Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

How to Restart Your Company Culture and Fire the Wrong Culture Fit People

26 May 2020 · 1 min

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1:19

Cameron Herold discusses when and how to 'restart' company culture by removing employees who are a poor cultural fit, advocating decisive action ('cut deep, cut once') and simultaneous removals across the organization when needed. He advises supporting remaining employees (the 'survivors') through close, visible leadership — sitting with them, having lunches/coffees, and checking in — and notes recovery typically occurs within two to four weeks. Herold recounts an anecdote of firing 150 people at a Seattle company as an example.

Questions this video answers

150 people

Two to four weeks

Chapters

Lori March, Is it ever right to do a scorched earth and start your culture or restart your culture? If it's just wrong, and if so, how do you support those who remain after a mass firing? What's one blind spot that founders usually have when it comes to culture? So, yes, if you've got a really, really bad culture, you always are firing those cultural cancers. I think of them like cancerous tumors in our body. If you know you've got the wrong people, you get rid of them right away. If you identify a whole bunch of them, you get rid of them right away. I always do cut deep, cut once. So if I'm firing one person I across the organization to see if there's others, and I get rid of them all on the same day. And I'm always looking to fire the wrong culture, fit people, and then people that aren't getting the results. Second, the way that you support those who remain after a mass firing. We had to fire 150 people years ago for a company that I was running back in Seattle. So we had what we called survivor guilt. And we just stayed close to the conversation. We got out of our private offices and sat with them. We went for lunch with them, we went for coffees with them, we asked them how they were feeling. And then we identified that over the course of a couple of days and a couple of weeks, that started to change. And at least after two to four weeks, they were really back to normal. And maybe they remembered some of their old friends, but they had really gotten through it. So remembering that, it's like a death. We're all going to die. Everybody knows people who have been fired, people will get over it. So it's not obsessing about it for too long.