You're Fired! NO ... I'm Fired!!

Explicit content warning

02/08/22 • 24 min

2 Listeners

My Job Here Is Done - Career Success Podcast

In today’s episode of the My Job Here Is Done podcast, we discuss the awful situation of having to fire someone. We also float some Pro Tips on how to make terminations expected, if required, and not a surprise event for the employee.

WHAT TOPICS DO WE COVER?

* The differences and proper uses of the terms You’re Fired - We’re Letting You Go, and We’re Laying You Off.

* Ideas on how to make careful but quick hiring decisions that merge naturally into a defined Orientation Period.

* How to watch for early patterns of concerning behavior and advice on bidding a fast farewell, if necessary

* How does employee termination affect your team, and what happens when you don’t communicate well.

* The difference between progressive discipline and performance improvement plans.

* A story about how local government employees handle the “new guy boss” and literally change jobs, culture, and priorities every election cycle, and what we can learn from that.

WHAT’S THE TAKE-AWAY?

Firing or letting go of employees is just a horrible event for everyone - nobody wins. We think you can minimize these events, grow a better workforce, and have an incredible culture of employee professional development if we add a bit of extra process and procedure. We’d love your feedback.

WE USED THESE RESOURCES:

Besides our experiences that directly relate to this topic, we found the following resources very helpful in preparing for this episode:

From Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2020/03/firing-with-compassion

From INC Magazine: https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-to-fire-an-employee.html

From our previous episode "Toss THIS Salad Out" https://www.myjobhereisdone.com/toss-this-salad-out/

WHO ARE DAVE AND KELLI?

An Entrepreneur and Intrapreneur duo with street smarts, ‘preneurial’ chops, and a penchant for storytelling.

Dave and Kelli met as teenagers and have a life-long story of their own. They took separate and very contrasting career paths, both struggling with challenges and celebrating their career successes in very different ways.

Over the years, they noticed similarities in the stories they shared about their work, the people they interacted with, and how business was conducted. Kelli, who “worked for the man like a dog for decades,” and Dave, who “started or ran businesses all of his life,” quickly realized there is substantial value for others in those combined experiences.

The “My Job Here Is Done” Podcast is the result. Ultimately, you’re either building a great business or moving up the career ladder of success, and we absolutely know we can help!

HOW TO WORK WITH US

If you like what you hear in the podcast, we have more to share with companies that we work with.

With the foundation of business experience from Dave and Kelli as a team, in concert with subject matter experts from the rich roster of smart people in our network, we have put these goals, culture themes, and operational processes you hear on the podcast to the test - and they work.

If you have a complicated problem to solve, and if you believe in the balanced approach that the needs of the business must be aligned with the needs of employees - AND you like to play to win - click here to learn how you can work with us.

WHAT TOPICS DO WE COVER?

* The differences and proper uses of the terms You’re Fired - We’re Letting You Go, and We’re Laying You Off.

* Ideas on how to make careful but quick hiring decisions that merge naturally into a defined Orientation Period.

* How to watch for early patterns of concerning behavior and advice on bidding a fast farewell, if necessary

* How does employee termination affect your team, and what happens when you don’t communicate well.

* The difference between progressive discipline and performance improvement plans.

* A story about how local government employees handle the “new guy boss” and literally change jobs, culture, and priorities every election cycle, and what we can learn from that.

WHAT’S THE TAKE-AWAY?

WE USED THESE RESOURCES:

Besides our experiences that directly relate to this topic, we found the following resources very helpful in preparing for this episode:

From Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2020/03/firing-with-compassion

From INC Magazine: https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-to-fire-an-employee.html

From our previous episode "Toss THIS Salad Out" https://www.myjobhereisdone.com/toss-this-salad-out/

WHO ARE DAVE AND KELLI?

An Entrepreneur and Intrapreneur duo with street smarts, ‘preneurial’ chops, and a penchant for storytelling.

The “My Job Here Is Done” Podcast is the result. Ultimately, you’re either building a great business or moving up the career ladder of success, and we absolutely know we can help!

HOW TO WORK WITH US

If you like what you hear in the podcast, we have more to share with companies that we work with.

Previous Episode

Survivor Bias: You're Looking at the Wrong Holes!

In this podcast episode of My Job Here Is Done we talk about survivor bias where the tendency is to study successful businesses, leaders, or outcomes and ignore the accompanying failures. However, analyzing the failures is where you will find the data you need to consider as you try to grow your own company or ascend the career success ladder.

We had planned to do a podcast on failure analysis but we didn’t have a great hook or story to tie into it. Out of the blue, our good friend and listener David Yanoshik suggested that we look at Abraham Wald’s work during WWII and how he likely saved hundreds of pilots' lives and uncountable amounts of money for the US during the war.

Well, co-host Dave is a pilot, and sure enough, that caught his attention, especially after co-host Kelli wrote the episode notes and brought the story to life. So thanks David Yanoshik, we tell you what you won for helping us at the beginning of the episode. Spoiler Alert - don’t hold your breath.

Abraham Wald, a statistician who worked in New York city was helping with the war effort during World War II, and he was on assignment with the military.

Many of the United States military bomber planes were being shot down on missions over Germany. The naval researchers knew they needed data to reduce the number of planes and pilots lost so they began to analyze the damage done to planes that safely returned from missions.

They painstakingly reviewed and diagramed the bullet holes on these planes and began to see a pattern. You can see a picture of the data used for this, here.

Most of the damage on the planes that were safely returned was done to the wings and body so the naval researchers at the time concluded that reinforcing those areas with armor would improve the likelihood of a safe return, so they began putting reinforced steel armor on those areas.

Side note: You might wonder ... why not just reinforce the entire airplane? The answer is you can’t - aircraft fly by a carefully balanced equation of weight and center of gravity. Add too much overall weight and it won’t fly, and add even a little extra weight, but placed in the wrong areas, and it won’t fly.

The naval researchers we’re thrilled with their scientific work, study, and solving of the problem. Until Wald stopped the process cold in its tracks after he was brought in to double-check the researcher’s theory.

He immediately pointed out the error in that thinking.

The researchers only looked at the planes that returned from missions, not the ones that were shot down. He looked at the data in a different way by analyzing both the planes that were shot down, and the ones that were not, and he came up with another solution - the successful solution.

Since the returning planes, the ones who survived, did not have damage to the places like the cockpit, the engines, and parts of the tail - he concluded those areas should be reinforced - not where the bullet holes were found on the planes that safely returned and were not shot down.

Brilliant - and it worked - and Survivorship Bias theory was born.

My Job Here Is Done takes a look at how survivor bias relates to business and why we don’t often look at and deeply analyze failure. We notice it’s too inconvenient to study because the data is often hidden and hard to find. But we also highlight how important it is to create the elusive and hard to define mixture of success we all call secret sauce.

Co-host Kelli offers some sobering advice in this episode: “If you’re not constantly troubled by the data you’re getting, you are looking at the wrong data.”

Most businesses and leaders that have failed, either suffered a single identifiable major mistake that is easy to find, or they succumbed to Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts - history shows failures are almost always at those two extremes.

To succeed, to grow, to maintain that competitive edge, you must always be reinventing. Think how important that thought is when you look at companies long loved and now forgotten. Toys R Us, Palm Pilot, Pan Am, Woolworth’s, Howard Johnsons, Radio Shack. All of these companies could have survived - actually should have survived - but they didn’t - ask why?

Here are some other links on the subject - Bullet Holes & Bias: The Story of Abraham Wald

Next Episode

Here's Why I CAN'T Do My Job!

1 Recommendations

WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT TODAY?

We’re talking about improving your success rate - in a big way. Did you ever have an unusual amount of trouble completing a big and important project at work? As a manager, have you ever been disappointed in your employees’ ability to get things done on their own?

In today’s episode of the My Job Here Is Done podcast, we discuss how your success in completing a project or task heavily depends on a balance between what we call ‘Span of Responsibility and Span of Control.’ What does that mean? We answer that today as we discuss our definitions, ways to achieve an outstanding balance of both, and how to mitigate an imbalance between those two ideals.

WHAT TOPICS DO WE COVER?

Our definitions around the terms Span of Responsibility and Span of Control and show examples of each

Reasons why Span of Responsibility and Span of Control must be in balance at the beginning of a project to ensure success

The importance of Span of Control, which is often missing in the balanced formula

These steps to help plan for a balanced Span of Responsibility and Span of Control:

Define the task or project in one paragraph
Select the leader of the project
Make sure that the leader has the time and desire to take on the project
Send them the project description paragraph that you wrote
Have a one-on-one verbal discussion to flesh out the details
Ask what resources they need to be successful
Define any hard limits and get them on the table
Discuss the what-if scenarios. Make sure you both understand the points where things could take a turn in the wrong direction.
And lastly, make sure the leader of the project knows they can come to you at any time for any reason

Ways to rebalance a failing project where the Span of Responsibility and Span of Control are out of whack

A really good book by Steven Poole on the origin and definitions around tones of business buzzwords - just for fun.

WHAT’S THE TAKE-AWAY?

You can be 100% more successful if you adopt our notion that the Span of Responsibility has to be in balance with the Span of Control. In our experience, a Span of Responsibility with a misaligned Span of Control is the number 1 and most significant reason why projects fail to achieve expected results. Leadership must provide both an outline of the responsibilities associated with a project, grant authority to make decisions, and provide the tools and resources needed for success. You can’t have one without the other and expect great results.

WE USED THESE RESOURCES:

Besides our experiences that directly relate to this topic, we found the following resources very helpful in preparing for this episode:

Span of Control on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control
Our Affiliate Link to Who Touched Base In My Thought Shower https://amzn.to/35Zksg4 By Steven Poole
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sceptre | ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1444781839 | ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1444781830

Please note: As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you, so thank you!

WHO ARE DAVE AND KELLI?

An Entrepreneur and Intrapreneur duo with street smarts, ‘preneurial’ chops, and a penchant for storytelling.

Over the years, they noticed similarities in their stories about their work, the people they interacted with, and how business was conducted. Kelli, who “worked for the man like a dog for decades,” and Dave, who “started or ran businesses all of his life,” quickly realized there is substantial value for others in those combined experiences.

The “My Job Here Is Done” podcast is the result. Ultimately, you’re either building a great business or moving up the career ladder of success, and we absolutely know we can help!

HOW TO WORK WITH US

If you like what you hear in the podcast, we have more to share with companies that we work with.

If you have a complicated problem to solve and believe in the balanced approach that the needs of the busin...