Many supervisors feel tremendous angst when they must fire a
coworker. But there are two groups for whom the termination process is easy:
bad supervisors and great supervisors.

Bad supervisors find terminations easy because they are
oblivious to their own failures in the hiring and development process, they don't
care about the person they have failed, and they don't make the connection
between these failures and the company's performance. And since they face no
repercussions from the bad supervisors to whom they report, it's easy to place
the blame on the terminated coworker, wash their hands of the whole affair, and
move on to the next victim. E Pluribus
Kinko's (BookSurge, 2009) author Dean Zatkowsky calls them "bossiopaths,"
because they bring a sociopath's self-centeredness to the workplace.

Great supervisors, on the other hand, find it easy to fire
poor performers because they do so to benefit the terminated coworker and the
organization. The difference between the good supervisor and the bad supervisor
is that the good supervisor knows that his or her top priority is the success
of the people supervised. Even if that success must be found elsewhere.

Generally speaking, there are two reasons to fire a
coworker: poor performance and values violations. Termination for values
violations should be a no-brainer, because what you tolerate, you encourage.
If, for example, you let a top performing salesperson get away with dishonest
behavior, you will quickly build a culture of dishonesty. Fire them fast and
don't look back.

Great supervisors devote tremendous effort to hiring and
developing coworkers, but the need to terminate for poor performance still
arises. Perhaps a coworker's skills or self-motivation were misjudged. Perhaps
a coworker's motivation has lapsed over time. How do you fire a poor performer
in a way that benefits the coworker?

Bad supervisors tend to handle terminations through the
annual performance review, which UCLA professor of management Samuel Culbert
calls, "...the most pretentious, fraudulent, ill-advised exercise taking place at
companies." In his book, Get Rid of the
Performance Review! (Business Plus, 2010), Culbert says that instead of holding
an annual adversarial meeting where coworkers defend their mistakes, companies
should engage in "performance previews."

In other words, do what great supervisors have always done:
maintain a constant dialogue with coworkers to ensure everyone understands each
other's goals, objectives, and performance on an ongoing basis. In such
environments, termination is neither a surprise nor a humiliation - it is
merely the fulfillment of an agreement between responsible parties. The
coworker leaves knowing what went wrong and how to find a better fit at another
organization.

Just as with values violations, poor performers must be
terminated quickly. Do not live with a problem - whether you are motivated by
kindness, laziness or discomfort, your tolerance of poor performance hurts you,
the coworker and the organization. The longer you let it go on, the more damage
you do.

When you do your job well and maintain an environment of
accountability and transparency, firing people is easy. I did not say it's fun.
It certainly is not fun. But after hiring, it's the supervisor's greatest
responsibility to his or her coworkers.