Dan Martell - How To Fire Someone (Fire an Employee Gracefully)

00:00:00.000 Hi there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor and

00:00:02.440 creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:04.000 In this video, I'm going to share with you how to fire an employee

00:00:07.800 gracefully without feeling horrible but do it in a way that

00:00:11.040 gets the job done.

00:00:12.340 Make sure that you're clear and there's no misunderstandings and

00:00:15.040 be sure to stay to the end where I share with you a framework

00:00:17.360 called the weekly sync which would probably have allowed you to

00:00:21.360 identify and support that employee a lot quicker.

00:00:24.260 Maybe they were still going to go but this structure of a weekly

00:00:27.060 meeting format will really get you clear.

00:00:28.660 I'll share with you how to get that at the end.

00:00:43.100 So I have a belief that it's hire slow, fire fast.

00:00:46.340 Now that doesn't mean that I sit there and I drag my feet as I'm

00:00:49.120 building a people plan and trying to hire talent.

00:00:52.080 I do have a talent pipeline structure that I'm going to teach

00:00:54.920 in a future video, but the whole idea is that there's a lot

00:00:58.420 hoops that people need to go through to make sure that they're

00:01:01.360 the right fit for your team.

00:01:02.720 But after all of that, after personality assessments,

00:01:06.200 video submissions, test projects, all that stuff,

00:01:09.000 you can still get somebody that's just an underperformer.

00:01:11.500 They might have started as a rock star and then slowly

00:01:15.000 degraded over time for whatever reasons and those are the

00:01:17.680 situations where you gotta act and you gotta let them move on.

00:01:20.340 You know, I had an employee, she worked in my community

00:01:23.480 management department and she was incredible. 1.00

00:01:27.780 She had all the drive, she got it, she wanted it,

00:01:31.020 she had the capabilities, she was amazing, great culture

00:01:33.960 and just continuously made mistakes,

00:01:35.660 continuously made mistakes and I'm gonna walk you through

00:01:37.920 the process that I used to not only let her go but to make sure 0.92

00:01:41.600 that she never felt like it blindsided her.

00:01:44.740 I think that there's, if you do things right,

00:01:47.000 my belief is, if you have somebody that's underperforming

00:01:49.340 and you know, right, here's a great question,

00:01:51.000 if I fired everybody that worked for you right now

00:01:53.740 and in three months, three months down the road,

00:01:56.680 I gave you permission to hire them back.

00:01:58.420 Who would you enthusiastically hire back?

00:02:01.820 That's the question that's gonna be clear on who makes that list.

00:02:04.680 So if you do it right though, they're not gonna feel

00:02:08.020 blindsided, it's not gonna have an impact to your business,

00:02:10.760 and it's going to make you feel good about the outcome.

00:02:13.700 Because here's what I believe, they will never be a star in

00:02:16.940 your business today, but they could be an incredible resource

00:02:20.100 at another company, at the right company.

00:02:22.100 But you holding them back from even discovering that isn't fair

00:02:26.340 you or your team.

00:02:27.940 So here are the five things, the five steps in letting

00:02:32.040 somebody go gracefully.

00:02:33.780 Number one, prep the accounts.

00:02:36.020 This means looking at the body of work they're working on, all

00:02:39.560 the different logins, all the different accounts, all the

00:02:41.660 different team members that they've been interacting with,

00:02:44.260 all the different projects they've been accountable for,

00:02:46.520 and audit that.

00:02:47.500 Make sure that you have a clear understanding that if they move

00:02:50.340 on, that you've already thought through all the different levels

00:02:53.540 of access they had.

00:02:54.500 You may not even have the password for certain accounts.

00:02:57.040 You may not even know the name of a vendor that they've been

00:02:59.840 working with to get a certain project completed.

00:03:02.180 So you wanna do a quick audit and prep all the accounts to make

00:03:05.420 sure that you have a hit list that as soon as you have that

00:03:08.180 conversation with them that you've got an action plan to

00:03:11.820 transition work and or migrate accounts to somebody else.

00:03:15.580 Number two, schedule the sit down.

00:03:18.260 This to me is the most important.

00:03:20.300 If you're gonna let somebody go, especially if they've been with

00:03:22.300 for a while, you owe them the courtesy

00:03:26.040 of sitting down eye to eye.

00:03:28.040 You want to look at them and let them know,

00:03:30.800 hey, this is where we're at, this is what's happening.

00:03:33.840 Don't do it over email.

00:03:35.620 Definitely, I mean video if you have to,

00:03:38.120 but at the end of the day, I just think if somebody has been

00:03:41.780 giving you their work and you've been working with them

00:03:44.080 on a team, it is your responsibility to sit down with

00:03:47.260 them and have that conversation person to person.

00:03:49.260 It doesn't have to be long, it should actually be short,

00:03:52.060 but do that and schedule it.

00:03:53.920 Number three, this is not a discussion.

00:03:56.700 I think the biggest mistake that people make

00:03:58.560 when they let somebody go is they say,

00:03:59.860 hey, here's how I'm feeling

00:04:01.800 and it's just not working out for me, how do you feel?

00:04:04.500 And then all of a sudden they're saying,

00:04:05.400 well, things are going great, I don't understand.

00:04:07.000 I know that I haven't been hitting my numbers

00:04:08.580 and I know things are going a little tough,

00:04:09.820 but what do you mean, what are you trying to say right now?

00:04:12.140 And then all of a sudden it turns into this crazy discussion

00:04:15.020 about, well, yeah, it's not my fault you didn't do this

00:04:17.880 and you said this would happen and then all of a sudden

00:04:20.060 I had to do all this extra work and it's like,

00:04:21.800 whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:04:23.100 At the end of the day, it's not a discussion.

00:04:25.400 It's very clear, sit down, let them know your position is no

00:04:29.100 longer available at this company.

00:04:30.900 Today is your last day.

00:04:32.540 Here's what's going to happen next.

00:04:33.980 I just want to let you know how much we appreciate the time

00:04:36.020 that you've given to the company and the organization and we wish

00:04:39.380 you all the best.

00:04:40.420 If you can support us in the transition,

00:04:42.220 I'd love to write you a recommendation to the next role

00:04:46.020 because a lot of times the person's actually talented.

00:04:49.300 These are the toughest ones but this is to me the way I've

00:04:51.500 seen it, they're talented.

00:04:52.700 They're just not going to work for you.

00:04:54.140 I mean, if you run a high-performing SaaS environment,

00:04:57.740 a team, a high-performing team, there's a lot of people that

00:05:00.740 would be rock stars at other companies because they're just

00:05:03.980 not as demanding and they don't have as high of a need and the

00:05:06.840 quality of work is just not where you need it and you could

00:05:10.520 refer them to somebody else and be totally authentic about

00:05:13.280 that so I always like to just let them know like, hey, this is

00:05:16.720 not a discussion.

00:05:17.620 Today's your last day.

00:05:18.860 If you help us with the transition,

00:05:20.100 here's what we can do to support you in that.

00:05:23.160 And if they want to play ball, good.

00:05:24.340 If not, that's okay.

00:05:25.500 You execute the transition plan.

00:05:27.280 Number four, remove access. 0.63

00:05:29.840 This is probably the biggest pain that shows up after you've

00:05:34.080 let somebody go is when you didn't have a plan to remove

00:05:37.420 access to certain logins, to accounts, to information.

00:05:40.520 I've seen situations with clients that I coach where,

00:05:43.520 you know, a key staff, a VP of sales takes off and takes their

00:05:46.420 whole account database with them, their customer list.

00:05:48.960 I mean these are just challenges that you don't need if you're

00:05:51.900 just prepped and you do it.

00:05:53.200 So if you do all the prepping the account at the beginning and

00:05:55.560 then you have the list of projects that need to be

00:05:57.400 transitioned or accessed, et cetera, and you make sure that

00:05:59.880 all the logins are reset, the emails are redirected to the

00:06:03.700 right people so nothing gets dropped,

00:06:05.400 then it's actually really straightforward.

00:06:07.320 It might take a couple hours of work but then it's done.

00:06:09.640 And ideally you do it during the meeting.

00:06:11.520 Have somebody on your team and your administrative, your admin

00:06:14.520 execute the, you know, the setting of the passwords

00:06:20.060 and the authentication and the redirecting

00:06:22.060 of who owns what assets and documents

00:06:24.320 while you're having that discussion, let them go.

00:06:26.160 So that way when they're done, everything's done.

00:06:28.040 If they need access from you to something that was personal,

00:06:30.460 they can ask for it and you can get it for them

00:06:32.140 on their behalf and that's the way I deal with that.

00:06:34.800 Number five, communicate the reason.

00:06:37.580 I think this is probably the thing

00:06:39.940 that's gonna hurt businesses the most

00:06:42.320 because you're so into it.

00:06:43.820 As the founder, as the leader, you're so into the person and

00:06:48.300 where they've fallen short and your frustrations that you don't

00:06:52.500 realize that from everybody else's perspective,

00:06:54.940 they look like they were doing a good job.

00:06:56.600 Yeah, they weren't as active in meetings and always showing up

00:07:01.780 for the team outings and all that stuff but man,

00:07:04.640 firing them, that might seem a little bit much for a lot of

00:07:07.840 people.

00:07:08.840 They might actually just like totally disagree with your

00:07:10.320 decision and if you don't communicate to the team, if you

00:07:13.320 don't take the time to set up a quick 15 minute call with your

00:07:17.420 team, send out an email, let them know the reasons and for me,

00:07:21.120 map them back to the values.

00:07:22.920 To me, we hire and fire against values and as we're

00:07:26.860 communicating why that person's no longer on the team,

00:07:28.960 we have to map it back to these are the things that we expect

00:07:31.480 of everybody on our team including myself and when they're

00:07:35.380 not being followed or they're not being done at the level

00:07:37.620 that we require, then unfortunately that role is no

00:07:40.340 longer available for that person in our company.

00:07:42.480 They're gonna go on, do amazing stuff and we're gonna find

00:07:44.620 somebody incredible to backfill and take that position over. 1.00

00:07:47.920 So just make sure that you communicate with the rest of the

00:07:50.520 team and you don't leave it this open-ended what happened to

00:07:53.760 that person because how you treat that person,

00:07:56.400 I call them alumni, how you treat somebody that's no longer

00:07:58.720 with your company is gonna have a huge impact on how people show

00:08:02.700 up on a day-to-day basis because they don't wanna feel like as

00:08:05.500 soon as they're no longer part of the organization you're gonna

00:08:07.840 talk crap about them, you're gonna blame them for everything. 0.53

00:08:10.180 That's not what I'm talking about. 0.99

00:08:11.180 I'm just talking about just being upfront,

00:08:13.020 letting people know where the performance fell short

00:08:16.020 and it's totally cool, they're gonna be awesome

00:08:18.380 and you're gonna support them in that transition.

00:08:20.380 So five steps to fire an employee gracefully.

00:08:23.020 Number one, prep the accounts so you know

00:08:25.220 what projects they were working on

00:08:26.320 and who needs to be transitioned access.

00:08:28.340 Number two, schedule the sit down, do it face to face.

00:08:32.340 Number three, not a discussion.

00:08:34.700 It's not sitting there as a performance review.

00:08:36.600 That is the decision that's been made, they're moving on.

00:08:39.080 Number four, while you're having the meeting, remove access so

00:08:43.080 that that way it's clean, it's done, there's no questions.

00:08:46.120 They need something, they can always ask.

00:08:47.460 And number five, communicate the reason to the team so that

00:08:51.260 everybody's clear where that person fell short.

00:08:54.260 So that is how you fire somebody gracefully from your

00:08:56.840 organization, but at the beginning I mentioned an

00:08:59.100 incredible resource called the Weekly Sync that allow you to

00:09:02.040 get clear with your team on who's doing what and what big

00:09:04.640 rocks they need to move forward.

00:09:05.980 To grab your copy, click the link below and download that.

00:09:09.080 It has the agenda structure that I use on a weekly basis to build

00:09:12.840 and maintain and train my high-performing team.

00:09:16.620 So my favorite parts of that is the Big Rocks and the Scorecard.

00:09:20.760 So you can get a copy with the link.

00:09:22.220 Click that below.

00:09:23.260 Get your copy and if you like this video,

00:09:25.020 be sure to click the like button, subscribe to my channel and if

00:09:27.560 there's somebody you care about that you think this could serve,

00:09:29.800 feel free to share it with them directly.

00:09:31.680 As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger life and a

00:09:34.500 bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.

00:09:36.440 Yo, you're fired!

00:09:38.180 That's what you don't want to do.

00:09:39.720 You're fired, you're fired, you're fired. 0.89

Dan Martell - February 04, 2019

How To Fire Someone (Fire an Employee Gracefully)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript