How to Fire Someone Nicely | S04E03

How do you fire someone nicely?

I mean, is that even possible? Let's talk about it today on the Leadership is Feminine podcast. Here we go.

Well, hello. Hello. How are you? Welcome to season four of Leadership is Feminine. I introduced to you last week that we're going to be talking about mastery and leadership. And this podcast is really for women business owners who want to learn not just the tactics of how to lead and manage and build and fix and all the things of a team, but also tap into what you need to learn for yourself to become the woman who can lead and manage and build and fix a team with so much more ease than maybe you do today. I know that ultimately what I talk about, and I've said this so many times, y', all, is not really.

Profound or rocket science or, you know, something you probably can't find if you Google it. But I do like to think that what we do here and in the work that I do with my clients is we wrap, you know, common sense t tactics approaches, foundational, fundamental management and leadership approach and tactics with wisdom. That I believe when you tap wisdom into tactics, you create a sustainable practice, right? You create something that isn't just something you can get done, but something that you then know how to do. And once you know how to do something, the tactic can change. That's actually true. And there's so much more ease that comes from the confidence of understanding and knowing how rather than just having the steps. Am I right? And so mastery is that right? Mastery is not just knowing, here are the steps to follow, and I follow them. Mastery is truly knowing the steps and then also learning how at such an intrinsic, visceral level that it can't ever leave you. And from mastery, we can elevate something. We can make it different, we can turn it into hours, which is different than when we're just learning what someone else teaches us. Right? So that's why, you know, if you're a podcast listener, I'm always suggesting if you listen and listen and listen, which I know a lot of you do, but you haven't worked with us yet, I just would really invite you to start thinking about why. Like, why, why aren't you here yet?

We could just so, like, amplify and quicken how much of this you're doing for yourself and your team. But. Okay, I'm not going to get into that today. We're going to talk about firing people and how to fire someone. How to fire someone nicely. How to fire someone so that it causes the least amount of injury and Pain to you and them. So let's start by first just talking about sort of general things about firing. Firing people is awful. I'm going to tell you that right now. I have fired a lot of people. I hate it. I do not skip into firing meetings. I do not get excited to fire people. I am not numb to firing people. I don't tune out. I don't. I don't. I'm not able to do it like on autopilot like I am other things in my business. I really do feel deeply that conversation and that experience with another human. And years ago, when I was a brand new manager, I had to fire someone who was on my team. And if you've been a podcast listener for a while, you've heard me sort of reference some of these experiences in the past. I worked for someone at the time who was pretty hard, heartless, not gonna lie. I learned a lot from her. But she was not. Not in the way that I probably would have preferred to learn, but nonetheless. So I had to fire a woman on my team who was, you know, probably at least 13 years my senior, had a young child, was a single mom, but she wasn't doing her job and she was not meeting her goals. And I had hired her and now I had to fire her. And so, you know, she was one of my first people I hired that didn't work out. And we all know also there's something about that that's even more.

Debilitating because, right. Like, what did I do wrong? Did I hire the wrong person? Did I not train her enough? Did I not give her enough of my time? Did I not write all the things that I know we do when someone that we've hired doesn't end up working out, especially for performance. She was lovely. She was a wonderful human. And so in the conversation of firing her.

I started crying. I just started crying. I was so upset. I just thought it was awful. I thought, why do I have to do. This woman is single, she has the son, you know, she's sole provider. This is terrible, right? Even though I knew it was the right thing for the organization that I worked for, because that's my job, right, as the manager of a business, is to release people if they're not delivering. We don't hire people to come into work and just show up. We hire people to deliver results. So I cried. Even when I was done with the conversation with her, I. I kept crying.

Now this boss I had was there in my office at the time, and so she came into my office and, you know, kind of just scolded me and told me, you know, get over yourself. Stop crying. You know, you can't cry. You need to be tough. All these things, right? Which I agreed with her. I said, you know what? I do agree.

That I shouldn't cry when I fire people. I appreciate that's probably not appropriate, unprofessional, all the things not helping. But I told her so. I said, so, I'll work on that. But I told her, but if I ever get to a point that I don't feel affected by having to let someone go, I need to quit. So when I work with my clients on firing people, I want to make sure that we honor that there's an exchange happening between human beings that is not great, but it doesn't mean it's not part of our role and our job as women who lead businesses. Okay? So I just want to honor that in all of you. You know, I. I've said before, the majority of my clients resonate as empaths. You really feel things differently and more intensely and feel other people's emotions. So having said that, how do we fire people with grace? How do we fire people nicely? And the easiest way to do that, of course, right. Is to have decided how someone will get fired or not work in your company anymore well, ahead of time. So the nicest thing to do when you fire people is to make sure it's never a surprise. Right. So how do we do that? Well, we do that by investing in and having very clear team operations systems. We're really good in most companies about having systems for our marketing and for our product revenue and for, you know, distribution and all the other things. Right. But we're kind of terrible at our team operations. Like, what does it look like when you get hired into a role and you accept a position and you are onboarded and you're given goals and you're followed up with, and you're given feedback. What does all that look like? And is it consistent? If I walked into your business today and asked people who worked for you if they knew what their goals were, if they knew what the result was that they're responsible for, would they know? If your answer is.

Maybe or probably not, then we already know. We have a cocktail for confusion when it gets to potentially firing someone because they don't even know the agreement. Now, in your mind, you might think, well, isn't that obvious? No. I just want to emphasize no. Anytime in your brain, you say, well, shouldn't they know? I mean, they're 45 years old, shouldn't they know? Your role as the founder, owner, leader of this business is to establish clarity over what someone's role is, what their results required of them are in the role, what their responsibilities are to deliver on that result and the way that you will measure and assess their results. And it does not have to be super complicated. If you own a small bakery, let's use that, right? And you have four people that work there and one or two are responsible for sort of checking out and checking in customers, running the register, filling the bags, doing the things. And then you have two other people who are the bakers and they're in the back. There is a reason why you have bakers and you have front of the store people. Why front of the store people? You probably have to provide exceptional, probably efficient or expedited service. If you have bakers, their key result is probably to make amazing products, bakery products, baked goods. Now how does a baker do that? They follow your recipe, they make as many muffins as they're supposed to by 10am they make sure the cupcakes are iced by 2pm I don't know, I'm making it up. Right? But like you, you tell them what their roles are and what their responsibilities are. And the same is true for the front person. You say hello to everybody who walks in. You make sure that nobody waits in line for more than five minutes. You make sure that all of their baked goods are wrapped separately. I don't know.

Right.

Again, you know this. I don't. But do you tell them or do you just expect them to know? And then if they don't do it. So if they're not getting the muffins baked by 10, if they're not icing the cupcakes by 2, do you address that or do you, oh, founder, just swoop in there and take care of it? Or do you just get annoyed and say, why didn't anybody make the muffins yet?

We know who was in charge of making the muffins and they didn't make them address that person. Hey, where's the muffins? And we're going to do a mastery and feedback on this podcast this season. So it's coming, but it's pretty simple. We just don't want to do it because it's uncomfortable. So the truth is you've made all that really clear and you've been consistent and someone is just consistently not meeting the agreement of their role. It's not a far fetched conversation then. And it doesn't mean it's less comfortable or less uncomfortable. It just means that I could say, hey, you know what? I've had this conversation with you now several times. And when you are not making the baked goods on time, it's really causing a delay in our ability to. To sell daily. And I appreciate that you've tried, but we're not. We're not getting there. So I think. I think we're gonna have to let you go today. Today's your last day. Now, people get upset, but that doesn't mean that you're being mean. And I think you can do this quite kindly. Your emotional attachment as a founder to how people do their job is usually, if I'm gonna generalize with most of my clients, we're way over invested in it personally, with our emotions. We take what people do in our business or don't do so personally. Like somehow it's an affront to us. It is not. People don't wake up in the morning and think, oh, I can't wait to make her mad today. Not make the muffins on time. People don't do that. People get distracted. People look at their phone. People are slow. People don't know what to do. People get overwhelmed. People don't feel like it. But when you make it a personal issue, it makes it harder for you to address. When you make it a personal issue, it makes it harder to let people go. Because you're coming from an unclean place and you know it. So then you feel badly, right? Then you feel bad because you know that you're angry or annoyed or irritated or resentful or fed up and you want to fire them. But you know, that that is icky.

So instead, I think if we just start off by saying, hey, here's the agreements that you're making. I'm making these agreements to provide you with this, you know, rate this, pay this, these benefits, if that's relevant, these hours, this training, this feedback, this support, and then in turn, employee team member, you're making these agreements to deliver on this result, to do these key responsibilities to meet the terms of when you show up, et cetera. And as long as it's a dialogue about agreements and not a internal argument and tantrum you have in your head about their intentions, it's so much cleaner. So we can let people go, we can fire people very nicely. Now, there's a really simple script I teach my clients on how to fire someone. But the script isn't going to do you any good if you haven't done Anything. I just told you because a script will be vacant without the authentic work done ahead of it. Right? Just like I said at the very beginning of this, mastery comes from really understanding how to do something, a tactic will not produce the results that you want unless you have put the effort into gaining mastery. And I know you can apply that to so many other parts of your life when you look at things that you've tried to do just by following steps and things that you've worked at and developed understanding and knowing and competence and ultimately confidence and in and then implemented steps. So we have to design a team operating system that supports the idea and the actual actions of firing people nicely. Okay, as a reminder, I'm going to do some coaching for a few of the podcast listeners. So if you are interested in participating in a 10 to 15 minute call with me, understanding that it will be recorded and used on this podcast, we are keeping people anonymous. If you want to be anonymous, although your voice will be on the podcast. I just want to make sure everybody knows that. But we're looking for a couple more volunteers. We got quite a few after last week, so just email hellorisplacky.com and and let us know that you're interested and then we will send you a quick, not very long application just so we can know a little bit more about you and the question that you want to ask. And we'll get those set up. Okay. And lastly, if you are looking for immediate support, you really need help and you want to get kind of your hands in there. We are now offering The how to CEO program, a digital course with one advisory Q& a call available to you per week for 12 weeks. So it's at a reduced investment than it has been in the past, but we still are offering a weekly Q and A call, which I'm really happy about because I know you will have questions. But it's a great way for you to get your hands on how absolutely everything really you need to be building your team infrastructure. So whether you're at 200k in your business or 2 million or 20 million, it's a great first step and it'll give you a real peek into the world that we offer here. And it'll give you immediate tools, job descriptions, job templates, difficult conversations, firing people, hiring people, how to really go about all of the fundamental practices that you have to master to grow your business. I know we all think it's making money and having great funnels and generating a ton of revenue, but the women I've worked side by side with who've doubled their revenue, who have gone anywhere from 500,000 to 1.5 or 8 million to 16 or 1 million to 40 million. It's been their investment in their team systems that have really been the fuel and the gasoline to scaling. So if that's what you want and you're Ready, go to chrisplackie.com howtoceo Registration is open. It's available. It is an immediately available downloadable product that you can start and you're Q and A calls would start the following Friday. So if you're ready, get it. All right, gorgeous. Talk to you next week.

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