As sure as night follows day, the one thing I can guarantee in your HR career is that you will need to let someone go, fire them, relieve them of their duties.
Because as much as helping people to join our organisation, helping people to leave is a part of our role and responsibility. And there will be a myriad of reasons for leaving, from performance to conduct, to reorganisations and retirements. But regardless of the reason, one thing remains the same:
You will show your true colours as both a human being and as a professional by how you handle these situations.
Too often, we take the easy option, disassociate ourselves and treat the people who are leaving as the reason. We depersonalise them, process them and rely on the legal framework and organisational procedures to justify our actions. After all, we are just following orders, right?
Well, we know all about that.
The trick, the challenge is to help people to leave with as much dignity and respect as possible. For them to be able to leave, heal, regenerate and become productive again as quickly as possible. Ideally in a job or company to which they are more suited.
There are very few examples, a handful over my twenty years of practice, where I’ve witnessed something so incredibly mean spirited, wrong or illegal that it warranted the full force of organisational justice. And in most of those cases, the authorities were also involved.
In the large majority of circumstances, it is instead the company who hired the wrong person, didn’t train or manage them properly, or just let things slide. It is the company, the organisation, that is responsible.
It might seem easier to blame the individual, to place the onus on them and to avoid any level of empathy or understanding. But ultimately this backfires on you, the organisation and the individual. So next time you come up against a situation, ask yourself this:
“What is it that I can do to make this as least traumatic as possible”
And then do it.
It won’t necessarily change the outcome, but you’ll be doing that person a service, protecting the reputation of your organisation and putting the human back in HR. You’ll also probably sleep better at night too. Trust me. Give it a go.
