Doing it right.
There are a thousand or so ways to make a mistake and do it wrong, some of which can get you in a lot of legal trouble, others of which can buy you lots of nuisance-level consequences and repercussions for months or years afterward. (We won’t even go there about the possibility of provoking repercussions that constitute security threats to your company, property or staff — ever hear the term “Going postal”? . . .)
And the one way to do it right seems to vary by individual.
What I want above all else is a clean break. Have the employee move on, and have something to move on to, and have that departing employee quietly float away. It may be possible that time heals all wounds, and nothing would please me more than to have exactly that happen eventually, and we can meet again amicably and achieve some partial reconciliation, and no hard feelings in the interim; but on this day, until I’m sure there are no hard feelings, I never want to hear from that person in the foreseeable future.
In a perfect world . . .
But in most cases, achieving all of this requires a world more perfect than the one you and I live in. Not even Jesus Christ, who was the Son of God and had all of the attributes of God while also being fully human, who literally needed no reference checks, who “did not need anyone to tell him what a person was like. He already knew” (John 2:25 - Easy-to-Read Version ); could select twelve guys to carry His message into the world and continue His work after He was gone without getting a Judas in the bunch. In a really perfect world, you’d never make a bad hire, an employee would never fail at his training or have performance problems or develop issues or fall into temptation and go bad on you, and no one would get fired at all.
There are a thousand or so ways to make a mistake and do it wrong, some of which can get you in a lot of legal trouble, others of which can buy you lots of nuisance-level consequences and repercussions for months or years afterward. (We won’t even go there about the possibility of provoking repercussions that constitute security threats to your company, property or staff — ever hear the term “Going postal”? . . .)
And the one way to do it right seems to vary by individual.
What I want above all else is a clean break. Have the employee move on, and have something to move on to, and have that departing employee quietly float away. It may be possible that time heals all wounds, and nothing would please me more than to have exactly that happen eventually, and we can meet again amicably and achieve some partial reconciliation, and no hard feelings in the interim; but on this day, until I’m sure there are no hard feelings, I never want to hear from that person in the foreseeable future.
In a perfect world . . .
- Everyone all around — including the departing employee — would agree that the situation isn’t working, and that it's best for all that we have a parting of the ways.
- The departing employee would move on with his or her life, and have something to move on to that would have him or her content to move on with his or her life, and never look back. I don’t want any ‘disgruntled former employees’ running around loose in the world.
- The impact of the termination upon the departing employee would be limited to the discontinuation of his or her employment by our company. No wipeout of any savings he has from the sudden loss of his income, no eviction because she couldn’t pay the rent, her kids don’t suffer because there’s no longer enough income to keep food in the house, no cars repossessed because he gets behind on the payments, no difficulty finding future employment because of a bad or questionable reference.
- It all gets done without pushback, resistance or a bad fight on the part of the departing employee — and the departing employee doesn’t try to leverage our commitment to get it done clean, quietly and without any problems, against us.
- There would never be any hard feelings, or grounds for hard feelings. Everyone goes their way, complete.
But in most cases, achieving all of this requires a world more perfect than the one you and I live in. Not even Jesus Christ, who was the Son of God and had all of the attributes of God while also being fully human, who literally needed no reference checks, who “did not need anyone to tell him what a person was like. He already knew” (John 2:25 - Easy-to-Read Version ); could select twelve guys to carry His message into the world and continue His work after He was gone without getting a Judas in the bunch. In a really perfect world, you’d never make a bad hire, an employee would never fail at his training or have performance problems or develop issues or fall into temptation and go bad on you, and no one would get fired at all.
