The First Time I Fired Someone. The First Time I Got Fired.

In this series, professionals share all the right — and wrong — ways to leave a job. Follow the stories here, and write your own (please include #IQuit somewhere in the body of your post).

Early in my professional career in technology I had been promoted (for the second time) to the sales manager of the SF District at a very successful young minicomputer company. The whole industry was young, and I was no exception being 34 at the time. And there wasn’t much in the way of management training in those days.

I had six sales reps and six systems engineers working for me, and I was chartered to expand the district to eight and eight. However, I had one sales rep, who was working remotely in Sacramento, whose performance was very poor. As a DM, my compensation and my future career opportunities depended on overall performance of the district – some doing better than quota, and perhaps a few doing worse would be acceptable as long as the total was above quota. But having one rep that was doing extremely poorly jeopardized the performance of the whole district. Even though I had been there about six months, I was still learning the job. Additionally I had relocated to the SF area I had not worked with the district reps before and did not have much local history. And, being remote this particular rep was much more opaque than the ones I saw every day.

So I consulted with my regional manager, providing a detailed performance review of the individual in question. I was hoping for my manager to “tell me what to do.” But instead he agreed that I had a problem and inquired as to what my plan was. This was of course an excellent response, as he was using this incident as a development exercise to force me to make a decision, and to become accountable as a manager. I decided that the only path was to fire the rep. Since he had a long history of inadequate sales performance it was not deemed necessary to put him on a performance improvement program (topic for another blog…).

I called him up on a Wednesday and set up a meeting in my office for Friday morning. I had never done this before and was very nervous. I also had a great personal emotional reaction to what I knew would be a stinging humiliation and potentially a significant economic hardship that I was about to impose on this individual. On Thursday night I did not sleep a wink, and arrived in the office at about 7 a.m., three hours before the scheduled time, and drinking lots of coffee to stay awake.

About 30 minutes before meeting time, he called me to let me know that he would not be able to make it that day, but would see me on Monday instead! So I had three more sleepless nights before arriving in the office Monday morning, a complete physical and emotional wreck. I started the meeting by indicating that his performance was not satisfactory. Before I could proceed he interrupted me and asked if we were moving on to “Plan B” – which I did not understand. He explained that Plan B was him being fired.

So he was not at all surprised and had been waiting for quite a while for the other shoe to drop. As it turned out, he had been divorced and living on his boat for the last six months and had not really worked at all, and was just doing fine with his base salary with no commissions. I should have made it my business to know much more, much sooner about his situation relative to his performance. If so I certainly would have fired him much earlier.

-----------

Fast forward five years later. My career had advanced extraordinarily well. By the time I left that minicomputer company, I had been promoted a few more times and was the senior field executive in the western United States responsible for a third of domestic revenue. I had total headcount under me of about 250 professionals in sales, systems, and service. The company had earmarked me for promotion to VP with another relocation in our future.

However, in 1980 I decided to follow my dream and I quit that job in order to form a new company and get it funded. This was a big decision for me and my family as my wife was home raising our two young children and we had a mortgage and loans on our two cars. And, we did not have any safety net to fall back on in the event that things did not work out.

It was a glorious time! We got funded almost immediately with first tier investors and recruited an engineering team of about 30 people to build the next generation of enterprise fault tolerant computing based on new microprocessor technology. Over the next four years, we ramped up to about 100 people and moved to a snazzy new building. The company had a huge amount of buzz in the nascent Silicon Valley, and I had real estate agents offering to get me a big house for founders' stock.

And then came the downfall. After four years and four rounds of financing, the company was still not getting customer traction – it was a big project and as we went from customer to customer we discovered that although we had provided 99 percent of necessary functionality, the other 1 percent was different for each customer. We were running low on cash, and had VERY unhappy investors. In order to provide a minimum financing for the company, the investors insisted that one of the lead-investor board members, who was an experienced / successful CEO, step in as CEO of this company and that I be removed from my post. I was “promoted” to Vice Chairman (NOT to be a real job for a real man…).

I remember that it was hard to come to work each day and hold my head high. A few months later I left the company, and watched from the outside as it spiraled down. It was eventually sold for asset value, and from there was shut down about a year later.

The loss of the CEO position, the loss of the company, and the loss of my dream were all very painful, and I grieved for a long time. And I felt the “stinging humiliation” that had kept me from sleeping for four days when I had to fire someone for the first time.

---------

So what have I learned from these experiences? In the first case, I learned that my responsibility to the mission and vision of the company (and my little part of it) must trump my loyalty or concern for any single individual. A “functional” organization has its own immune system, and when everyone is working hard and diligently, and there is a free rider (for any reason), that community of workers will look to the manager to do the right thing for that group by fixing the problem. The longer it lingers, the more the manager loses credibility. One of the most important characteristics of good leadership is to take responsibility to do the right thing for the group.

In the second case, I made a conscious decision to understand what happened, and what I could learn from this terrible turn of events. It is easy and very common to find and place blame on many parties. And when there is a failure of a company there is no shortage of such parties to blame. I decided that I wanted to be BETTER, not BITTER, so I confined my search for the truth by looking inward at my own failings. It is perhaps one of the most important life lessons I ever had, and I attribute much of my future success to this moment. One can think of this as an act of Ju-Jitsu – how can I take this bad force and twist it so it works in my favor. As a side note I think this also illustrates the personal characteristic of resilience (when I was growing up my mother always told me if you fall down that you pick yourself up, brush yourself off and try again!!). There will always be setbacks in life and success depends on your determination to try again.

Finally, there is a synthesis between these two. As a leader it is necessary from time to time to fire someone. As someone who has been on the other side of the table, I believe it is also necessary when you fire someone to do so with grace and compassion, and to make all efforts to preserve that person’s dignity.

Over the years as my career continued on a successful trajectory I have had to fire many more people. It got easier (thank goodness) than that first time, but I always do so with compassion for the other person, and do my best to treat them with dignity and grace.

I am happy to report that the first time I was fired was also the LAST time I was fired!