Terminating People

Read this by chance...
while looking up stuffs on the web...
for real work...
in the office...
at 1:27am

Sounds great, right?

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http://changingminds.org/blog/blog.htm

Monday 19-March-06 Terminating people One of the hardest this a manager has to do is to sack people. I have had to do it several times and it doesn't get any easier. The official term is 'termination', which is also an euphemism for assassination ( think Arnold Schwartzenegger). It is a harsh but somehow appropriate word. For the terminated person it is like a bullet to the heart and those left behind can also suffer the shock of loss. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described the emotional roller-coaster experienced by people told that they have a terminal illness (see, there's the word again) and it's often appropriate for those affected by corporate cuts. I've also lost my own job before now (in corporate downsizing, I hasten to add) and have watched the misery on the faces of those on the other side of the table. Bizarrely, I found myself trying to cheer them up, though I know it was mostly about trying to take my mind off my own predicament. In my current role, I am a Change Programme Manager and employ a mix of full-time staff and consultants. The employment dynamic is very different for these two classes. Whilst full-time staff have persistence of tenure and termination is a last-ditch action, consultants come and go like wizards. Employees get trained and developed, but consultants are expected to know their onions and deliver the goods from day 1. If a consultant doesn't deliver the goods, they can be terminated at a moment's notice, without all the opportunities, development and warnings that the permanent staff get. This doesn't mean it's an easy thing, for the consultant or for the terminating manager. Particularly if the consultant has been there for a while, those human bonds which are painful to sever will have developed. Working in change, as I do, I have a good understanding of its impact on people, which probably makes it harder for me when I have to terminate people, though I hope I can go some way to softening the blow for them. What I cannot do, however, is extend the stay of consultants who have to be terminated early. I spend public money and have a duty to conserve it. I have terminated one consultant in recent months and cut the contract of another. One went in the first fortnight after he failed to deliver an early investigation report on time. The second did deliver and stayed for a while, but managed to annoy a key client manager plus a few others to the point where he was losing collaboration and my group was losing credibility. I liked his challenge but others found him too dominant so I had to act. As a change consultant, one of the key tricks is to nudge your clients forward whilst keeping them sweet, a hurdle at which this guy had fallen. It didn't help my decision that he had a difficult personal circumstance and needed the work. He has a lot of good knowledge and it would have been a waste to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so I kept him on for another month to write our supplier management manual. I'm writing this blog in the middle of the night as I lie awake, fretting. Managing and termination can seem easy from a distant position, but when you're in the hot seat it burns.