How Do I Fire Someone?

“Everybody tells me that it’s impossible to fire someone at this company, no matter what they do.  How do I fire someone who really, really needs to be fired?”

- MK, Estes Park, Colorado

By the time you decide you need to fire someone, it’s probably too late to do it right. A proper termination takes time and effort. You need to start the process long before the employee situation reaches the point of no return.

First, it’s almost never the case that you get to fire people. They don’t work for you; they work for the company. It’s up to the company to decide to let them go. You may be the agent of the termination or the bearer of the bad news, but to make a firing happen, you normally need the cooperation, support, and approval of your own management chain, which normally includes human resources and may include the legal department as well. If they haven’t been brought on board early, they may be reluctant to back you up when trouble starts. If you even think there’s a real possibility that someone may need to go, talk to your boss and to human resources as soon as possible.

There are two basic reasons to fire someone: performance and discipline. Performance issues are about the amount, quality, and appropriateness of the work the employee does. Discipline issues involve failure to obey rules and policies or behavior that undermines authority and cohesion of the workforce. In both cases, good practice (and in some cases laws and contracts) argues that employees have the right to know that there’s a problem, what the problem is, and reasonable support from the organization to fix it short of termination.

So, what exactly is the problem? What is the difference between the behavior you expect or require, and the behavior you’re getting? Don’t expect to get away with generalities like a “bad attitude.” Describe the issue in behavioral terms: what you can actually see, hear, or otherwise measure.

If the firing offense is blatant and obvious, like stealing or violent behavior, it’s usually pretty straightforward. But if the offenses are more subtle — and especially if it involves personality issues — you need to prepare the ground carefully.

What are you doing and what can you do to improve the situation without firing? To answer that, you need to determine the root cause. There are three basic causes: the employee doesn’t know what the proper standard is, the employee can’t meet the standard, or the employee won’t meet the standard.

If you have a “don’t know” problem, the answer is simple and it’s your fault: you need to provide clear and specific guidance. If that’s enough to fix the problem, clearly you don’t need to fire someone.

“Can’t do” problems may respond to training or coaching, to additional tools or resources, or to a modification in the job environment. Even under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), you can fire someone who can’t perform a job, as long as you’ve made “reasonable accommodations.” Of course, what you think is reasonable and what a court thinks is reasonable may vary, so interpret “reasonable” broadly.

“Won’t do” problems are when an employee knows what is proper, has the ability to do what is proper, and still chooses to do something different. It’s worth the effort to find out why someone won’t perform, but the bottom line is that it’s still a choice.

Don’t assume you know what the problem is until you do your homework. Talk to the person involved. And listen to what he or she says in response. There may be a way to solve the problem to everyone’s satisfaction short of termination.

Find out if there are other issues involved. Is the employee politically connected, or does the employee have skills or access that may be more important than the performance problems? Are there union contracts, regulations, or legal protections that apply? Considerations such as these don’t make an employee invulnerable to firing, but they often require careful management on your part.

Make sure you learn your company’s process for firing, and follow the rules to the letter. Get coaching from human resources. Have everything ready before you call the person in. Get to the point, and get it over with.

If the person you terminate is surprised, you did something wrong. By providing feedback, support, and coaching throughout, it should always be clear to the employee what the current gap is between actions and expectations. If there’s no surprise, the emotions are often not as strong as you might expect.

Above all, don’t drag it out, and don’t let your own fear stand in the way of doing what needs to be done. A lot of firings are botched because of the cowardice of the manager. If you’re not willing to follow through, don’t bluff.

Finally, be prepared to negotiate the terms of separation. What kind of reference will you provide? How much severance pay? Are there timing issues? Because of the ever-present risk of lawsuits, it’s often cheaper to sweeten the pot for the departing employee in exchange for a release of liability.

What Is Six Sigma (and Why Should I Care)?

I'm an indirect casualty of the Borders bankruptcy. I did a proposal for something called The Manager's Answer Book, done at a publisher's request based on their idea, but by the time the publisher was ready to offer a contract, the standard advance had been cut by 60%, so I declined. I did three samples, and here's the first:

“There’s this guy in the office who keeps going on about Six Sigma and claims to be a green belt. What is Six Sigma and why should I care?”

- MD, Bethesda, Maryland

When quality is poor, you can lose money two ways. It costs money to do it wrong, it costs more money to find out that you did it wrong and have to fix it, and it costs still more money to do it over again. And that’s not to mention the risk of losing a customer in the process. The answer, for most companies, was inspection: catch the mistakes before they get out the door. That kept customers from getting bad products, but it didn’t do anything about the cost of making the bad products in the first place.

Enter Walter Shewhart, a quality control engineer who went to work for Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of the telephone monopoly, in 1918. In 1924, he wrote a revolutionary one-page memo outlining a new approach: using statistical tools to observe the process of manufacturing, with the goal of finding and correcting the causes of potential defects before they occurred. This was known as Statistical Process Control (SPC) or Statistical Quality Control (SQC), and it’s at the root of modern thinking about quality.

Shewhart was a major influence on physicist W. Edwards Deming, who adopted and promoted many of his ideas. After World War II, Deming worked for General Douglas MacArthur in Japan, where he famously trained Japanese engineers, managers, and executives (including Sony co-founder Akio Morita) in these techniques.

One of his students, Kaoru Ishikawa, took the teachings of Deming and another quality guru, J. M. Juran, and added customer satisfaction to the mix, calling the new hybrid Total Quality Management, or TQM. (Ishikawa developed one of the basic tools of TQM, the cause-and-effect analysis diagram, also called a fishbone diagram because it looks like the skeleton of a fish, and an Ishikawa diagram for obvious reasons.

In 1980, NBC aired a documentary on Deming and his influence on the Japanese, called “If Japan Can… Why Can’t We?” and TQM fever took off in the United States. But as you can tell, quality philosophies don’t stand still. There’s the zero defects approach, total quality leadership (TQL), kaizen, kansei, business process reengineering (BPR), and more. Because any company could claim they had implemented TQM, along came ISO-9000, a standards-based way to certify internationally that you really had a workable quality program.

Enter Six Sigma, developed by Motorola in 1986. It’s been a highly successful and widely adopted strategy — and, of course, it has its detractors and critics.

The goals of Six Sigma are in line with other quality strategies: it uses statistics, it aims to reduce the causes of defects or errors, and it tries to minimize variability. “Six sigma” itself is a statistical term, representing fewer than 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

Six Sigma advocates claim that their approach does a better job of measuring financial return, promotes more passionate leadership, provides a trained cadre of champions (the “green belt” is an example), and makes decisions based on data instead of guesswork.  Critics claim there’s nothing new to see here, that Six Sigma is just TQM with karate belts.

In terms of results, Motorola claims to have saved over $17 billion from Six Sigma. Jack Welch at General Electric was another successful champion. However, a 2006 Fortune magazine article reported that 91 percent of companies that announced Six Sigma programs ended up trailing the S&P 500.

From your point of view, however, the controversy doesn’t matter. Six Sigma critics argue that it’s derivative, not that it’s wrong. If your company’s made an investment in the program, it’s good sense for you to get on board.

You need Six Sigma certification if you’re going to be doing Six Sigma related projects. If those projects are alongside your regular duties, a green belt is sufficient. If you’re going full-time on Six Sigma projects, shoot for a black belt. If, on the other hand, Six Sigma activities are going on around you, but not in your area of the business, it may be enough for you to pick up the basic vocabulary and concepts — in other words, what you’re doing right now.

Of course, things don’t sit still. Cutting edge companies now practice “lean six sigma,” combining Six Sigma with ideas of lean manufacturing, a technique to eliminate waste. New iterations are surely on management consulting drawing boards. When in doubt, cite tradition. “It’s all just warmed-over Shewhart, you know.”