The Hardest Person To Fire

The hardest person to fire is the one who is good.

Not good at the wrong things. Good. Hits the numbers. Shows up early. Does not complain. Reviews always clean. Long tenure. The team likes them. The clients like them. And yet, something is off. They feel unhappy and unfulfilled.

And they may be slowly killing your company.

Performance is not the same as fit. They are doing a job well.

This is the trap. Most leaders cannot fire a high performer. We have been trained our whole careers to chase performance. Quarterly numbers. KPIs. Etc. Performance is what we measure, so performance is what we protect.

But the question is not "are they performing." The question is three layers deeper. Do they get the seat. Do they want the seat. Do they have the capacity to do the seat.

Get it. Want it. Capacity. This is a concept borrowed from EOS.

Good people fail every one of those three tests and stay in the seat for years, because no one could name what they were watching. The numbers were fine. The optics were fine. The seat was wrong.

When you finally have the conversation, it does not feel like firing a bad employee. It feels like betraying a friend. Because in every way the org chart measures, they are not the problem.

You are the problem. You put them in the wrong seat. You kept them there because they were comfortable to keep. You called it loyalty.

The kindest thing you can do for someone in the wrong seat is to tell them. Early. Plainly. Before the team has to work around them. Before they hit fifteen years in a role that was never going to fit and they have nowhere to land.

Most people in the wrong seat already know. They just need a leader honest enough to say it out loud, and humble enough to admit they put them there.

Don’t settle. Be relentless.

— Hunter