There will come the time when you will have to fire someone in your organization. It can be one of the more discomforting aspects of management. Should you have to fire someone hopefully you won’t make the same type of mistakes that played out in last weeks firing of Shirley Sherrod.
If last weeks drama doesn’t become a case study for management students of how not to fire someone it should, what happen to Ms. Sherrod was clearly amateurish and all the senior level people involved should have known better. It’s amazing how people when under pressure will forget all reason and do what they think is expedient.
Managers at some point will have to fire people and it can be disheartening but if you follow some simple rules it can be a bit less painful and most of all a lot less embarrassing. The following rules – well let’s take line from Ghostbusters when Bill Murray quipped “more like guidelines – won’t make the process any easier but can give you a framework to work within.
1. Keep your composure, know the facts, and make no assumptions until you’ve had the opportunity to check and verify what do and don’t know. Based on all reports it’s clear that both the White House and NAACP did neither of these. Both the White House and the NAACP have sufficient experience between them to have known better, to have slowed the process down, and done some fact checking. For unexplained reasons both caved to pressure and shouldn’t have.
2. Never let people take you out of your game, never violate your own rules. The way Ms. Sherrod was fired was not normal. Asking someone to pull over to the side of the road and text in her resignation can’t be in anybody’s rule book when it comes to terminating any employee. This rush to fire her so she wouldn’t be a subject on the Glenn Beck show clearly showed they were being taken out of their game by FoxNews. Also, they were violating their own rules, before asking her to text in her resignation she was already put on administrative leave which is a normal part of their disciplinary process, but what appears to be self-imposed pressure the get her resign caused them to violate their own rules.
3. Oppose outside pressure that will cause you to rush to judgment, and object to any unsubstantiated claims of wrong doing without first checking everything out. Everyone involved in this decision allowed themselves to be swayed by the current events unfolding without checking the facts. As a manager you have a responsibility to slow the process down, you can see what happens when you don’t.
4. Wait there is no reason to rush judgment. Wait until you have all the facts. Had everyone waited and took time to look further, they would have discovered that the tape was edited and there was much more to the story than what was showed in the edited clip. Had people waited and asked if there was anything else, or what was the source of the tape, was anyone there, and what they knew about Ms. Sherrod, well, I wouldn’t be writing this post about how not to fire someone.
Firing someone is never fun, but at times necessary. So when you faced with this decision keeping you composure, not allowing the situation to take you off your game, and opposing the pressure to make a quick decision, and waiting to get as much information as you can before you make a decision is indeed showing that you KNOW what you’re doing so that when you do say to someone “you’re fired” you won’t have to back track and then say, “well maybe not.”
© Timothy A. Wilson 2010. All Rights Reserved
