CMU School of Drama


Thursday, August 29, 2024

When Should You Fire Someone?

Remodeling: Employees, employees—what would you do without them? Not much when you have a lot of work going on and a backlog in production. You need them and they need you. However, that doesn’t mean that “once hired, never fired” is the reality.

2 comments:

Carly Tamborello said...

The “good intentions but poor performance” point is so hard to draw the line with. To me, it is much easier to stop investing in someone who is unmanageable, lazy, or treats others poorly than someone who is pleasant but not so competent at what they do. I tend to feel that when I am in a leadership position, part of my responsibility is training and uplifting everyone else on the team and giving them the help they need, but as the article says, sometimes you may have someone who is taking an excess of attention and help, or whose work you are constantly needing to redo, and what’s best for the company is to let them go. It’s a difficult situation to navigate emotionally. Also, the “being talked about” point is so real. We all know someone in our place of work whose performance is constantly the topic of conversation.

Carolyn Burback said...

I hope I never get fired from a job not just because that is awkward but because I don’t like letting people down when I arrive in a space and agree to do x y and z. I think the list of reasons to fire someone was an interesting read and found many similarities between the examples given and how people tend to talk about other people within the school of drama. I think the saddest one is good intentions but poor performance because clearly they aren’t trying to do no work correctly but the fact they can’t carry their weight bogs down the rest of the team. I think a good employer may be able to give these people a program or agreement to improve their skill sets at the job rather than pray it will click one day with “another chance.” I also agree that just because a person is good at something that if their attitude or ego sucks it is not worth the work they produce, especially if it is stopping others from operating at their best. People who think they know everything probably also have less aptitude to do better than they are currently because there is no drive to learn more or from others.