> When you do fire someone, put yourself in their shoes. It is a devastating event emotionally. And it is a real setback financially. **Your team will also be watching closely to see how you treat ex-employees: a vindictive attitude will make everyone feel unsafe.** ### **What I'm thinking about** 1. **Handle your own anger first** – You will feel it, and it will tell you not to give them an extra penny. "Feel this anger, and then let it pass." Then take responsibility: your recruiting, training and management helped create the situation, and if you want to save resources the fastest route is helping them land somewhere better. 2. **Severance is two months minimum, realistically three or more** – Enough time to find something and have pay start realistically. 3. **Become their agent, genuinely** – Work out what role would actually suit them. Write a description of their talents and post it with your endorsement if they agree. Offer to make a call if they reach a second round somewhere. Note the tactical detail: that call works once, and it is worth far more spent *after* a first interview to land the job than before it to get the interview. 4. **The conversation has a fixed shape** – Warn them it will be difficult and name the emotions. State it plainly. Say it is not changeable. Give brief reasons including what you did to create the situation. Lay out how you will help. Make it their last day — "it minimizes the time that everyone lingers in the sadness of saying goodbye." Then ask for their thoughts and repeat back what they say. 5. **The announcement never blames the person** – Praise their contribution, take ownership yourself for the mismatch, and say what you are changing so it doesn't recur. Then meet each remaining person individually and ask directly whether they feel fear or anger about it. ### **So what?** There is a self-interested case alongside the decent one, and it is worth stating because it changes behaviour: "It will allow you to let underperformers go sooner because you won't dread the trauma of the firing process. **There will be no trauma.**" Managers who dread firing delay it, and the delay is what does the real damage — to the team, to the person, and to the standard. The second-order effect is on risk appetite: teams that handle exits well can take bigger bets on high-potential, low-experience people, "and those often end up being the best performers." Related: [[Difficult conversations are a sequencing problem]] [[Withholding Feedback Is Self-Fulfilling]] [[Separate the Decision from the Implementation]] [[Making People Feel Heard]] [[Executive Operating System MOC]]