Do you think of firing someone as something mean or unintelligent? He sounds like someone I’d love to meet but your comment interests me because I’ve never really thought of these characteristics as relevant to that kind of decision.
Unjustified firings, absolutely. I’ve seen plenty of horrible, vindictive managers fire talented folks simply because it wasn’t “one of their guys”. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a good manager let a good person go unless it was due to company mandated force reduction.
I personally don’t consider someone who makes the workplace toxic “good”.Regardless, Salesforce is large enough that if they're not encountering your hypothetical rare scenario every now and then then it seems unlikely that many companies on planet earth meet your criteria for good hiring processes.
This is why I say that often times the worst people to hire are those that are "just below average mediocre". Reason being that, as you point out, it is not hard to fire people who are blatantly incompetent. And of course many/most people can be coached to improve, but I've seen cases where, despite lots of coaching, people chronically underperform.
I consider it a mark of bad management when these subpar performers are only let go during layoffs. Conversations should be open, ongoing and constant, and people should be given lots of coaching, time, and plenty of heads up, but it does nobody any good to essentially string people along when folks aren't cutting it.
In the previous 3 months there hadn’t been a peep about my productivity despite weekly 1:1s and my frequent solicitations for feedback of where I could improve.
In the exit interview, I strongly suggested they may want to look into some professional leadership training programs. The founders were both 26. I was 42.
Since their founding 8 months earlier they had hired 4 and fired 2. I told them that probably would be a bit of a red flag to their investors.