In small, family owned businesses, or those that have grown from family roots, the issue of nepotism and performance is a delicate one. Dealing with a poor performing or downright incompetent family member who also is an employee is doubly difficult. Then there is the question of how they got in that spot—or perhaps more important, who put them (or promoted them) into a position in which they were ill prepared to succeed.
Firing people is no fun at all—at least it shouldn’t be—but it is necessary. Often, the person who gets fired feels relief even if their ego is damaged, because they go home each night and usually know that they are not performing well enough. Sometimes getting fired is like a reprieve that can give a person a chance to start anew and build a happy, productive new work life. Let’s take these topics one at a time
First, don’t hire close relatives into the business. It is seldom good business practice and creates more problems than it fixes. If or when you do, don’t treat them any better—or worse—than you would any other employee. The same rules apply to them as to everyone else.
I recall one time in my career that I waived my own rule against hiring close relatives, and hired an engineer who was married to our general accounting manager. He did fine at first, but then we made the typical mistake. We took this competent engineer and promoted him to a supervisory position, for which he had no preparation and for which we gave him no training.
Now we have compounded problems. We realize that the man is clearly failing as a supervisor and our choices are lousy: we can demote him back to an engineering role or we can fire him and risk the ire of his wife, who is one of our star performers in another area.
We ultimately fired the guy. We did it the right way—left him his dignity and a small severance package—and he took it pretty well. Why? Because he knew he was not doing the job and was miserable.
His wife actually thanked us for taking him off the hook. She confirmed that he had misgivings about taking the supervisory job, since he’d never done that before, but he wanted the status and extra pay grade that came with the promotion. Bad moves–on his part and, especially, on our part.
Hiring relatives is fraught with peril. Almost the same can be true of hiring close friends. Good friends are harder to find than employees. Remember that. And with relatives, you can seldom be truly objective. Even when you are, other employees still doubt that you have been. You very quickly put yourself between a rock and a hard place.
The worst outcome is when under-performing or downright incompetent relatives are kept in place. This demoralizes the entire organization doing untold harm.
Second, if you think you want to promote that star individual performer into a supervisory or managerial spot, spend some time on testing and see if their personal makeup will fit that kind of job. Then invest time in training them to understand the different nature of such a job. The primary difference is that instead of relying solely on their own talents and hard work, now they must organize and direct the efforts of others, including delegation of work.
Smart companies create separate ladders so the skilled specialists and individual contributors can be compensated better and rewarded for their contributions without the reward being a one-way ticket to the wrong job on the way to the unemployment line.
Finally, don’t be too reluctant or wait too long to fire someone especially when they are performing miserably. But do make sure they have been told about the problems with their performance—at least twice—in a clear way. There may be some extenuating circumstances you don’t know about, that if remedied, would allow you to save a good employee.
When you finally decide to fire someone, keep it short and make it about the job and performance, and not about them or what kind of person they are. Leave them intact, with their dignity as a person, to restart their life anew. After all, they probably know better than anyone how lost they are in that job, and they might just surprise you.
I always recall one of the first people I had to fire. She was a very nice, pleasant, hard-working young woman—who messed up nearly everything she touched. She was a customer service rep, so her foul-ups really hurt. When I told her we were going to terminate her, she took a deep breath—I thought to myself, here come the tears. Her next words, as she exhaled, were “Thank you! Thank you so much. I am so relieved. I know I have been messing everything up, but I didn’t want to be ‘a quitter’.”
That is a lesson I have never forgotten. Always remember that it takes two errors to create a failed employee: an employee who doesn’t perform in the job, and the supervisor who put them in a position to fail. Take that responsibility to heart, because I’m convinced that the cause of failures and firings is the management error at least as often as it is a poorly performing person.