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“Sorry, it’s not working out”

Greg Isaac

This article concerns the issue of firing in a secular company. We print it in this issue because of the light it may shed on the issue of pastoral departures.

I helped fire someone this week. It was my first time.

I’m not sleeping well over it, and I’m not sure why. It seemed “right”. The evaluations from the divisional leaders had been clear. Ignoring them would cause bigger problems. Sometimes people deserve to have their “resignations requested”, which is how we put it. While he had many great attributes, they just weren’t what we needed. The things we did need, he didn’t seem to have. We consoled ourselves that we were freeing him up for a better position elsewhere, something more in line with his talents. In the right position, at the right company, he could be great.

Hemingway said a moral act is one you feel good after. Well, I don’t feel good about it. I want to take a shower.

I commiserated with a friend who had recently implemented a corporate reorganization. He told me how it felt to call a 45-year-old father with a graduate business degree into the office to thank him and wish him well and direct him to counselling.

It didn’t get much better with practice, he said.

“Why do we struggle so much over letting someone go?” he mused. “I don’t think it’s just out of caring for people, although that’s part of it. Making that the issue shields us from the real need to make a call, and that’s a frightening prospect. Generally, if we have the choice, we will not risk calculating the damage caused by no decision; that is, we don’t fire because that will hurt the person, but we don’t calculate how many people will be hurt if we don’t. First and foremost, we are creatures of comfort.”

We both agreed there is a right time for the company and the person to part ways.

“But,” he went on, “we have an enduring fondness for inertia. Sometimes one or the other has to have the courage to make the tough call. It usually ends up being the best decision for both – unless we think so little of people that we believe their only real fulfillment can come from working for our company. And that’s not true. People are better than the boxes we put them into.”

I read somewhere that most terminations are because of a bad fit. Whose fault is that? I am uneasy because it seems the onus is on the employer to make sure the fit is right. What can I do to make sure the next one isn’t a bad fit? And why did it take so long to realize that this relationship wasn’t working? Why had we hired him in the first place? What was wrong with our discernment to think he would fit our need? Or we his? Were we unclear about expectations? Or did we not train and nurture him properly?

What will I do differently from now on? I guess I’ll be more clear in the future about expectations. Maybe I will sit down with the next hire and spell out exactly what happens if the fit doesn’t work.

Once we knew what we had to do, we tried to do it right, whatever that means. Some experts said people should be fired early in the week, so they can hit the ground running in their search for a new position. Others insisted you should wait until Friday so the employee has the weekend to work off resentment.

When the time came to lower the boom, we were blunt. We didn’t begin with idle chit-chat. “It’s not working out,” we said, “and we both know what has to happen.”

We had wrestled with severance. The hardliners said stick to the legal minimum. A friend said Christian duty was to err the other way. We heard several different formulae. One called for a month’s pay for every $10,000 of salary. This is based on the guesswork that it could take seven months for someone earning $70,000 to find an equal job. We didn’t go that high.

I do know that the person is still unemployed, and the severance pay must be close to running out.

I sure hope he finds something before it does.

Greg Isaac (a pseudonym) is an executive with a medium-sized company. This article was distributed as a news release of Mennonite Economic Development Associates.

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Last modified August 13, 2002.

© 2002 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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