StrangeFiringPractices

This spins off of the StoryTelling page.

Jerry commented that telling someone Here's what your doing wrong, and here's how you should do it might be a way to encourage people to leave.

During college I had a job in a bank. I ended up doing the work of an assistant manager (without the pay or title), because the manager was not good at anything to do with numbers and because he was too busy smoozing with the local businessmen. When I caught on to this, I asked for a raise. I was told: Why I think that $n (my current salary) is a fine salary for a young lady. That day I started looking elsewhere for work.

Maybe you have stories about how you left a company? or even of firing practices?

Johanna, Is firing part of your hiring advice?

- BeckyWinant 2-28-03

I hear all sorts of unbelievable (but true) stories. One that sticks in my mind right now is a company that sent emails to people saying to come to an assembly. Once there, they were told that if they had been invited, they weren't laid off (fired). While they were there, managers went around to all the other employees telling them to pack up and leave. This apparently spared the remaining employees the pain of seeing their associates leave. Or something. JerryWeinberg 2003.02.28

I was fired once (the last time) in this way:

VP: JR, you're not moving to the new building next week.
JR: Oh? I'm not? (laughing)
VP: No, you can give your office to so-and-so. You know, you really should be a consultant, not an employee.
JR: Are you tell me I'm fired? (incredulously)
VP: Well, we think of it as a layoff. I'm working on a package now.
JR: Fine, tell me what you want to offer and we'll start negotiating.

I went back to my office and started working on my brochure for my business. The next day I started calling everyone I knew telling them I was starting my business. I did no more work for that company, even though I had an office there. It was the one time I thought I was taking advantage of the company's infrastructure. Since they'd originally offered 2 weeks of severance pay, I decided I'd take 4 more work-days.

I'd been fired and laid off before, but this was the strangest way. My boss had the nerve to tell me it "wasn't personal." I told her I didn't see how it could be more personal. :-)) On the other hand, it was one of the best things that happened to me. -- JohannaRothman 2003. 03.01

The first time I took a layoff, from the first "real job" I had, they called some of us into a meeting in the cafeteria. If you were invited, you were gone. Kind of makes you wonder how the remaining people felt about meetings with management. -- JimBullock, 2003.03.01

Johanna,

My boss had the nerve to tell me it "wasn't personal."

Do I ever know what you mean! How many of us have heard this!?

I remember the scene from (Oh, God, what was the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie - You've Got Mail?) in which they are both in the book business. Tom says as his mega-business pushes the Mom-Pop business onto the fringe: it was business, not personal. He was hoping he could salvage their relationship.

In my own business, I heard from an employee (not a boss) tell me that a stiuation "wasn't personal". The movie scene flashed in my mind. In the situation I didn't believe for a moment that it wasn't personal. Since then I have come to believe that people who don't care about the outcome or who want to alleviate pressure use this phrase. Reality says that ANYTHING that impacts your ability to perform is indeed personal! It blocks your way!

That aside, in one early experience (1979) my boss had the nerve to tell me that my performance was unacceptable. At the time I admit to some slacking as I was going through a divorce.

(Wow, rereading this I had to laugh! The nerve of that guy, yeah. -BeckyWinant 2003-3-6)

But, I knew for a fact that this boss had bent over backward to enagage the services of a man from Lebanon who never had to prove his worth and who "slacked" beyond anything I could ever dream of! I never saw a line of code from this man (which was his responsibility). Worse, I attended a lunch where this man boasted in front of all business associates (us) that he "never had to pay" for a woman's affections.

It was 1980 and, oh, yes, this story was true!

His performance was apparently acceptable .

I was shocked and then disappointed by my boss' response - which was silence. Time to find better colleagues.

- BeckyWinant 3-3-03

I recall working for an organization years ago where, as a manager, I was given a directive to fire certain people by name. When I asked why those people, I was told that they were "too expensive". I ended up putting this in context for my manager, becuase one person they wanted to fire, while highly paid, was also highly valuable!

I suspect that firing based on $ is common. Do you think so?

- BeckyWinant 2003-3-6

I was told by one person he was let go from his previous job (instead of the other person) was because "he could get a new one". Why management would keep someone who couldn't get a job somewhere else is beyond me.

Makes you wonder about the discontinuity between what they say and what they mean.

DonGray 2003-3-6

I think one source of the discontinuities is the very humanity of the situation. Some folks can't keep their minds working when the situation gets real. One bad solution is to retreat from the real issues and real consequences found in hiring, and firing and any other human management situation. A better solution is to grow one's self to be able to engage in the hard stuff.

Firing based on $ is one of these escapes. What is the point of looking at $ without looking at contribution? Oh, contribution is hard? So, of course we'll run away from it.

Another example of avoiding hard questions is forced ranking. These are always involved, painful exercises. But why? If required to rank the people you manage in terms of their contribution to the organization, shouldn't you be able to do that in about 5 minutes? Forced rankings are such ugly processes because:

There's a lot of horse trading for position, to make sure my people get ranked to reflect well on me (compared to how yours are ranked.)
There's usually no attention paid to how people contribute.
Nor to what the organization values - no performance standards.

So the forced ranking becomes a game where we play with the definitions of what matters, and who did what, always with an eye to who's winning the management sweepstakes.

Here's an alternative. Managers of a particular forced ranking "pool" will toss their names in a hat. The names will be pulled from the hat, establishing a selection order. Once the forced ranking of staff is established, staff will be assigned one at at time to each manager in order. Manager 1 gets employee 1, 2 gets 2, etc. up to N gets N. At the end of the sequence, the order is reversed. Manager N gets employee N+1, N-1 gets N+2, and so on. When you get back to Manager 1, the assignment sequence reverses again. Now rank people.

I'll bet you'd get a very, very different ranking if those were the consequences. And, of course, as soon as someone says anything along the lines of "But that's a different job." or "But, he's doing something completely different." we toss the whole exercise out the door. If we're not force ranking apples to apples, what are we doing?

But that's just me. I could be wrong.

- JimBullock, 2003.03.06

Here's a strange firing practice, one that's fairly common from what I can see:

Here's the scenario:

Some person, we'll call him Randy, isn't quite doing his job. He'll attempt an assingment in lackidasical fashion and make a mess of it.

So Randy's manager re-assigns the work to another team member.

Randy bolixes up other tasks. And those are re-assigned to other members of the group.

All the other team members become overloaded from doing their jobs, fixing Randy's messes and doing Randy's work.

Randy's boss starts taking up Randy's tasks becuase everyone else is maxed out and it's easier than trying to get Randy to do something right.

Pretty soon, Randy's main tasks have all been distributed to other memebers of the group. Randy still does a few things, mostly the things he likes to do.

And the strange firing practice?

Randy isn't fired. He's kept on the payroll because it's easier than getting rid of him.

True story.

EstherDerby 031103

Randy's manager is the one that should be fired. -- JimBullock, 2003.03.11

Yeah, he's definitely not doing his job either. But I bet no one ever taught him how, and his boss is asleep at the wheel, too. In this organization, it goes all the way to the top. ED 031203

Maybe yes, maybe no.

There's a marvelous saying: "Once is happenstance, twice coincidence, three times is enemy action." You can substitute any kind of conclusion for the three times case. Randy's repeated failures, and the repeated covering for him create a pattern. There's no pattern in the story about Randy's meta-boss. We may be dealing with happenstance with that one.

Over time (and over my own screaming objections - I hate this lesson), I have also learned that the size of the concerns changes as you move through an organization. Randy's meta-boss is accountable on a larger time frame, and in terms of more general measures than Randy's boss. It takes more time for successes or problems to play out. So I've learned that the immediately obvious to people right there where something is happening, doesn't have to be immediately obvious to people one level, or one team away. If they get it eventually, often that's good enough, and all that can be expected.

One thing that doesn't scale like this is underperforming direct reports (in a pyramid organization). If everyone's got the same number of reports up through the organization then meta-manager has about the same standard: one screw up by his report is happenstance . . .

I try to calibrate accountability to what people can know in their role. I'm pretty sure that it isn't the CEO's job to manage every individual employee's performance. They can't know enough to do that in detail. Ultimately it is the CEO's job to manage how all the employee's performance is managed, both how that is done, and how well. This kind of aggregation of responsibility is fraught with errors. It's a hard problem.

So, in this particular case, while I'm clear that the problem is with Randy's boss who has had at least three shots at recognizing a problem and done nothing, I'd be looking at his meta-boss to see if there is a pattern, or just happenstance that s/he hasn't noticed yet. And I'd be asking some questions about the climate in the organization, the performance of the organizaiton, and how well persistent problems get addressed - CEO stuff.

God I hate being reasonable and balanced. -- JimBullock, 2003.03.12

Jim,

I've talked to the CEO, and a handful of the people in between. Goes all the way to the top. BTW, the board voted no confidence and didn't renew the CEO's contract.

But you're right, that part isn't in the story.

ED 031203

I think Esther has hit on the major reason for all of these distorted firing practices. One or more managers believes they are easier, at least, in the short term. Put another way, they believe they are minimizing risk, at least, for themselves. -- MikeMelendez 2003.03.12

Mike,

Intersting! NOw that you point it out, I've seen alot of manager's avoid firing an employee in the name of "protecting" some one or other. And it goes beyond firing, some manager won't give an employee feedback performance either.

One manager refused to move an employee who was utterly failing in his job into another role, because "it might hurt his career."

EstherDerby 031603

Cowardly managers really piss me off. I've inherited a bunch of people whose careers "might be hurt" by honest feedback and firings. Tough luck. In *each and every case*, the company was hurt more by keeping those people on than by firing them (or coaching them out of the job) in the first place. My resume is full of companies who don't exist anymore because my managers didn't know how to fire people, including:

the mentally ill person, who threatened a bunch of us when we gave him feedback on his work. By the time I got him, we were in a hiring freeze. My boss told me I could fire him, but I couldn't replace him. I said ok. I figured (and it was true) that by not dealing with his aggravation we would increase my group's performance. Now, I don't think that all mentally ill people should be fired -- far from it. But if they can't perform the work, they should be. Feeling sorry for people is not a good reason to employ them.
the manager who didn't want to be. This manager didn't need to be fired, he needed to be coached into another job. (I've done this at least 4 times in my career.)

Now, is keeping these people the reason the company failed? No. But, keeping people on who don't belong in the organization is the same symptom as not killing projects to make way for the ones you need to run, as not making a decision about which strategy is most important. Decision-making is a critical piece of management, and decision-making about staff is the longest-term, highest return decision. -- JohannaRothman 2003.03.15

Here's a game: I hire someone, then I get promoted. You take over the project, including the person I hired. If you're having problems with them, it either reflects poorly on me (i.e., I made a bad hiring decision), or it reflects poorly on you (i.e., "They were doing fine when I was managing the group. What's your problem?") A way out that seems to protect both of us is to either ignore the problem or keep it stalemated.

I ran into a situtation like this early in my management career, inheriting a borderline performer that the company founder had brought in. Being new, I couldn't very well force an issue that reflected poorly on the founder, and I was an easy target for "you're just not managing him right". I wonder how many other new managers find themselves in similar positions.

DaveSmith 15 Mar 2003

Dave, it sounds as if your experience is a more intense case than mine. But your sentence, "Being new, I couldn't very well force an issue that reflected poorly on the founder" is something I wouldn't consider :-) I've forced plenty of personnel issues with founders. But I agree with you, most people can't argue with founders like that - it can be quite career-limiting. -- JohannaRothman 2003.03.17

Since then, I've learned a few tricks for dealing with execs. --DaveSmith

Well . . .

How did this conversation get stuck in the politics and ego zone? Some new guy walks in based on referrals, resume, and some interviews and starts making changes that seem like nonsense? The new guy's got no track record. As a "new guy" you've got to both manage your track record, and realize that the latitude you'll get will be based in part on the track record that you have. The track record with these people, here, directly.

Getting hired for a job gets you the chance to build that track record for a while. It doesn't get you a mandate to do whatever you want until the end of time. I think of it as a "pass" of limited scope for a limited time. After that, whatever latitude you'll get will be based on what you did with that first increment of trust. Anything else is unreasonable to expect on your part, in imprudent to allow on the boss's part. Speaks to abdication vs. delegation.

As the "new guy" it's useful, I think, to assume that if the founder or anyone else hired someone they thought it was a good decision at the time. So try to figure out why that was so. You may have a different perspective, seeing the same events or history in a different way. Or you may learn something - like the new boss was right, and you're not an all time perfect genius at job fit and hiring yourself. "I'm right and he was a dolt" is hardly the only choice here.

I don't think this is exclusively about "forcing" issues, or reflecting poorly on the founder (or not) or even "arguing." I've been known to have a conversation with my boss where I take a marker for later. "So, after I straighten out his personnel problem here, the one you recognize and don't know what to do about, I'd like to talk about a couple other personnel things." "Things" like the founder's earlier hire, after I've got a track record.

That's one way out of the perceived double bind: ignore the problem or keep it stalemated. In essence I've simply added the words: "for now" to both of these options. Of course you've got to have some latitude to get some traction or the track record never gets built. And your boss has got to understand that they've hired you to give you some latitude; ideally latitude that will grow over time. In a new job, I suggest that people look for the opportunity to grow the latitude they are given. Short of that, they are dealing with some lack of skill in their boss. But that's a story for another day . . .

- JimBullock (Been there. Done that. Got the T shirt.) 2003.03.17

Somebody ought to work this material into an article. - JerryWeinberg 2003.03.19

Indeed. THere's a lot of great material here... which could be several articles from different voices. (Lots of spots on this wiki have potential!)

ED 031903

I'll offer again. I'll gladly work with someone who wants to develop some of this stuff into an article. I can't be on point right now, meaning make sure we keep chugging along. If that idea appeals to someone drop me a note.

- JimBullock, 2003.03.20

I've experienced the more usual (reverse) of Jerry's first comment - a bunch of people being invited to an offsite meeting at a local hotel who were then laid off. The additional quirk was that the people not invited knew why those people were going before they did.

The same company went through several rounds of layoffs - voluntary and compulsory. One of the even odder rounds was when a Director took a dislike to a whole team and decided to fire them. He then brought in a consultancy to take over. It later emerged that the Director had a financial interest in the consultancy and was later fired. The team he brought in were not re-instated - many had got jobs elsewhere fortunately.

- PhilStubbington 2003.09.15

This was almost amusing: although supposed to be a secret, everyone and their dog knew that the following Wednesday was going to see the next round of layoffs. On the Tuesday, while looking for a spare conference room, I tried one to see it stacked to the ceiling with empty packing boxes. Later that afternoon, clearly in an attempt to get ahead of the game, I saw a caretaker walking down the corridor with a list, leaving 3-4 empty boxes outside certain offices. Nice one! (Incidentally, as a "joke", someone moved a bunch of boxes to my office door - I was amused, but my manager was not).

The Wednesday morning between 8-9 am, I watched people summoned one at a time to their manager's office, only to return with an escort of two security guards who waited while they packed their belongings. Having made it through unscathed (I thought), I headed off to my 9:30-11:30 across the campus. When I returned, my office light was on (a sign that someone had been in there within the last 15 minutes). Sure enough my boss was looking for me. Apparently 9-10 am had been designated to inform those who had been reassigned. Yes, that included me - I should have guessed since just about everyone else in my department had been escorted out, there was nobody left for me to manage. Suffice to say, the reassignment didn't represent a positive career move ("...er, Rob, they need a couple of junior testers over in..."). All I can say is: "Thank The Lord for Monster.com!"

RobWyatt 2003.9.19

Updated: Friday, September 19, 2003