I find it irksome when founders talk about culture and firing people like its some kind of sublime process. Like this guy is some kind of pariah that wouldn't get canned or treated marginally by the next doofus manager who felt he/she didn't like him.
He doesn't at all but if you have ever been an entrepreneur, you will probably know that firing people is usually the worst thing that you can have to do but at the same time, the results of firing someone in terms of the impact on other people in a team can often be very positive.
Not really. imagine it was the other way around. imagine as company owner you can be eliminated by your employees on a "gut feeling" or because they decided you just weren't doing the job they envision you should be doing. I think most founders would be tossed out on the curb at one time or another.
I'm pointing out that culpability in a perceived bad job performance isn't a two way street and it would be responsible to speak about how you don't always get it right. nothing is more irksome then someone who has fired dozens of people and says they made the right choice every time. statistically impossible.
I don't know where you are located abotwright, but out here in California, by the time it gets to a termination, the employee has all but stopped coming into the office and burned the place down. From my perspective, taking credit for always firing the right person, is setting the bar really, really low. I'm much more impressed with a manager that manages to fire all the people that should, not that he should have fired the people he did.
For whatever reason, only the bottom 5% ever get fired. Where organizations tend to make the mistakes you are talking about is during layoffs, in which quite often, the wrong person is let go - but, in "theory" layoffs aren't performance related - though, in practice, they almost always are. Top Performers are almost never laid off, despite their role in the organization, and bottom performers somehow always turn out to be redundant. One exception to this is when a company drops a division or location - then it's across the board.
Anyone I know who's ever fired someone absolutely hated the experience. One guy told me after the first time he fired someone, he went into his office and wept. Wept. Even though he felt he needed to fire that person.
