Leaders Have to Fire People

How to keep your humanity in a world of layoffs

Hey there 👋 Welcome to ✨ You Are The Product ✨, a monthly newsletter for product people becoming product leaders. Every month, I share my own and the experience of other product leaders, including material and advice to help you move up the career ladder and have fun while at it. Please like, share, and subscribe!

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I got my first job in tech while still in grad school. After over 50 applications, a lot of ghosting and many rejections, I finally landed a part-time gig in a tech company.

And I thrived. In mere months, my part-time student gig became a full-time job. They made me team lead. I dropped out of grad school, and there I was, 20-something and managing a team of 60 people. It was beyond anything I could have imagined.

“It’s Just Business”

Several months later, the company had decided to downsize, and I was asked to let go 50% of my team.

People I had worked with as peers, coworkers, and friends. And many more who I had hired.

I had three months to execute a redundancy plan that I had to develop on my own.

It was my first full-time job. I had never worked in tech before. I had no idea what the words “layoffs” and “redundancy” even meant.

Like many first-time leaders, I was thrown into the deep end without much guidance.

“They promoted me and then left me alone.”

Sound familiar? I hear this from product leaders often.

I had no idea what to do, but I knew that I wasn’t going to do it alone. So I organized a meeting with my team, sat everyone down, and told them the truth.

I told them that, while there was nothing I could do about the fact that some of them would lose their jobs, at the very least we could make the process fair and transparent.

Most of the work the team was doing was measurable, so we agreed to focus on a number of metrics that were the strongest indicators of performance and added clear value to the business.

But a lot of the work was research-based and included writing, tagging, and classification tasks that were subjective value judgments. Our QA process had included verification by an additional two or three team members. (For context, we were building training sets for machine learning experiments.) So we decided we would apply the same peer review mechanism to each other’s work.

Two or three peer reviewers would rate anonymous work. It was both transparent and ensured fairness.

I designed a dashboard showing overall team performance, which was public, and individual performance dashboards for all team members, which we reviewed in one-on-one meetings.

Tears, Thank Yous, and Truths

Although this was the best possible version of events, it still sucked.

My first big call as a leader was to choose which 30 of my friends and colleagues to fire.

One person cried. Many said thank you. One person was upset for a while. But no one was mistreated.

We spoke to each other at eye-level, and every decision was based on data, peer review, and supervisor feedback. Everyone received a performance assessment and was shown where they stood compared to the rest of the team, with reasons why they were chosen to be let go clearly and explicitly spelled out.

Leaders have to fire people.

Those of you becoming product leaders should be made aware of this.

It’s not always possible to fire people quite so transparently and openly as in my story.

I use the word fire because we try to mask the truth about this by calling them layoffs, redundancies, downsizing, etc.

At the time, this seemed like the most awful thing I would ever have to do. The truth is, I would see much worse over the course of my career.

In this scenario, I was given full authority and control over the process.

I had three months to develop and execute a redundancy plan for the team I was running.

I could ask for help internally, and I did run my plan by people for a sanity check, even if it was me who had to do the dirty deed at the end of the day. Luckily, they were overwhelmingly supportive of my plan.

In most other circumstances, layoffs happen quickly, you have a limited amount of time to make big decisions, and you don’t always have editorial control of the messaging and the process.

Nothing will prepare you for it. It will suck every single time.

But you will become better at communicating to your team about it. And managing your management to ensure that the process is handled the right way.

How to Fire People

As practical advice goes, this is not my favorite to give. But it’s important we talk about it because it makes all the difference in the world.

Communication

Your employees deserve to know why you are firing some of them. This is not a time to mince your words or beat around the bush.

Layoffs are a failure of leadership, but the unfortunate truth is that it’s rarely leaders who are affected by them. There is a cognitive dissonance in that. Some companies are able to look inwardly and realize that it’s really a change in leadership that they need. But in most cases, it’s the same leaders who would need to change who are the ones deciding on layoffs.

As a product leader, you might find yourself in the position to execute on this decision.

This might be a good time for you to revisit whether your company is still the right fit for you. Does it have a future? Are layoffs a symptom of a greater problem?

The hard truth is that firing people can help turn around a business. As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve seen it happen.

Tech has been growing like mad for more than a decade, and we’ve made companies bloated and inefficient.

At the same time, your job is to look at the organization and its design.

As a product leader, you regularly find yourself in the situation to structure teams, move folks around, realign their work around product strategy.

Objectively speaking, this is no different. It’s a realignment of team structure based on strategy.

So approaching this task should start with strategy, the circumstances of your business and the market you find yourself in, and then trickle down onto org design.

You should consider individual ability, past performance, importance for your culture (because culture bearers are vital employees), and do your best to understand and account for further potential attrition (i.e., which people may choose to leave because someone got fired).

Never keep your team in the dark, and make sure that you are communicating what’s going on throughout.

Of course, you won’t have the luxury to discuss individual decisions, but don’t keep your team waiting for weeks. In most cases, you won’t have the luxury of months on end to decide what to do. At best, you’ll have a couple of weeks. At worst, days.

Compassion

Don’t be confused by the corporate speak: we are talking about human beings with private lives, families, dreams, hopes, and fears, and you should never forget that not only your employees, but also their dependents will be affected by your decisions.

Approach your people with compassion, kindness, and solidarity.

We are all workers in the corporate meat grinder, and our destinies are intertwined.

Beyond that, we are all human beings who have ourselves been fired and gone through tough times. At least most of us have.

Some leaders choose to behave like automatons and detach from their feelings because this is in many ways a traumatic event for all parties involved. But what that does is both damaging to employees and leaders alike.

I advise you to sit down one-on-one not just with the people made redundant, but also with everyone on your team and explain what is going on — throughout.

Keep talking, as much as you need to.

Meet regularly and often, and create many opportunities for people to express their feelings.

Accept that some of this will hurt. There will be vitriol, anger, disappointment, and sadness.

You need to accept that, and you need to be prepared to handle that.

Some schools of thought on this argue that it’s better to limit communication and provide only a selection of forums in which to discuss things. Some leaders prefer to make a quick cut and move on.

But layoffs have an extremely detrimental effect on morale, performance, retention, and a host of other company success and employee experience metrics. Great leaders do not underestimate the cost this bears.

So do your best to help your team air out their feelings, vent, and collectively heal. Don’t ignore the psychology of this situation in order to avoid conflict.

Care

Giving someone bad news is best done directly and without hesitation.

Sit down one-on-one, tell them what the decision is, and explain why.

Give them a chance to process the information, and offer to answer questions.

Accept that some people will react badly. Accept that some people will react really badly.

Do not lose your temper.

Do not raise your voice.

Do not moralize or become judgmental.

Be kind, be compassionate, and offer your help. Write them a recommendation, share their profile with your network, advise them on their next step. Offer mentorship or coaching.

This may all depend on your previous relationship. If you’re firing a person you would have fired otherwise, this may be harder for you. But try to look at it from their perspective.

This works entirely on a case-by-case basis, of course. You also need to be comfortable with anything you want to offer.

Some people will reject every offer. And that’s OK. Don’t force anything on anyone.

This isn’t about you.

But you are allowed to acknowledge that you have feelings about it, too. So reach out to your peers to talk about it. Don’t ignore how it makes you feel.

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Now take a deep breath.

I know, this was not a pleasant text to read. It wasn’t perfectly pleasant to write either.

But it’s the truth. Leaders have to fire people.

And to become a leader, you have to be prepared for all that that means.

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