Compassionate Firing

Zen and the Art of HR. I love that title. It was coined by Mark Stelzner in 2008.  It reminds me that suffering and happiness can co-exist. The question is can we cultivate equanimity in our hearts and minds? Putting the “Human” back into Human Resources is a part of my path.

Compassion, and the phrase: “You’re Fired,” are typically not used in the same sentence. This year HRMargo started “HireFriday.” Today, I was thinking, what about the dreaded “Fire Friday?” What happens when an HR Executive knows that firing someone s/he likes is a foregone conclusion?

It’s one thing to terminate the employment of someone you don’t care about, it’s quite another to let someone go that you truly admire. The recession of 2009 displaced workers, good employees, men and women with families and young children, and mortgages to pay. It was a devastating period in our Nation’s history. Successful people had to close the doors to their businesses , and pull the plug on their dreams.

I learned in my first management position, never hire someone you cannot fire. This is what my Director told me when I was promoted into my first position of management. She taught me the tenants of human resources. We are human. We are fallible. We are hired, and sometimes we get fired.

During that period I had to fire people. It was a part of my job. I had strict legal guidelines that I followed.

That is not what this post is about. This post is not about legal policies or compliance. The purpose of this post is to engage in inquiry and reflection.

How do we fire someone, and still feel good about ourselves when we lay our head down on the pillow at night before we go to sleep? What do we think about on the way to work when we know we have to let someone go? How do we fire compassionately?

There’s a wide range of opinions of the topic. I’m interested in yours.

What is compassion? Compassion defined: “Compassion is a human emotion prompted by the pain of others. More vigorous than empathy, the feeling commonly gives rise to an active desire to alleviate another’s suffering. It is often, though not inevitably, the key component in what manifests in the social context as altruism. In ethical terms, the various expressions down the ages of the so-called Golden Rule embody by implication the principle of compassion: Do to others what you would have them do to you. [1]” (source: wikipedia.org).

Now, I pose the question: how do you keep compassion in your heart when you know that it is necessary to let someone go?

A penny for your thoughts.

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