The Best Approach to the Worst Conversation: "You're Fired"
firstround.com
firstround.com
Feedback needs to be immediate. As soon as someone steps off the path or veers into dangerous territory, let them know. Ideally during the first 90 days, give people “an exorbitant amount of feedback,” Lopp says. “Just think, you could have fixed it six or nine months earlier by pulling Jeff aside and saying, hey you really frustrated people in that last meeting because you weren’t listening.”
People that are being "jerks" are typically not leaving obvious footprints when they "step off the path" nor do they tend to make obvious and transparent mistakes or mis-steps in pubic. You are typically dealting with people well versed in passive agression. Plausibly deniability, and adding unwanted "drama" by abusing their authority, or bullying their staff or doing a whole range of things which if the junior staff report to (skip-level) management, they (not the mid-level-manager) will be on the hook for "insubordination" to the business discretion of the middle boss. This is the type of opaque, catch-22 that many people face in reality and dealing with it is a PITA, time consuming and risky (for senior and junior staff). Its not a paint-by-numbers situation at all, those are ovbious and people with blatant incompetence tend to not make past interviews. The types of problems that tend to result after effective interviewing are rightly seens as variations of incompetence, and bad leadership though... because they impair the ability to "get shit done". But dealing with them requires more than a nudge on the tiller when something is headed off course. It requires (1) a system and approach to make performance transparent; (2) a system to compartmentalize risk; and (3) a system that generates enough observations to for reliable systemic data on performance and accountability. Without such a struture in place in these fronts, "bad apples" will underperform without consequence for long periods of time, because they will cover their tracks, blend in, and otherwise obfuscate situations to manipulative effect.
If all this seems "overly complicated" and not anything like following an HR handbook, that's probably about par for the course !!
Firing someone for <creating> "an ambiguous situation" might in fact be the simple, correct action.
But if you fired someone evertime you were just <in> an ambiguous situation? Not so much. Good luck with that, because your boss might probably fire you next=D.
Its also why you'll find a "good leader" is never surrounded by this crap. If you think about the "broken windows" theory of policing, where low-level crime creates an atmoshere conducive to "real crime", there is probably a decent analogy. Good leaders are adept at working through <uncertainty>, but distinguish this from <ambiguity> for this reason. IMHO.
Yeah. If the employee does not realise the threat imposed by a PIP then he/she is an idiot and should be fired immediately.
Sorry, it just ain't so. Like the grandparent said, the employee's probably not an idiot, and threat is present from the very beginning, even if unintentionally.
If it's on the low end of the range, then a generous severance would seem to be the better choice for all concerned.
I've interviewed at a company before for about a week. 4 interviews later they tell me they won't go through with me for undisclosed reasons. This was before I had seen the company or anyone besides the immediate people interviewing. I then asked just to see what the company layout was like and they gave me a tour of the offices.
Jesus fucking H christ, everyone was the same. It was all 20-25 year olds, glasses, beards, tshirts, jeans, all white males. If that's ever a reason to not hire someone or even fire someone it's not a company you want to work at in the first place.
If the word "culture" is in any sentence when you're hiring/firing me, I'm punching you right in the fucking face (not actually though) and leaving. It's basically saying "for some arbitrary reason we're going to fire you, but we don't really know why and neither do you, bye!" Sorry for not having a beard, thick rim glasses, and not liking the same N64 video games as you.
I'm probably just bitter though.
I think it's extremely insulting to disregard the years I have put into perfecting my craft because I don't have the same outward appearance/attitude as everyone else.
No matter how much of a cultural fit you are, that doesn't get the work done, the expertise does.
I work at a team right now that has: Indian men/women in their mid 40's. Young teenage interns from. People ranging from Indian, to Asian, to White, to Jewish, to men, to women, to gay, to straight, you name it. We have not gotten along better. It really doesn't matter.
"Culture fit" is just a poor patch to cover up insecurity.
Laws on termination are very complex in general. You need a lawyer to navigate that stuff. There are a lot of things that it's illegal to fire someone for doing (including, for example, discussing salary with co-workers). If you're under threat of a PIP/firing you can usually make one apply in the 30-90 days of the PIP.
More than a lawsuit, companies fear disparagement (unless their reputations are in the toilet already) and that's a good enough reason, in general, to write decent severance packages. Warning: never explicitly threat disparagement in a severance negotiation. That gets into extortion territory and while you're unlikely to be taken to jail, you've lost all leverage.
Generally, you should aim for a fair (not unreasonably high) severance and more important try to work out a good reference even when let go. Always, after any termination, check your own references. Employment suits become he-said/she-said affairs very quickly, so the behavior of the people involved will determine a lot. If they're giving good references, reasonable severance offers, etc. then the odds are very strongly in their favor. If they give a bad reference, the situation is much to your advantage and your argument that you were fired 2 days after disclosing migraines suddenly finds a more receptive audience.
It doesn't quite work like that. You can fire someone for any reason at all, as long as it isn't one of the disallowed reasons (discrimination on the basis race, gender, religion, age, etc). However, the reason you give need not be taken at face value. A jury is entitled to conclude that your stated reason is pretextual, and a discriminatory reason is the real one. There's an evidentiary showing the plaintiff must meet first, but it can be purely circumstantial and pretext is often what the claim really boils down to.
That's where shit like "he's not a cultural fit" can get you into trouble. It's basically begging the jury (or a judge at summary judgment) to disbelieve you and conclude that you really fired someone for a discriminatory reason. I.e. "he's not a cultural fit... because he's black and we're all white" or "she's not a cultural fit... because she's a woman and we're all men."
A sibling comment to yours recasts "culture" to "process and management structure." That's much more firm ground. "He's ineffective at his job because he can't work well with our internal processes" or "she's ineffective at her job because she doesn't take direction from our management."
Also, this isn't just a legal issue. Talking about "process and management structure," which is specific and grounded in the ultimate question of whether someone is doing a good job, instead of culture, which is amorphous and can encompass things that have nothing to do with the work, focuses your thinking on factors that you should actually care about.
Just sayin'.
I have found "culture fit" to often mean problems with adjusting to the process and management structure of an organization.
I have worked with folks from corporate environments who never adjusted to having to find their own work and set their own goals in the startup world. And I have worked (briefly) at companies where I liked the people and the work but could not be productive or happy with the kind of micro-management I was expected to put up with.
That's why it's valuable to interview for "culture" (both when hiring and being hired). You need to talk out loud about expectations of how we work together and how we decide what to do. Have this conversation enough times, both in interviews and just chatting with peers, and you'll see things you agree with, things you disagree with but don't mind, and things that are absolute warning signs of toxic environments.
Any business that's sole focus is not accomplishing their mission is dysfunctional. "Cultural Fit" is always toxic - unfairly discriminatory in hiring and non productive in practice.
You clearly never had to put up with The Angry Guy.
Cultural fit, I agree, it's a catchall term that covers everything from blatant aesthetic discrimination to merciful removal of toxic characters.
"The Angry Guy" in these cases is often "angry" only by projection, or frankly with cause.
The conditions of the market may not allow such radical choices in every single case; but I don't have a problem with acknowledging that despite being right in my anger towards the bullshit I was seeing, I was actually being disruptive and damaging to that particular (horrid) environment. Not everyone is suited to every company - it seems a very basic truth to me.
True story, a few companies ago I worked at a medium sized place where we had people employed full time to allocate storage and IP addresses. Getting them to actually do it tho' was like getting blood from a stone. Unless one of them owed you a favour, you would literally have to stand over them and not let them go until they did their damn jobs. That was a highly dysfunctional company. The next place, the people in those jobs practically fell over themselves to help, they were like a breath of fresh air. As a consumer of these services, I'd have alienated myself immediately if I hadn't taken the time to adapt to the culture. And if I'd been going the other way, well I'd have got nothing accomplished, expecting people to actually want to do jobs they're bloody paid for. AArgh.
Neither of them is "wrong" and both of them can adapt - but someone's got to take them aside and explain the lay of the land, not just leave them to flounder.
People are complex. Groups of people, magnitudes more so. I have seen an interview end with unanimous positive assessment and after being hired the subject fail spectacularly. I have also seen candidates barely squeak through the hiring process become star players. Anyone who believes that they can predict the outcome of personalities from a job interview is a great and pompous fool.
That can include things like "most people do GTD", "most communication is asynchronous" and "we're all accountable." Or it can include PRDs, a specific agile method, or constant off-sites about improving efficiency. In many places, it isn't thought about, so they think they have no process or management, when they do, and it's just a secret culture or a back-door process.
The reason to talk about "culture" is to have these discussions to hear what people take for granted, and which things they groan about. I've worked at places where "obviously" we need an annual plan and at places where "obviously" we can have no idea when things are shipping and shouldn't even try to. That's why you have to talk about it in depth: one person's "we have no process" is another person's convoluted, opaque process.
My point is that while these may be sold as process and management, these concepts are more values than states, and many of the examples you've used illustrate a lack (or low values) of presence.
one person's "we have no process" is another person's convoluted, opaque process.
And they'd both be right.
However, I'd question the health of the organization if the so-called culture is in the way that people dress or trim their facial hair. It is hopefully much more related to things like company's structure, employee's attitude and interpersonal skills, people's approach to team management, problem solving methods, work ethics etc.
Having said that, the threat of an established monoculture is probably much worse for productivity, morale and sheer fairness that having to put up with one sour (or clashing) apple.
The last interview that I was on where someone was not hired because of "culture" was because when an experienced devop was asked for an interesting disaster story, he had none. Then, when pushed, he had one, but one with parenthetical comments about how he had told them not to make the mistake.
We said "culture" but what we really meant was, "He's showing the kind of defensive behavior that you REALLY do not want in a devop when things go pear shaped."
And, given defensive behavior was already seen, do you think we really want to try to justify what was clear to us?
If your plan is to have excellent punching bags for when things go south who you can blame and who will not fight back early on, then your not hiring him was a good plan. If you wanted to avoid disasters, well, perhaps you should think about it.
I can't blame the guy for not wanting to talk badly about his former management; it's not a way to win friends in a job interview.
On the other hand, surely everyone working in any kind of sysadmin role has a story of things going sideways.
I'm still worried about the pop-psychology of "well, good candidates should have <stories>, and he didn't have a <story>, so he's not a good candidate." Just substitute other words in for "story" and you get more of a gut-feel that often doesn't translate into real world success.
I want to agree with this but there are some big caveats.
1. What if you don't expect this question and thus don't trawl through memories ahead of time? It's easy to feel put-on-the-spot and have your mind go blank.
2. What if you're really talented and worked at a place with rigorous process and thus all the stuff going bad gets caught in test or QA or whatever? Nothing really goes sideways in that situation.
3. There are a lot of situations where things go bad not because you've made a mistake but because management's made a mistake. Not wanting to talk about those situations is understandable for a couple of reasons. Not talking bad about the former employer is one, so is not wanting to get all worked up about former management screwing you in a job interview.
4. You could have been on either end of the situation described by a previous HN story: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmer... If you're on the "lazy" team you might have been a damn-fine sysadmin with no horror stories. Or on the "hard working" team with plenty of disaster stories and a questionable level of talent.
I'm not saying that having disaster stories makes you a bad sysadmin, nor am I saying that not having disaster stories makes you a good one. But I am suggesting that the correlation between disaster stories and skill level probably isn't p = 0.99 and might be more like p = 0.5 or 0.2 or maybe 0.07.
Even if you find that the correlation is 0.7 (pretty decent) are you going to be interviewing enough people such that you can be sure that you don't end up with sampling error?
If you need to hire 10 sysadmins and you interview 200 then perhaps you'll do a decent job of identifying the good candidates. But if you only need to hire one and you only interview 10 you don't have the law of large numbers on your side. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
Well now aren't we just walking about interview skills? Interviewing poorly leads to not getting job offers, and if that's why he didn't have a better example off the top of his head, it's due to his poor interview skills that he wasn't hired.
> 2. What if you're really talented and worked at a place with rigorous process and thus all the stuff going bad gets caught in test or QA or whatever? Nothing really goes sideways in that situation.
I don't think these places exist. I work for a Fortune 500 with an absolute ton of process due to the sector we work in. I haven't even been here 2 years, I'm not even in sysops, and I can think of one or two things that would have made a good interview story about something "going sideways."
2. I said a rigorous process, not a ton of process. There are good processes and there are not good processes. The fact that you work at a Fortune 500 company doesn't automatically make your processes good.
If Fortune 500 companies were so much better at executing processes than startups surely they would also be better at executing "finding new businesses" processes and thus startups would never get off the ground. The established businesses with far more financial and human resources would immediately swoop in on any opportunities.
But surprise! The world doesn't work that way. Being big doesn't mean being right.
This makes sense if the company is desperate to fill the role or needs tons of time. In many company's hiring is a process where false negatives (kicking someone out because of warning signs) is a better safety than a false positive (hiring someone and having them turn out to be crappy / toxic).
Hiring is hard but firing people is even harder. Some companies have the bandwidth to manage people who are underperforming and raise up their general level of performance and some don't have that luxury.
That being said, defining valid false negatives versus ridiculous bias IS HARD. There are things that are bad from a cultural fit perspective, but if you can only say hes a bad cultural fit and not give more details, if not to the candidate then at least to the rest of the hiring team, then you are not doing your job.
1. lack of understanding of professional working environments (ie. interview structure)
2. lack of preparation for the interview
3. lack of ability for self-reflection
4. actual lack of any experience with which to construct even a lame story.
Human interactions are complicated, stochastic things and I can't help but think that interview processes that include "describe a success/describe a failure" in order to "get a feel" for the person are a hackneyed attempt to distill these complicated things into overly simplistic checklists and scores.
If your culture is sick enough that this is what happens, then no good devop should want to work for you.
Defensive behavior goes hand in hand with cultures where you need to defend yourself. Nobody is good enough that they never make mistakes. What matters is what happens after the mistake. In a good culture, whoever knows what the problem might actually be - who was often the cause of said problem - will immediately speak up and suffer no consequences for doing so. But the person who screws up and then tries to hide it will get fired.
I do admit that there are too few good cultures. But those that exist have to filter out defensive behavior if they wish to remain good.
Each time, the person in question turned out to be a terrible hire and never lasted more than a month.
If you can't come up with a disaster in your career, you've never had a career.
>'Then, when pushed, he had one, but one with parenthetical comments about how he had told them not to make the mistake. We said "culture" but what we really meant was, "He's showing the kind of defensive behavior that you REALLY do not want in a devop when things go pear shaped."'
I had an interview where I responded to a "greatest challenge" question with a true story about recovering a disastrous project from the brink. I related the story in a very "what we did" as opposed to "what was wrong" sense.
Afterwards, the interviewer pressed on about what actually went wrong in the project to throw it into a death spiral to begin with.
I generally try to avoid talking about previous employers, particularly in a negative light when interviewing, but I provided an honest answer - a short tale of cronyism, incompetence and prior efforts made to save the project.
I don't think the interviewer took too well to that response and I had to wonder if I'd been pegged as being defensive or accusatory there? I expect I was.
In the end, I'm thinking questions which might beg or demand talking ill of a past situation can be a no-win situation for the interviewee and not necessarily informative for the interviewer.
Anyone who "needs" to see it will see it, and immediately check it off in their head then click through our other tabs. Meanwhile we can continue hiring the best people from all over the world regardless of age, gender, looks, or location. They also don't have to spend two thirds of their salary on rent, pizza, gaming gear, and lattes to fit in, and you will be more than welcome wherever you are located or if we open a regional office. Keep us in mind.
[1] representative picture: http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/oakl/sports/c-swim/auto_...
Culture is not just about ethnicity or how you look like or what hobbies do you have ? At work, culture is about how you work together with the team to accomplish the same goal that the company has. Whether it is making shitload of money for shareholders or building the most beautiful product, you should ideally believe in that culture. I care less if all co-workers around me are white or black or orange, what I do care about is how they treat me, their work, their company, their attitude. What kind of work environment does the company promote ? Open door ? Face to face conversations ? These are the examples of "culture".
From the OP: 50% of people who are put on performance improvement plans become repeat offenders.
Even when someone recovers from a PIP, they can't transfer internally in most companies-- they're not blocked, but no one wants them-- and the stink never goes away. Promotion is out of the question, too, even 2-3 years later. Good people (wrongly PIP'd, it happens) leave and bad people stay.
Most "repeat offenders" on PIPs are people the manager still wanted to fire. HR said "no, we're not willing to take the legal risk of firing this person." PIPs are rarely passed. Either they fail (leading to termination) or are ruled "inconclusive"-- which makes the manager look bad (HR declined his firing request) and more pissed off. The only time PIPs seem to be "successful" is when there's a change of manager (or, if possible, the team).
Why do PIPs persist? Two words: externalized costs. An HR department can claim it saved money on severance payments, while the cost is externalized (and multiplied) to that employee's team and manager.
It may be counterintuitive that "rewarding failure" is the best strategy, but it's just another cost of doing business.
Just fire on the spot with no severance. I've never known anyone to go on a PIP and remain at a company. They are either fired "eventually" or they find another job.
Bad play, risk-wise. Severance requires them to sign a non-litigation agreement and usually non-disparagement as well. PIP provides a paper trail and insures you somewhat against lawsuit (but not disparagement)-- they could argue for a "wrongful PIP", but you have paper. I don't recommend going that way, but it is better (risk-wise) than just cold-firing.
If you cold-fire, you're taking a major risk. With no severance and no warning, he will be pissed off-- and it's not hard to damage a company's reputation.
It's also not as hard as you think to build a termination case, although I'm not getting into the details here. Let's just say that some people (esp. termination lawyers) are as good at playing that game as we are at programming. Even if you win, he can make it a pyrrhic victory.
I've never known anyone to go on a PIP and remain at a company. They are either fired "eventually" or they find another job.
Agree. I covered that. You're 100% right.
By the way, do you know if it is possible for the employee to refuse severance, and therefore retain the rights to litigate? What happens in that case?
Of course, it is possible. It's unlikely that he will. Most people want to move on with their careers, not sue an ex-employer.
A properly calibrated severance is 1.5-2x the expected length of the job search. Since people on severance are generally able to represent themselves as employed during that time, the job search won't take terribly long.
Very insightful. I wonder how much silliness in corporate America can be explained in terms of HR externalizing costs to other departments. I'm specifically thinking of the articles always talking about HR blocking good but unconventional hires.
The "HR (outsourced) exists to handle payroll/benefits compliance; founders and line managers deal with everything else for as long as possible" seems like the only way to make this work, though.
That also makes them even more horrible and useless. Once you start going down this route, everyone knows what the score is, and it's extremely demoralizing. Nobody takes them seriously, and employers often stack the deck so there is no other possible outcome but failure.
Which is why many companies choose to offer a shitload of severance pay in exchange for the employee voluntarily "resigning".
http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/02/how-to-fire-someone-wel...