Thinking Through the Difficult Decision to Terminate a Team Member

Making the decision to expel a team member is never easy. 

Because they are good people who want to be fair, most leaders agonize over the decision, doing their best to find reasons to avoid firing a long-standing colleague. 

Open-and-shut cases where termination is the obvious answer are relatively rare. Instead, most dismissals require weighing one or more events or outcomes and making the call that is best for everyone involved. 

Deciding what constitutes a good reason for letting a colleague go is a lot more complicated than those looking from the outside can appreciate. 

Generally speaking, there are four primary reasons why a leader would consider terminating a team member:

• Underperformance 

• Bad judgment 

• Misconduct or compliance violation

• Culture disruption

Stated another way, leaders cannot sit idly by while a team member consistently fails to meet job expectations despite feedback and support, repeatedly makes bad decisions that negatively affect results or the team, engages in inappropriate behavior that violates the enterprise’s policies, or disrupts the team dynamic by refusing to embrace the values and norms central to the culture. 

What makes the decision to terminate so difficult is not only that most team members make a valuable contribution in other areas, but that typically none of the reasons for dismissal are so blatantly bad as to warrant an immediate call. No wonder leaders are so torn about when to push people off the team. 

One way to clarify the decision is to consider how many of the four primary reasons for termination exist for a given team member, even if only partially so. The premise is that any team member who exhibits more than one reason at the same time should likely be shown the door.

For instance, take a team member who has been a low performer and now engages in a wrongful action that violates the company’s policies. While neither the low performance nor the compliance violation perfectly constitutes the strongest argument for termination, the fact that both reasons exist at the same time should tip the scales. 

Any time more than one of the four critical reasons for termination exists, a leader should use this as a signal that the time has come to make the tough call. 

Good leaders do their best to keep everyone on the team fully engaged, rowing in the same direction, and performing to their highest potential. Unfortunately, not everyone on the team always does what they need to maintain their valuable status as a colleague. 

In those cases when termination is a decision on the table, the best leaders look for multiple reasons to make the hard call. Black-and-white decisions regarding termination are the exception. 

Thinking through the need to dismiss a team member is rarely uncomplicated. Team members who give leaders multiple reasons for termination make the decision a bit more straightforward.