104: Firing a Friend

Hey, my friend Kenny Chapman here, Leadership in a nutshell. Cracking the code of the driven mind. I'm so honored to do this. I'm just like, I'm just resonating bliss today as I get a chance to sit down with you and share this incredible technology platform that brought us together. Today's episode 104, Firing a Friend. And you might go, well, you're a little excited about this. I'm excited about this because I just had an opportunity to work with kind of a, I'll call it a mid level manager that was going through this process for the first time in his young career. And I'm just so fascinated by this younger generation of leaders and how, you know, how studious they are and how much they're learning. And as I, you know, I consider myself a young leader even though I've been a leader almost 30 years now, and still I'm such a student of the game. And I realize that people get torn up inside when it comes to making what the world has conditioned us to believe are hard decisions. And yet no different than going to the gym and working out. If it's hard, then it's got value. And if I'm making leader decisions that are hard, then they probably have some value. And this isn't a selfish thing. And I'm not here talking about that it's easy or it should be easy or it'll ever be easy when it comes to point of firing a friend. And I want to kind of create additional context around this. As I was thinking about today's episode, it came to me because of this experience that I was able to just help a leader go through this process where they were coming up to the point of being kind of forced with a decision of possibly having to fire one of their good friends that ended up working for them. But as I was thinking through this, I also want to go beyond just the leadership concept of sometimes there's times in life when we need to fire a friend from our peer group too. Would you agree? So I kind of want you to listen to this from and interact with me today mentally. Because one of the things I believe is even though I can't see you and you can't see me, we're sharing energy and there's vibration that creates the sound and the words that come through. And therefore there's energy that we get to share. And don't call me crazy and cut me off and all that. I just, I'm a heart center centered individual and I believe that we can share energy Even though that we're not in the same room together while we're having this experience. And so as we're working today together, just kind of think through this could be in a context of maybe you don't have any friends that work for you, or you've never had a friend that worked for you. But also I want you to think about maybe you've had to fire somebody as a peer group friend or somebody that was close to you in your life and you had to go, hey, you're not holding up your end of the bargain anymore. This isn't working. What we agreed to in your original employment agreement as my friend in my personal life. Right. Or whatever that looks like. So I just wanted to kind of jump in and I'm going to share a few things specifically four step process to kind of think through this, but you know, to share this kind of, you know, where this came from. This young manager that he had a buddy that kind of started in the business at the same time and they were peers and they were always working together and competing in sales together and install and all the different kind of jobs they had as they were kind of coming up. And then they both thought they were going to go on and be leaders and have this experience. And one of them ended up kind of getting chosen over the other one based on commitment and less kind of radical behavior and more willingness and different things. They both had the ability, but one was just a little more coachable, a little more willing. And we've all seen that you give me willingness and ability as those two scales and I'll choose willingness over ability all day long because I can train you in ability, but I can't train you how to be willing. I can't train you to open up and to be willing to grow. And so the one got kind of chosen over the other one and came in the office and was working as a leader and just kept on. You know how that works. Sometimes a little pushback, a little challenge. There's these different things that happen of what I call the crab bucket culture where, oh, you're trying to get out of the bucket, I'm going to pull you right back in here and you can't move forward. And this young manager was moving forward and so his buddy started becoming a pain in the butt for him and undermining him and creating issues and challenges. And I know that happens all the time and yet it's not easy to deal with. And so what I want you to think about from a contextual standpoint Today is just the. The evolution process of humanity and how. Now, I'm not talking Darwin. If you don't believe in evolution because of your religious beliefs, please don't lose me here. I'm not talking about Darwin, though I did have the opportunity to go to the Galapagos Islands and talk about an incredible experience that will humble you regardless of your belief system. I'm talking about as we evolve in consciousness, as we evolve in our careers, as we evolve as leaders and managers, and just in the human experience, we evolve. You don't like the word evolved, then you use grow. And so I think that we progress through different levels of consciousness, and once we learn certain things, then we get to go to a different level. And it's not that a level is better than another level or an individual is better than a different individual. It's just that you have a different perspective of the world of life, of leadership, of the business. And as that happens, there can kind of start creating a gap and a little bit of a wedge. Nobody's wrong, necessarily. It's just a matter of everybody winning and the entire team winning. And so just understand when you start looking and going, God, how did that happen? Let's be clear. Sometimes I just thought about this in the middle of sharing with you. I've had to fire a spouse in the past. And my three incredible learning experiences of marriage in my life, which I believe I'm in, my final relationship of intimate relationships, go with the lovely Christy in my walk on this planet. But my first one, my first wife kind of fired me because I had taken her geographically out of El Paso and she was really connected. She was from Mexico and her family was really tight. And I brought her out of that scenario and I started my business and she just couldn't handle it. So we didn't have a bad marriage. She fired me as a husband because I wouldn't move back to El Paso. And then I look at my second situation where I ended up marrying my high school sweetheart and kind of settled for what I thought my life was going to be. And then ultimately I ended up having to fire her based on how we grew apart. And then, go figure, found out she was cheating on me and she had actually fired me mentally prior to that happening. However, it just. She didn't call the ball on it. And so we fire people in our lives, in our relationships, and sometimes we just don't even tell them, like, what a crazy world that we live in where we don't even tell somebody if we're done with Them, but you know, that just kind of not trying to squirrel on you here, but just that I think about that, like when we come to. I'm talking about firing a friend in the business today, there's firing. That happens in relationships all the time. And so when you realize the point of that is intimate relationships grow apart because we don't progress together. We don't evolve in consciousness together. The same is true in the business. And everybody doesn't have to be at the same time. My buddy and mentor, Les Brown, taught me that when two people go for a walk, somebody sets the pace. And that's true in the relationship, in every relationship with myself and my leadership team at blue Collar. Sometimes I'm kind of setting the pace, sometimes they're setting the pace with the lovely Christy. Sometimes she sets the pace, sometimes I set the pace. The same is true with you in your lives. And so when you realize, however, that the gap is too far and you can't pass the baton because you can't reach that individual in the race any longer, which is what happened with this young manager I'm talking about. He just got to this point where the friend of his was just becoming a cancer in the culture and it was bringing down other team members, and other team members were looking to him of, man, this is your buddy. But he's destructive, he's disruptive. What are you going to do as a leader? Do you have the guts to do this or what's the deal? You know? And so once you realize that has happened, whether it's personal or it's in the business, I got four things I want you to think about. Number one, get your why clarity, your why clarity. When I say why clarity? It's like, what is my why here? Why do I have to do this? Why am I feeling the necessity of this taking place now? This may have gone on for a while. I may have been putting up with this is it that I've elevated. I know in my own life when I've had to fire personal friends, I put up with things for a long time and I decided that I care about myself, that I'm not going to let someone else treat me worse than I treat myself. I used to treat myself so bad, I let other people kind of walk on me quite a bit too, because I didn't have the self confidence. And so what is that why of this team member with this individual that I'm talking about? His buddy was just undermining, disrupting meetings. He was constantly interrupting him in the meeting and calling Things out. Look, I can't grow this department with him on the team. That becomes the why. Number two, check your circle of influence. So I've got my why clarity now I check the circle of influence and in this case I already kind of jumped there where this is impacting other people. The scenario I'm talking about with this young man, it was killing the other young people in the business that were. Or the people, people that work for him, some that were 20 years older than him. Looking at him as a young leader like, look, this is kind of disrupting what we're trying to do. I like the training, I like when we're in the team meetings getting educated and this guy's destroying it. So what is the circle of influence? How is this impacting things? How is this resonating with things? So check in on that and see if there's other people being impacted by you not making this challenging decision. Then we go to three. And I want you to just move into massive love, massive empathy, massive compassion. Because the world has taught you that when you're firing a friend now you got to put up the dukes, you got to get in the cage match, you got to fight, you got to draw first blood, all these different types of things and that's crazy. You've got to just go into massive love, empathy and compassion with yourself and them. Them, they're simply dealing with their demons in the world. They're acting out based on their conditioning. Yes. They're doing the best they can. And you go, kenny, how are they doing the best they can when they're constantly interrupting me in my meeting? They have some deep seated pain you haven't thought about or that you don't know about. They're operating from an MO that got them to this point in their life and they think it still works. So just have love and empathy and compassion for them and what they're trying to do. They're not trying to wreck everything, they're trying to show up in the world someh somehow in some way and this is the behavior that's making it happen. So you don't have to hate them, you don't have to be pissed at them and you don't have to be all jammed up in yourself. Just have massive love, empathy and compassion for yourself and for them. And then you move to step four. Once you've done it, once you, you know, I'm not going to talk you through. I'm not an attorney, I'm not going to get into any of the hows and the what's. And what to say and how long to let it go. You know, any of that type of, of stuff. That's not what this is about. I stay away from HR intentionally because I'm probably not politically correct in today's world. I just speak what I feel. And if you hadn't noticed, I recorded a couple of episodes about apologizing. No, I'm just joking. I just speak what I feel at the moment. And I'm not going to tell you how to go through this process. Check with HR if you need to let somebody go or if you need to fire a friend. In a personal life, that's a different scenario. But in step number four, I'm going to tell you to just stay committed to self love. So once you've done it or as you go through it, just love yourself and know that you're doing the best you can. And if you're doing this for a vindictive reason or you feel they're competitive with you, or you're going to show them by I'm so much better, I'm your superior. Now you're going to struggle with that and it's going to haunt you and you're going to have that same scenario show up and manifest again because you got a lesson to learn here. And so when you're firing a friend, it doesn't have to be the worst thing in the world, but it does have to be an incredible lesson for you to learn. And I was honored. I did some work with this individual and then a few days later I heard from one of his superiors that he did go ahead and call the ball and got help from a superior in making it happen and going through the process because he hadn't gone through that. Matter of fact, as I'm thinking about it, this might be his actual first firing ever as a manager and it had to be one of his longtime best friends. So that's very challenging. And that's why it hit me so much that I just wanted to share this with you. You might be long in your career. You may have fired many friends, you may be transitioning. I'm working with a client that's got some long, long term friends that have to go. I think back on my career, I had to fire my great aunt one time. I brought her into my business and she was at the tail end of her career and just literally could not get the technology. I put her in the call center and she couldn't stay up. Script and the typing and the software and it was incredibly challenging. And when I went to her and kind of talked through it with her and set her free, there was a relief for her and for me. And it wasn't easy. And I certainly wasn't as evolved as a leader as I am now when I had to do that some 10 years ago, probably, I don't know, longer than that, maybe 15 years ago as I think back. But what happens when you set people free is you set things them free. If they're that destructive and that disruptive, they're not happy. And your job isn't necessarily the Happiness officer, but it is to create an environment for other people to find their happiness on your watch. I'm so honored and so grateful to share this time with you each and every week. Leadership in A Nutshell Episode 104 Please review us like us, share us, subscribe us and fire an email to a friend that might be having a challenge with this right now. Or you've seen somebody disruptive in their personal life, they might need a little bit of help thinking through a process. Get that? Why? Clarity. Check your circle of influence. Dive into that love, empathy and compassion in a massive way. Stay committed to your self love and set yourself free. Thanks so much for being here. Until we talk, make it a better than fantastic week. I'll see you next time.