Trying to Decide Whether to Fire Someone? Ask Yourself This Question.

As a manager, when an employee is struggling, it’s tough to know whether to fire them or give them time to improve. This single question can help you decide.

Image Credit: Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Because I worked in HR for years, I’ve heard about a lot of employee performance issues.

Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised several years ago when company executive Randy came to talk to me about a problem he was having with one of his new team members, Chris. (Both names are pseudonyms.)

Chris had only been at our company for one month but had already racked up an impressive list of detractors. Ten different people across multiple departments had complained about Chris’s attitude and lack of professionalism, and Randy was reaching his boiling point.

However, Chris had a unique skill set and everyone knew he’d be a tough person to replace, which led to Randy’s dilemma…

Should he fire Chris?

After all, Chris seemed like a nice enough guy. He was a bit awkward at times, but he was smart and technically proficient. He had a solid resume and an impressive list of accomplishments. Plus, it had taken us months of interviews to finally land someone like Chris. No one wanted to start another exhausting job search after we had just concluded the last one.

So Randy was wondering the same thing every other manager wonders in this situation, “Should I give this guy more time to turn things around? Or should I cut the cord right now?”

When Randy came to me with this question, I tried to suppress my immediate reaction to give advice. (I used to thrust my advice upon everyone, but I eventually realized that’s a horrible idea, so I now try to follow the coaching model rather than telling people what to do.)

So I asked Randy a question suggested in Jim Collins’s book Good to Great:

Knowing what you know now, would you enthusiastically re-hire this person?

Randy thought for two seconds, then looked at me and smiled.

“No,” he said. “I definitely wouldn’t re-hire Chris. He’s good at a lot of things, but he’s not the right fit here. I need to let him go.”

That single question brought Randy helpful clarity, and I’ve seen it bring the same clarity to other leaders multiple times. In fact, it proved to be such a powerful question that the company incorporated it into the performance review process.

We called it the “Duplicate Test” question and required every manager to answer it about each team member as part of their performance review: “Knowing what you know now, would you enthusiastically re-hire this person?”

Answering “No” didn’t result in automatic termination, but it did mean that the manager had to develop an immediate game plan to determine whether the employee was the right fit.

That game plan could be additional job training to see if the employee could turn the corner. (After all, sometimes employee struggles are the result of poor company training or support rather than any fault of the employee.) Or sometimes the manager would share candid feedback with the person and put them on a 30-day plan to improve performance.

But regardless of the next step, we found the answers to that question were always revealing.

This single question forced “nice” managers to confront reality, even if they normally struggled to say anything negative. It’s a much tougher question to dodge than standard questions like “How is this person performing?” or “What are this employee’s strengths and weaknesses?”

So if you’re in Randy’s position right now and you’re trying to decide what to do with a problem performer on your team, ask yourself the one question that has a unique and powerful ability to separate fact from fiction: