Humanity and profitability are not mutually exclusive. It is okay to talk to your people and treat them as people. Does it make termination or laying them off easier? Yes, if you broaden your approach from termination as the final solution, to seeing a range of solutions when you have a performance challenge in your team. The trouble is that many managers mistakenly believe it to be easier to terminate unsuccessful employees than to probe more deeply into the problem. That takes more work. However, in the long run it is not easier and in fact the automatic termination solution can be much more costly in the long run. First of all, looking to terminate a team member, as a first option does not say very much for the initial hiring decision. If you hire good people, then you will not need to let them go for poor performance issues. Secondly, every individual brings a certain set of talents and shortcomings. The particular combination in any one person may vary, but overall there will also be a tradeoff between talents and challenges. Therefore, if you fire a team member without first having made some attempt to get things turned around, then you run the risk of getting someone worse for the job. At best the next person will be as good, but with a different set of shortcomings that you will have to address as well. In other words, nothing has really changed very much. So, unless your team member actually refuses to implement your suggestions for improvement, it does not make a whole lot of sense to look for a reason to terminate at the first sign of a challenge. Wouldn’t you agree? In every individual you will have good and bad. The real questions are how bad is the “bad?” Can it be fixed? Is the person willing to fix it? What exactly is the challenge? In other words, you have to go a little deeper into the situation to find a proper solution.
Unfortunately, our current society tends to emphasize short term and face value. This encourages people not to look too deeply at anything including in management, business, and relationships. One of the results leads businesses to emphasize off sheet accounting, delayed revenue recognition etc. That focus gets away from the basic principle of financial efficiency and fiduciary responsibility. This is not unique to finance. It is a reflection of general cultural trends. However, these concepts are very instructive. They imply a deeper sense of commitment, responsibility, and appropriateness. Having an intuitive sense of these kind of character-oriented ideas, informs the decisions that are made. Will those decisions strengthen the parties involved making them richer, happier, or more secure in various ways? Or, are those decisions one-sided, misinformed, or imbalanced? The answer to these questions depends on the fundamental values involved.
