I took on this job years ago and as I came on I realized my subordinate sucked. Worse, he was an alumni of my tight knit small college. It was my duty to help him out, but ultimately he sunk my ship. I should have fired him, but didn't and it made me look bad and ultimately cost me the job. It was a tough situation. I wish my boss (the COO) would have just said 'fire him'.
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Not to discriminate, but this guy also had bad ADHD and he didn't believe in medications anymore and he literally could not function. One time we were in the copier room and I asked him a question and he went "ba da ba da da" beating on the copier with his hands and just forgot the question. It was literally the most insane ADHD I have ever encountered. And he used to paste his Excel updates in fonts not in common with the sheets and his updates looked ridiculous. I had to edit all his updates before sending to the COO. He didn't even realize his Excel looked off.
Been in a similar situation. I believe someone with ADHD, which significantly affects their job performance, is covered under the ADA which if handled correctly can also protect the company and you.
Did you get HR or Legal get involved and if so were they effective? I'm assuming no and/or no given you lost your job. But if you report it, document what you report, then you should have been protected. Or you just worked at a dysfunctional company and even documenting everything you got the raw end of the deal, which then means you have legal recourse if you decided to put the effort in that direction versus finding another position.
People often bash HR as ineffective but if you have a good HR team they are there to handle these situations. I've learned, with a good team, you just hand the situation over, but it seems you were also influenced by the social connection.
All you high finance cream of the crop should be fired
Thanks, Intern in Accounting
Over time I've learned how to be a "moderate asshole". It's generally a good thing to be a nice person, but it's definitely possible to be too nice. If your niceness prevents you from inflicting some moderate amount of short-to-medium-term pain, you're going to allow bad situations to fester. That eventually creates worse outcomes for you, for people whose interests you need to protect, and even for the poor performer in question. It may well be that pulling the plug in a timely manner will be the best thing for them in the long term, since it will allow them to move on to something that's a better fit.
I would definitely do it in a polite and professional way, but ending a relationship is the right thing to do in some cases. And if it's the right thing to do, you need to do it. In the long term, you're doing everyone a disservice if you can't handle a painful conversation.
Did you have the authority to fire him? Also, did you communicate his bad work product to your boss? If you have complete hiring/firing discretion then yeah, that's a tough decision to make, but I imagine you would have had to run it up the flagpole regardless in which case it takes some of the pressure off of you. It sucks to have to point fingers and assign blame, even if completely warranted, because of the optics, but there are ways of doing it that don't come off like you're just trying to wiggle out of your own shit.
I think the best way to handle an subordinate with substandard work product is to provide clear feedback, document it, and after a few strikes bring it to your boss. That way you aren't just coming to him and complaining, you're showing that you noticed the problem, tried to work with them on correcting it, and ultimately they couldn't get up to speed. Any good team will see that kind of communications across organizational levels. It seems a little bizarre that the COO just let you go because of their bad work, seems like they weren't tracking their own team very well.
I think this is a very good approach for both the employer and the employee, in that the employee is given a chance to improve, and the employer creates a written record to show that the employee was given said chance (which will make it easier to demonstrate in the future to terminate the employee if they do not improve). However, I think this has to be done in good faith by the employer to prevent a "kiss of death" situation with a PIP or something where even if you as the employee do improve, mgmt still doesn't like you and terminates you, seemingly unilaterally though they can show some kind of documentation. Tough situation as both entities try to act in their own self-interest.
Part of being a manager is delivering the necessary results for your team. If you have a performer who is not performing "mission critical" responsibilities and is dragging down the team's work product and legitimate efforts to coach or teach the underperformer are unsuccessful then you have to do what is necessary to improve the team. If you don't, management will find a new manager to lead that team or organization.
I was in a spot where I had a team member who had been hired before my arrival at the company but this individual should never have been in the role they were in. They were not qualified for it and HR at the time didn't know better, but it was a legitimate regulatory issue. After trying to find another role at the organization that this individual would be better suited for - which they were not open to - I ultimately had to let this employee go. Obviously, not a good or fun situation, but it is what it is.
Only advice here is to be brief, be direct and be firm. And, don't linger when it's done. It may come off as cold, but you don't want to end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit. Having a conversation about "why" at that point only leads to more problems. To that point - I always thought it was a bad idea to ever allow managers to be involved when people are being let go. To me, once the decision to terminate an employee is made, HR should carry the ball the rest of the way.
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Vito Spatafore?
The first guy I had to fire I definitely let fester for too long. He joined as part of the AM team and just wanted to get his foot in the door and move over to acquisitions. He immediately started neglecting any AM work and jumped at the chance to do any acquisitions work. I didn't want to fire him before the holidays and it bled into the new year, a poor decision on my part.
Since then I've had to do it a couple of times (sometimes layoffs, sometimes performance). It's never easy, but you grow thick skin pretty quickly. I've also improved my ability to sniff out disgruntled/jaded workers and help them get new/better jobs before they really get to the "we need to fire you" phase. Having them leave on their own, often times for a better job, is much easier if you can manage it.
I have fired hundreds of people.
30+ in a day at one co we acquired.
I've never had to lay people off. Only fire due to poor performance. Have never felt bad doing it because it has always had to happen.
I tell everyone we hire. We are not a "family", we are a sports team. If you perform, you are compensated well. If you don't, we will try to work with you to fix it within reason, otherwise you are dragging our team's performance down.
I've had loads of people freak out. The best one was a C-level who lectured me for 20 minutes. I just let him rant lol
Was the C level guy bad at his job or what?
He put in the work but the results were not there. We fired him and my partner took over his role. Within 6 months we cut variable labor as a percentage of revenue from 20% to 12% while increasing average warehouse/production employee wages by 30%. Given the dramatic change in #s, I think he was awful. Only lasted about 6 months so it's not like we were super slow to fire. Still annoyed I didnt fire him after 3 months though.
Have any of them tried to sue you? At my last company there were a few senior people (both title and age) who were with the company for 10+ years and were horrible at their jobs, like didn't even do any work and just browsed the internet all day. It was fascinating how they were able to stay in the same position for so long and not get canned.
Every manager openly despised them and I later found out they had very long HR files. It was implied that they haven't gotten fired because the company would have to defend a lawsuit. You would think that it would be more cost productive to just defend the lawsuit then to keep paying their salary. Just interesting how some companies fire people without question and other places it's practically impossible to get fired.
In short, no. I have been sued before and had to settle when I had my first company in my early twenties. Since then, I avoid hiring out of certain states (California is garbage) and have a very explicit contract at signing.
Worst that happened recently was a settlement for a couple thousand over someone claiming we fired her because she was pregnant. That wasn't true, as we had several pregnant people on our team, but the manager responsible for responding to the state didn't respond fast enough, etc.
When firing executives, we have a very clear system. Basically...here are the #s. You aren't hitting your #s, this is a sports team. Rarely is anyone surprised when we terminate them with the exception of that COO I mentioned above who went on an apeshit rant.
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