Furthering your personal and professional growth

Dismissing someone, though highly stressful, offers important opportunities for personal and professional growth. For example, you learn how to manage your own and others’ emotions, how to master challenging new tasks, what your strengths as a manager are, and where you can improve your skills.

After making it through a dismissal, you may discover that you learned far more than you expected—and that you handled the situation more skillfully than you ever anticipated.

And if you feel dissatisfied with the way you dealt with any aspect of the process, you can objectively examine what went wrong and then use the resulting insights to do better next time.

In short, navigating through an employee dismissal gives you valuable new opportunities to enhance your knowledge, your managerial skills, and your personal and professional integrity.

Gaining a broader view

Dismissing employees teaches managers to broaden their view of this difficult, complex task in several ways. For one thing, you gain a new understanding of time horizon. Before experiencing a dismissal for the first time, many team leaders see the task from a narrow perspective; that is, they focus only on the moment in which the actual dismissal is implemented. But dismissing an employee has a much longer time horizon than that. You need to take important steps and make vital decisions before, during, and after the “main event.”

For example, you need to identify when it’s appropriate and legal to dismiss a problem worker, how to do so without incurring a lawsuit, and how to rebuild your team afterward. Thus the act of dismissing someone is just one narrow portion of the spectrum of decisions and actions the process entails.

You also gain a new view of “people horizon.” You realize that you must not only manage the impact of a dismissal on directly affected employees; you must also manage the impact on the rest of your team.

Identifying ways to improve

If you’re dissatisfied with any aspect of your leadership before, during, and after a dismissal, you can learn from the experience and put better strategies and systems in place for next time.

Sometimes, dismissing employees stems from poor planning and ineffective performance management that occurred long before the employee dismissal.

Many experts maintain that “hiring smart” is the best way to avoid dismissals later. Hiring for attitude and social-dynamic ability as well as more formal skills can help you build a high-performing and stable team. And “strategic headcount planning” helps you expand and enrich your group wisely.

Preserving your organization′s integrity

By skillfully implementing a dismissal, you also help preserve your organization’s and team’s integrity. That’s because you sever a relationship between your company and an individual who simply is not contributing to the firm’s success.

Though upsetting, dismissing a problem performer can help your team refocus on the work at hand. Indeed, many managers and teams feel relieved to finally say good-bye to an individual who has been draining the team’s energy and spawning resentment or frustration throughout the group.

Handled skillfully, a dismissal can help you forge a stronger self, a stronger team, and a stronger company.