Luke Murray walks his small team through the four emotions that surface after firing someone: sadness, fear, anger, and excitement. He names each one directly, validates it, and explains why surfacing feelings prevents resentment and gossip. Emotional transparency, he argues, is a practical habit that changes how a business runs.
Last week we let go of an employee that had been with us almost longer than any other employee, and in this video I'm going to tell you how we dealt with that from an emotional perspective. And I'm going to focus on first the emotion that was easiest for me to bring out of the staff, then one that I think is probably the most important, um, but is a little bit tougher, and then lastly a couple emotions that are particularly difficult for me and that I don't see get talked about almost anywhere. Actually, I don't see emotions being addressed at all in the workplace, and so that's why I wanted to talk about this. This is not how to let someone go. This is not how to announce it to everyone else. This is just to talk about emotions that may come up in your company as a result of letting somebody go. The first one, that was easy. So the way that this happened is we said, it's Monday morning, at the Monday morning meeting, the person had been let go on Friday. We said, As you guys have probably heard, so-and-so is no longer with us. How does everyone feel about that? And no one said a word. And so I said, well, my guess is, do some of you guys feel sad? Because this person, again, was a friend of lots of ours. They'd done a lot of great work. And I eventually got folks to admit, yes, I am sad. And so I said, thanks for letting us know. It's okay that you're sad. The second emotion, actually this might have been the first thing that I said, was, is anybody feeling fear? And specifically asking themselves the question, am I next? So whenever you roll out a change or anything happens in a company, the first question people are gonna ask is, How does this affect me? And so I told everyone, first of all, it's okay to be afraid. It's okay to have this question. And if you're being good at managing your employees, you should be able to answer that question with, because we have regular reviews of your performance, which hopefully you have. We did not have until the last few months, but because we have regular reviews of your performance, You will know when you're doing a good job or a bad job. And actually, if you want to know right now, you can ask as soon as this meeting is over. The last one though, actually this is the last two. These are particularly uncomfortable for me to feel just in life and certainly would be a difficult thing to say out loud in a company format. By the way, the size of our company is less than 20 people. Size of this team is less than 10 people. So it's a relatively small group. But these two emotions are anger and actually, actually excited. So a couple of things. One could be, hey, I am angry at you, boss, for letting this person go because I disagree. That would be one question that I would ask folks, and I think that they're Voice should be allowed to be heard, just like they could be allowed to be heard with these questions as well, or these sentiments as well. I'm sad. I'm afraid. The second thing they could be angry at the boss about is, why didn't you do this sooner? And that's a fair question as well, depending on how open your communication is with the team. The last one, and this honestly feels like the most uncomfortable or the most inappropriate, is straight up excited. In my opinion, the fastest thing you can do to improve the attitude and the morale and the performance of a team is to get rid of the lowest performing member if there is a significant drop-off between your second to last person and your bottom person. And this is something I didn't even— I, I thought to ask this, I didn't even consider asking this because it felt so wrong because It feels like it could violate feeling sad. Can I miss this person and also be glad that they're gone? Well, has anyone ever been in a relationship with someone that they loved and known that they needed to let them go? You could feel both at the same time. As a matter of fact, you can feel all of these emotions at the same time, and that's okay. I get it, all this touchy-feely kumbaya. That's okay that you feel sad or angry or scared. This practice of welcoming emotions into the space, like, it sounds super woo, and I totally get that. And honestly, I felt that way and still sometimes feel that way, but I have seen it over and over again be game-changing in my businesses and honestly in any relationship for 3 reasons. First, emotions are just sensations. They are energy in motion. In fact, the word emotion comes from the Latin word imovere, and the E, it's like a form of X like exit, means to go out, and movere means to move. So literally, to move out. And if this energy does not move out cleanly, then that energy and those sensations can and will be bottled up and just shot out in random-ass ways, like talking shit about your boss, or talking shit about other employees, or just in general causing drama in the organization. And I don't want a bunch of drama in my organization. So if one of my employees says, "Hey boss, I'm sad that this person is gone," just allowing that energy to get out and into the open keeps it from being just pushed underground and distracting everybody in the company. The second reason it's super critical to let these emotions out in a way that's clean, controlled, open is because sometimes there is wisdom, like actual strategic business insight in people's emotions. For example, if everyone was pissed that we didn't fire that person sooner but they never told me, I would have probably taken too long to fire the next person, which would have made our business shittier for even longer. And third, if you could let people feel pissed or scared or excited in high-stakes environments, like letting someone go, then all the little death-by-a-thousand-dramatic-paper-cuts moments, the ones that really erode the foundation of a relationship or a business, they're just less likely to occur. So I don't want to create an environment where people gossip or pout or spend half their day terrified and wondering if they're going to get fired. But if I want that, I need to accept that the reason they do it is because gossiping or withholding are some form of emotion underneath of that, that they don't want to feel and express to themselves, or it's an emotion that they don't want to feel and express to the person who needs that information the most, and that's you if you're the boss. Hopefully this is helpful when you are considering letting someone go or doing something that's slightly less emotionally charged. And if you want to learn more about how I'm trying to grow my businesses and make more money while accepting the fact that businesses are run by humans being human, then check out more of the videos on this channel.
