Truth 48. Terminations are an engagement tool

First of all, let’s be clear about one big principle. Unless your soon-to-be departed has been the cause of a SWAT team visit or hazmat suits or a scattering of black fingerprint dust, firing someone should never be an occasion for celebration. If you derive a dark, secret satisfaction from telling someone that today’s their last day, you might want to consider taking on a new job. One that involves working with, say, plants.

Terminations are rarely a happy occasion. It’s not happy for the ex. If he or she wanted to leave badly enough to actually leave, that employee would have quit first. It’s not happy for the company. There is inevitably unwelcome expense involved: severance, legal, the expenses associated with making the original hiring mistake. And the expenses associated with recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training the replacement.

Now that we have that little proviso out of the way, let’s look at the termination experience from the perspective of how the process will strengthen your team, your employees’ relationship with you, your company, and each other:

• Make sure the way you terminate your employee is absolutely consistent with the law and your company’s processes and promises to its employees (like a progressive discipline procedure that might be in place). Most importantly, it’s the right—and safe—thing to do. But additionally, it also keeps you on the job too. You won’t have the chance to restore engagement equilibrium in your team if you’ve been fired yourself.

• Terminate others as you would have others terminate you. Your company’s values don’t stop when management decides it no longer wants an employee. All those lofty and publicly pronounced values that your company’s leadership wrote in the vacuum of early and hopeful times are even more important now when conversations will get excruciating.

Your soon-to-be-ex employee is going to walk out into the world and turn into a customer, a competitor, an opinion-maker, a gossiper. What tone do you want that person to take when discussing the company and the last conversation? The way you treat your newly departed before they walk out the door can make a huge difference for your company’s reputation.

It’s also important to bear in mind that the person you say “good-bye” to today could be the same person you want to hire back again tomorrow. It’s not unheard of for companies that lay off talent one week to call that same person back a week later to offer another—sometimes even better—job. You want to have treated that person in such a way that they’ll happily say yes. And wholeheartedly commit to the job rather than just begrudgingly use it as a stopgap while they look for opportunities in a company that will keep its commitment to its stated values.

The person you say “good-bye” to today could be the same person you want to hire back again tomorrow.

• Remember that terminating an employee won’t terminate that employee’s relationship with colleagues. Sure, you might try to impose a gag order as part of your severance agreement. And, under pressure, shock, and anxiety, the employee will sincerely agree to a “mum” policy. But there’s something about sustained staring into an extra large margarita glass under the sympathetic gazes of former coworkers that will loosen tongues. You’re going to give them something to talk about. Treat your terminated employee in such a way that whatever is said about you will be as benign as reasonably possible.

If you can, make it acceptable and safe for your employees to keep in touch with each other (they will anyway, hello LinkedIn). Smart employees know that their network will be more dependable than whatever position they happen to be holding at any given time. It’s that network that will help them string together job after job, ultimately forming a career path that has some sort of logical narrative. Your tenure as their boss is, itself, fleeting. You will eventually be folded into their network of colleagues. So by supporting their individual efforts to keep their networks and connections strong and current, you’ll be building your own career power over time.

• Remember that your employees are watching how you hold up the employment brand promise through the way you terminate unwanted talent and how you behave afterward. Just because someone has left, that doesn’t make that employee irrelevant to the commitment and passion of your remaining employees. Their own engagement might start to unravel if they observe you betraying the values and integrity of your team culture.

• Don’t speak negatively about your recently departed to your team. They will conclude that you can’t be trusted. They’ll be gone one of these days themselves. And what will you say about them then? If you must speak of the newly absent, reserve your comments for either neutral or positive thoughts. You’re not protecting the departed. You are, through your actions, demonstrating to the remaining that their reputations are safe with you.