

• Management confers a set of responsibilities. One of them is living in a more morally complicated world. If you are faced with two choices – one adheres to the average person’s intuitive sense of right and wrong and leaves the world worse off than it was before; the other seems to violate our collective sense of what is right and leaves the world better off … people in leadership roles face this sort of decision on a regular basis. Staff-level employees rarely do.

• Mr. Horn made the mistake. The employee pays the price. That’s always the case – it’s in the nature of leadership. In war, when officers make mistakes, soldiers take the casualties. Unless you want to make every mistake a capital crime (or, at a minimum, a firing offense), it’s something leaders have to live with.

• For clarity: “Adequate” was more than my editorial spin. It’s a reasonable synonym for “satisfactory,” which is how Mr. Horn described the employee’s improved performance. A point your analysis fails to deal with is that the employee’s salary continues to be a bad investment for the company. When you bring morality into these discussions, you ought to consider whether or not the employee has a moral obligation to deliver as much or more value to his employer than the employer invests in him in the form of salary, benefits, and facilities.

• Promises aren’t, and shouldn’t be absolute. Situations change, and a promise that seemed like a good idea when made might be harmful when the time comes to deliver. Since Mr. Horn has no choice regarding the employee’s continued employment, keeping the promise isn’t an alternative available to him. The question is, now what?

• When I advised Mr. Horn to “agree on a story” I was advising a courtesy. Please consider the alternative to my advice: Either saying, “I can’t discuss the reasons for this employee’s departure,” or “The company decided to fire him for non-performance,” which is how the average employee would interpret the first sentence. I’d advise sticking with the advice I provided.

Unless, that is, you think public humiliation is an appropriate accompaniment to the employee’s termination. – Bob

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