Hiring Slowly, Firing Kindly
Two of the hardest lessons of four decades in business, and why most companies get both of them wrong.
Most of the mistakes I have watched companies make, over the course of a long career, are variations on the same two mistakes. They hired too quickly. They fired too late.
Hiring slowly is not about being fussy. It is about being honest. Every person you bring into a small company changes it. Not slightly. Fundamentally. The culture of a fifteen-person team is the fifteen people on it. The sixteenth person is not an addition. They are a rewriting.
If you would not, in a difficult month, want this person in the room with you, do not hire them in a good month. The good months end. The person remains.
Firing kindly is the harder discipline. Most leaders, faced with a decision they know they must take, delay it. They tell themselves they are being patient. They are being cowardly. Delay is not kind. Delay is only kind to the person delaying.
The kind thing is to be clear, early, in private. To give someone the truth of where they stand while there is still time for them to act on it. To make the transition, when it comes, dignified rather than dramatic.
Hire slowly. Fire kindly. Do both, and you will be a rarer kind of leader than you think.
