Taking Some of the Sting Out of a Dismissal

Badly handled firings can be devastating to employees and damaging to employers. It pays to let people go with integrity and sensitivity.

By I. PERRIN WESTON, Special to The Times
Sunday, December 17, 2000

No one enjoys getting fired, but a bungled dismissal creates more than hurt feelings.

Bad firings are bad business, say labor lawyers and workplace consultants. At worst, a bad firing can lead to lawsuits, sabotage and even the statistically rare workplace homicide. At best, a poorly managed dismissal can devastate morale among remaining employees.

Becky Boyd still feels the pain, shock and humiliation of her firing in 1999 from a software development firm in Roswell, Ga. Before joining the company, Boyd had been with Hewlett-Packard for 13 years.

"It sticks in my head," she said. "My boss walked into my office and said, 'This is bad, give me your keys. I am going to escort you out of the building.' "

Boyd returned to collect her boxed possessions at a designated hour the next afternoon, along with seven co-workers who were laid off the same day. Most of the remaining employees were sent home early to isolate them from the fired workers. Boyd recalls that there was a man changing the locks.

"We felt like criminals," she said. "It was devastating. I've always been a valued employee, loved by my staff and clients, but I started questioning myself: Maybe I am a bum, maybe I'm not a good worker. I always believed people got fired from their positions because they were not good, reliable, honest workers. I was all of those."

Bad firings can come back to haunt employers.

Santa Monica risk management author James Walsh, in his book "Rightful Termination" (Silver Lake Publishing, 1997), recounts the firing of James Censullo, a sales manager for Brenka Video in New England.

Censullo took a week off to stay with his hospitalized newborn son, who was undergoing lifesaving surgery. When he asked his supervisor for additional post-operative time off, Censullo was told to "straighten out his priorities" and consider "whether it would be better to suffer one loss or two."

He was fired that day by telegram for poor performance. He sued for wrongful termination and was awarded $73,000 in damages and $250,000 for emotional distress by a sympathetic jury.

"Some employers revel in coldheartedness, but in the context of human resources it doesn't serve any purpose," said Walsh, a former insurance industry consultant.

"The rule of thumb when firing is [to] say as little as possible. Avoid any gratuitous criticism or slights, and avoid venting. It's not relevant."

The Censullo case may be an extreme example of insensitivity, not to mention ineptness, in the termination process. In fact, as Walsh pointed out, "there seemed to be no process at all." But routine insensitivity can be just as damaging.

These are firings that are handled remotely (by e-mail, voicemail or any other kind of mail), without dignity (the armed escort) or, in the case of large layoffs, with the courtesy and notice afforded cattle being herded to slaughter.

Then there are the small indecencies, such as getting fired on a Friday afternoon by a stranger after 22 years of service or being invited to lunch by a boss who fires you after dessert. And there is the insidious practice of developing a negative file against an employee in good standing whom, for whatever reason, a company wants to dismiss.

Neal Lenarsky runs his own executive placement consulting firm in Burbank and has managed employee relations for major corporations, including Walt Disney Co. and PepsiCo. During his career, Lenarsky has had to fire individuals and entire divisions.

"I was compared to the angel of death, because I decided who lived and who died," Lenarsky said. "Once I had to fire the man who mentored me in my career, and we were close. He said, 'How can you even look at yourself in the mirror again?' "

The answer is to fire people with as much integrity as possible. Almost universally, workplace consultants say this means firing people face-to-face, offering outplacement services whenever possible, providing a decent severance package and having human resources stay in touch with the former employee while they job hunt.

The invested time and expense helps diffuse any hostility felt by the departing employee, and it sends a reassuring message to remaining employees. Most people sense a dismissal is coming and have a "fight-or-flight" decision to make, Lenarsky said. Those who stay and fight usually end up fired.

"They are 'managed out' over several months while the boss works on documentation and creating a rationale for a justified firing," Lenarsky said. "These manage-out situations are designed to protect the company from future lawsuits, and they are a sham. The employee has already been fired. He just doesn't know it."

Rather than subjecting people to this charade, Lenarsky believes employers should be honest. "Why not tell someone it isn't working out and give them three months to tie up loose ends and find a new job?" Lenarsky said. "It doesn't take any longer than managing out, and it allows the person to exit the company with their dignity intact. I've seen employers manage their terminations this way, and it works. But it takes courage."

Though honesty is nice, Sally Haver, vice president of Ayers Group, a human resources consulting firm in Manhattan, said ruthless is sometimes the only way to go.

"We deal with a lot of people working in secured areas with their hands on the guts of the IT system for the company," Haver said. In those cases, whether a company is firing one person or a group, Haver has her clients "orchestrate and choreograph firings like a dance. The boss calls and says, 'Have Joe Jones come up to my office.' As soon as the elevator door closes on him, his computer is shut down and his access to the main system is cut off."

Though aggressive tactics may be necessary in the technology sector, Haver said, they are not called for in most other professions, such as publishing. "What's the person going to do?" she said. "Rip up the cover art? Destroy the only existent manuscript?"

Some managers and supervisors botch firings not because they are unfeeling, but because they feel terrible about delivering the bad news. Like a deserting spouse, they find it much easier to leave a note on the coverlet and run.

"Firing by e-mail or voicemail is horrible, but people do it because they are miserable and embarrassed to deliver the message," Haver said. "They don't want to own the act, so they weasel out from the responsibility of the decision."

Haver, whose responsibilities often include accompanying managers and supervisors to meetings in which mass layoffs are announced, said some fall apart under the pressure.

"I was with one manager who broke down and wept like a baby because he was about to walk into a room and lay off dozens of workers he'd known for years," she said. "He said these were good folks, but not that employable."

The reasons people are fired have changed during the two decades Haver has been counseling employers and human resource professionals.

"Firing used to be about misconduct issues, bad performance and embezzlement," Haver said. "Now we have situations like this one Wall Street financial service firm that is doing fabulously, but downsized in the middle of summer to drive up their profit margins so they would look good compared to a competitor."

Jim Redeker, chairman of the employment services practice group at the Philadelphia-based law firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen, said most employers get into trouble because they fail to follow their own termination policies.

They fumble an investigation or they discharge employees in a manner that juries find callous or demeaning.

In one reported case, a Rawson, Colo., Sears store manager was awarded $10 million for damages and $5 million in pain and suffering "because the jury found the employer's investigation prior to his termination to be insulting and in utter disregard for the guy's feelings," Redeker said. "He ended up with security escorting him out of the store in front of employees and customers."

Though this illustrates a consequence for offensiveness in firing, Redeker said there are no laws in most jurisdictions that require an employer to be fair, or even civil, when discharging a worker.

He points to people who have traded in secure careers to join Internet start-ups on the promise of a fortune in stock options, which evaporate when they are downsized or the business goes belly-up.

"What's tragic with the 'dot-coms' is employers have sold people such a vision of a wonderful future and then these dreams are just dashed," Redeker said.

"[But] they knew they were taking risks," he said. "What really gets me are the guys that order layoffs of hundreds and hundreds of people just because they want a good balance sheet. I'm picking up the pieces for a company right now that bought the assets of another company in bankruptcy.

The prior owner just bled every bit of working capital he could out of that company, and when he bled it of everything he could, he declared bankruptcy, shut the doors and left the creditor holding the pot."

Damian Birkel is the founder of Professionals in Transition, a North Carolina nonprofit support group for the unemployed, and co-author of "Career Bounce-Back: The Professionals in Transition Guide to Recovery & Reemployment" (Amacom, 1997).

Birkel launched the group in his Winston-Salem home after he was fired from his sales and marketing job in 1992. His dismissal came after seven promotions in as many years.

"To be more precise, I went from being rated 'outstanding' to 'unsatisfactory' in 90 days and the only thing that changed was my boss," Birkel said.

Loosely based on the Alcoholics Anonymous model, the support group is a place where members can discuss their feelings about unemployment and can network.

While researching his book, Birkel developed a theory that job loss mirrors the grieving process of the terminally ill described by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her classic book "On Death and Dying."

He wrote Kubler-Ross about his idea, and soon they were talking over home-baked bread and coffee in the kitchen of her Virginia home.

"She told me a loss is a loss," Birkel said. "It doesn't matter if it's a loved one or a job, the experience is the same."

What to Do After You're Fired

Getting fired is a shock to the system, even when you sense it is coming. If the termination comes as a total surprise, the trauma is that much worse. At a time when terminations and massive layoffs come with little warning, it pays to consider how to handle the situation should you be summoned to that meeting upstairs.

Damian Birkel and Stacey Miller, coauthors of "Career Bounce-Back," offer these tips:

1. Don't burn your bridges. Suppress the urge to tell your boss exactly what you think of him and his company. This may feel good in the heat of the moment, but it lacks dignity and it may well harm your professional reputation.

2. Stay calm. Keep in mind that the termination meeting is frequently uncomfortable for the person doing the firing. Use this to your advantage. Seize the moment to barter the conditions governing your exit. Chances are the boss is eager to bring your mutual association to a dignified close because it makes an unpleasant chore easier.

3. Take your time. Don't sign anything until you've had a chance to digest it. Don't settle for the first severance package offer. If your employer wants you to leave amicably without stirring the waters too much, then you might have true bargaining power despite company policy.

4. Leave quietly. Rather than submit to the humiliation of being escorted from the building by security, request permission to pack your belongings under supervision after hours or on a weekend.

5. Prepare for a soft landing. Come up with a simple, plausible explanation for leaving your company to offer at job interviews and negotiate with your former boss to back the story. Many employers are agreeable to this, if for no other reason than to avoid a lawsuit.

6. Keep some doors open. Take the time to thank people who helped you at your old job; they might be the key to your future success.

Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times