The Necessary Evil — Reasons to Identify Employee Underperformance and Terminate Them

The life cycle of an organization includes letting go of employees. Others describe it as a necessary evil. People come and go, and businesses should fire employees whose performance is poor after several interventions or whose career goals and values are not those of the organization.

Letting people go is one of the difficult tasks that managers must face. I expanded further on Kim Scott’s original four arguments for why it’s critical to spot underperformers in the workplace.

1. To be fair to the person who fails. If you are not breaking things, you aren’t moving fast enough — this is one of the famous pieces of advice coming from Mark Zuckerberg to entrepreneurs. The reason why things aren’t moving must be communicated well to the underperforming employee. Managers should be sensitive enough and have expectations for every milestone of an employee’s accomplishment or what has not been accomplished, this is important so the employee will have enough time to recover and address problems early enough.
2. To be fair to the company. Paying someone who isn’t responding well despite multiple company efforts is difficult especially if the employee’s underperformance is impacting the team or the organization. It is important to carefully consider all of the options and to consult with legal and HR professionals as needed.
3. To be fair to yourself. Time management and effective workload are two important skills a manager should have to avoid burnout and ensure focus on the tasks that are most important to the success of the team and organization. Keeping an employee or letting them go after many interventions is a decision to make.
4. To be fair to the people who are performing really well. Most employees are working together to achieve personal and company goals. It is unfair to other people who are producing outstanding work to tolerate employees with poor performance for too long.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail says Abraham Maslov, don’t be that man. Letting employees go isn’t always the answer to every performance issue.

A manager should explore different options to motivate and keep employees, but when a manager feels that they exhausted everything and they are having a hard time letting go employee, think that employees might have the opportunity to discover their gifts and exercise their full potential in other company and by keeping them around, the manager could be robbing them of that chance.