How to Fire Someone

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Letting people go is always a challenge. First of all, you have to bite the bullet. When you think it is time to replace somebody, it is usually too late. So you need to do it quickly. But you need to do it humanely. You need to tell the people for the sake of their career why they are being let go. You do not have to look into yourself and be satisfied that you understand you have to let this person go. You must terminate them because your position there is to make sure that this whole entity runs and that any dead weight or counter weight is going to affect multiple people. The best thing to do is just have a frank conversation about what the mismatch is with that person as early as you can. Try to work for it. If that is not the case, then it will not be a surprise to anyone when you come to the mutual decision to part ways with one another.

One of the things, as a CEO when you are scaling a company, it is very easy right at the beginning to hide the right talent because you take an active role in that process. As a company stops to scale, I spend half of my time in recruitment, making sure you bring in the right people. But I think the challenge is that sometimes you do get it wrong. And if you get it wrong, I think you have to sit down with the people and say be very honest, and this is not working out. It is not right skills at. And that maybe because they are not performing well and maybe culturally they are not right. But I think you have to be drawn up about it. You have to be very fair. And you have to give more reason. Take the time to think about what you are going to say. Maybe write it down and have the conviction within you. That you need to be able to get rid of this person because that person is interfering with the rest of the unit and will negatively affect everybody else’s performance. And just do it. I mean that is the bottom line. Stand up tall; clinch your fist behind your back if you have to, smile, and say, “I am sorry, it did not work out.”


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