Chad Silverstein walks through firing someone fairly: set clear numeric targets, document everything, give a 90-day performance improvement plan, do check-ins at 30 and 60 days, and only terminate if they miss the minimum. No surprises, no ambush.
Chapters
How you terminate teammates says everything about your style of leadership. Bad surprises are the worst. I used to show up at someone's desk late in the day on a Friday with a box, and everybody knew, and it just put everybody in a bad mood. I didn't want to do it. Nobody wanted to go through it. If I didn't do it face to face, people called me a coward because I would do it over the phone. I thought that'd be easier and make it easier for the person, give them a chance to save face. So then when everyone gave me a hard time about that, I did it in person. And then they'd have to embarrassingly walk through the office with a box. There was no easy way to do that until I learned about Pip Pip. Pip was the performance improvement plan. Built a lead, taught me this, and it was a game changer. And after I learned about the performance improvement plan, about 15 people in my office went on one. And it was because I was very clear what the expectations were. Everybody knew what the numbers had to be. And I made it clear that if you don't hit these numbers after a certain amount of time or a certain amount of months in a row, that you'll go on a performance improvement plan plan. And what that meant was, is we would give you 90 days, and we would sit down and have that conversation with you, tell you where you're not doing well, have that conversation so we can hear, is it a training issue? Is it a culture issue? You know, what is the problem? Try to find the root problem. And we didn't let people give us excuses. We would call it out if they gave us an excuse. And then we would put together a plan. And typically that looked, you know, like this. It'd be say, well, send me what your plan is, because I wasn't going to do the work for my teammates. So I passed the tension where it belongs. And they'd have to write me what their plan was and how they were going to improve. And I just told them that they can't stay after 90 days if they're not able to increase their numbers or at least meet that minimum bar. So we set the minimum bar. We thought that'd be very fair. We told them up front what's expected of them. We put it in writing so there's no surprises. And we had them do the hard work and pass the tension where it belonged. And then what we did over the next 30, 60 days is we would check in and we would either high five them when they were doing a good job and showing that they were improved. And typically, you know, you can see when someone's fighting for it, or you can also see when they check out because they either have given up or they're already looking for another job. Either way, it's a win win for the person and for the company. For the person, there's no point in delaying the inevitable. And for the company, you're kind of going to cut the cord and you're going to do it in a healthy way for the culture. And, you know, something you can kind of go home and feel good about. So I think it's important that every leader understands that whether it's a performance improvement plan or whether it's part of your HR program that you want to put in place, having those clear expectations up front so everybody knows what's expected, knows what can get them fired, and knows that it's coming is really, really key to creating a healthy culture where people aren't scared. And giving people an opportunity to kind of fight for their performance. And then when they win and they come off that performance improvement plan to celebrate and high five that it's a big deal and you really want to show people that it's possible to come off of the performance improvement plan. Most times, most people do check out, it's just the reality. And again, it just kind of puts the right person in the right seat, because typically the wrong person is in your seat and you need to make a change. And so it's always better to give people a chance. You go all in, you invest in these individuals, and it's important that on the way out, the way you exit your employees, it says everything about the way you're running your business and the way you lead your team. So have some sort of a plan, whether it's a performance improvement plan or any type of other strategy that you're using, and make sure that everybody understands what that is and avoid all those bad surprises that kind of come out of left field when someone's not performing.
