People ask me how to fire someone the right way, with real kindness, dignity, and care. It’s a good question. It’s just an early one.
Before you can figure out how to let someone go well, you have to deal with two lies. One is yours, and one is theirs. Until both are on the table, everything you do next is built on a lie you’ve quietly agreed to believe together, no matter how gentle it looks.
The two lies
Your lie. You believe you are this person’s provider, and that their paycheck, their stability, and their family’s next month all rest on you. So you keep them and call it kindness. What you’re actually doing is holding a good person in place to shield them from a fear you’ve decided to carry for them.
Their lie. Theirs is rooted in fear. They believe that without this job, they’re doomed, and that they’re better off here, underperforming and shrinking a little every quarter, than they would be anywhere else. It’s a lie, and it’s a loud one.
You can’t let anyone go well while you’re both still bowing to these lies.
Grab hold of the truth
Letting go of a lie isn’t enough. You have to replace it with something true. The truest thing I’ve got here is an old EOS® idea called GWC, used in a way most people never use it.
GWC asks whether a person is in the right seat:
-
Get it: they understand the role and how it fits.
-
Want it: they want to do the work, not just tolerate it.
-
Capacity to do it: they have the time, skill, and bandwidth the role demands.
Normally, GWC is a filter the employer holds up to the employee. I want to hand it to the employee so they can hold it up to themselves. I believe, down to my bones, that people thrive when they’re in the right seat. And when they’re not thriving, it’s almost never a mystery. They don’t GWC, and they know it.
There’s one condition, small on paper but enormous in practice: this only works if they’re the right person to begin with. Use your core values as the filter (that’s the EOS® way), or use my preferred filter, the ideal team player: humble, hungry, smart. I’ve written about that elsewhere. For this post, just assume it’s already true. Assume they’re humble, hungry, and smart. They’re likable and exactly the kind of person you want on your team.
That’s who this is about: the good ones who are quietly failing.
What you’re actually doing when you leave them there
Here’s the hard part. When you keep a good person in a role they don’t GWC, you aren’t protecting them. You’re dishonoring them. Their capability reaches well beyond the limits of this one role, and you’re pretending it doesn’t. Don’t be a weenie about it.
Ask yourself an honest question: what story does a person tell themselves after months of falling short at something? It isn’t a story about how capable they are, or about their value, their potential, or the growth still ahead of them. They tell themselves they suck. And if you believe, like I do, that there’s a real enemy in this, he’s happy to tell them the very same thing. When we let good people rot in the wrong seat, we sign our name to that story. We help shrink a human being.
That’s wrong.
And here’s what keeps us stuck: we tell ourselves we’re taking care of them and that they’re better off here than out there. But that’s the exact same lie they believe about themselves: that they aren’t as capable, skilled, or valuable as they really are. So we believe it, we let them believe it, and we reinforce it together, arm in arm, and call the whole thing kindness.
It isn’t kindness.
The turning point
The moment you can both honestly say, without flinching, that this person will thrive somewhere else doing something else, you can stop clutching what’s broken. But you only get there by killing both lies first: yours, that you’re their provider, and theirs, that they’re doomed without you.
They are not doomed. That’s a lie.
Whoever you’re about to let go is the best person in the world for something. It just isn’t this. And every day you keep them in the wrong seat, you’re holding them back from the right one.
The kind way is slower, a lot slower than walking somebody to the door on a Friday. But if I know anything about the Lord, it’s that slow and kind wins. (You don’t need to share my faith to see it play out in the numbers.) It builds teams that outrun other teams, and it shows up on the bottom line.
Once the lies are dead and the fear is named, you get to do something strange and good: step into the unknown together. Let’s keep you in your role while you look for your next one, and while we look for your replacement. I’ve done this many times over the years, and I can’t point to a single instance where it went worse than simply firing the person would have. Not one. It’s been a net positive for both sides every time. At this point, I can’t imagine doing it any other way.
The caveat
If the person is toxic, throw all of this out. That includes anyone who isn’t humble, hungry, and smart, anyone who is stealing, and anyone putting other people’s jobs at risk. You don’t kumbaya with that. You fire them. I’m talking about good people who are underperforming, which is a different animal entirely.
The rest is mostly logistics
For the good ones, once you’ve dealt with the lies and the fear, what’s left is mostly mechanics. In my experience, it takes about three months:
-
Coach them where coaching will actually help.
-
Get them help. I once hired a job-search coach for someone on their way out.
-
Document the role while they’re still in it.
-
Search for a replacement, if you even need one.
Let it play out from there. It really isn’t that hard.
I’m part of C12, and many of us believe our companies carry a higher purpose than the P&L. If we really mean that, picture every one of those businesses parting ways with people like this. We’d pass good people to each other instead of discarding them, trading talent across a whole network of companies that refuse to reduce anyone to their worst quarter.
There are ways to let someone go that honor both your stewardship of what you’ve built and the person sitting across the table. That person has every bit as much inherent worth as you. They just landed in a spot that isn’t a fit, like billions of people before them.
We can do better.
