One of the hardest things that any manager must do is to fire someone for underperformance.
This is difficult to write about because so much of the act of firing employees is dictated by HR departments these days, even at small companies. There are good and bad things that come out of this, but arguably the nicest thing is that you, as a manager, will have a process and procedure to follow. Upon hearing that someone is underperforming, many companies will have you write the person a document called a performance improvement plan. This is a set of clearly defined objectives that the person must achieve within a fixed period of time. If she manages to achieve them, then she is taken off the plan and all is well; otherwise, she’s fired. Depending on the company, such a plan might actually be an effort to turn an employee around, but often the plan is written in such a way that the person can’t possibly hope to achieve the goals in the allotted time, and it’s just a generous way of giving someone time to look for another job before being fired.
Whatever the procedure is at your company, the process of coaching someone out should begin long before any performance improvement document is filed with HR, and long before the actual act of firing. One of the basic rules of management is the rule of no surprises, particularly negative ones. You need to understand what a person is supposed to be giving you, and if that isn’t happening, make it clear to her early and often that she is not meeting expectations.
The ideal is that you know exactly what job she is supposed to be doing, and if she isn’t doing it, you can say, “You aren’t doing X, Y, and Z. Do more of those things.” Of course, like all perfect circumstances, reality is rarely so simple.
A common, straightforward scenario is closer to the following. Your employee, Jane, has been with you for a few months. She seemed a little bit slow in the onboarding process, but you gave her the benefit of the doubt; the code base isn’t in perfect shape, and there’s a lot of business jargon to learn in a new hire’s first few months. However, it’s been six months, and when you look back over that time, you see very little in the way of achievement on Jane’s part. In fact, the few things she has done have not gone well — they have been very late, very buggy, or both.
This situation sounds straightforward on paper. Tell Jane that she is not meeting expectations, that her work is too slow or not well done, and give her a strict deliverable. But Jane has excuses, of course, and some of them are believable. The onboarding wasn’t good. Her first month was interrupted by the company party, and then you were out for a week on vacation, and she has not had anyone to ask questions of. In fact, it sounds a little bit like the issue is you and the team, not her at all.
This situation is why you start giving feedback early and often, and keep records of the feedback you’ve been delivering. Feedback, positive or negative, should be a conversation. If you avoid tackling negative feedback until it builds to a boiling point, you’re going to be met by a pile of excuses, and then what do you do? Some managers will ignore the excuses at their peril, and lose employee after employee to an unwelcoming team that fails to onboard, coach, and give clear goals to employees. On the other hand, some managers will accept any excuse until problems can no longer be swept under the rug, and the team is furious at management’s inaction with regard to the lagging employee.
You’ll always need to have a record of negative feedback to fire someone in any environment where HR is active and a standard performance improvement plan is required. If you have no HR, I suggest that you still give people clear improvement feedback in writing, with a timeline for improvement, and have them acknowledge it in writing as well (email is OK). Not only does this protect you legally, but it helps you treat your employees fairly.
A final warning: don’t put anyone on a plan whom you wouldn’t be happy to lose. Most smart employees will take this formal warning as a sign that the organization is not a good fit for them, and leave as quickly as possible. I once heard a story about a great engineer who was put on a surprise performance improvement plan by his manager after someone in the organization complained that he had bowed out of a project. This manager, who had not been paying any attention to the situation and had approved the engineer focusing elsewhere, gave in to pressure to set up a plan that served to do nothing but poison any goodwill the engineer might have had for his manager and the company. It’s no surprised that the engineer resigned soon thereafter, despite having easily achieved the goals of the improvement plan.