How I Fire People
The best teams I've ever worked for had this set of common traits:<p>1) On the offer day, potential employees were told there were high expectations and no fixed rules to govern what that meant. There was leniency in some cases, but manager/supervisor judgement was the only rule that mattered. No handbooks or rule sets.<p>2) All new team members were automatically assumed to be terminated within a month or so. This was usually true. Any new employee that didn't pull their weight, sat around waiting for someone to tell them what to do, or lied in any way was terminated.<p>3) Human mistakes (fat fingers, brain farts, etc.) were reprimanded internally but covered, responsibility-wise, by the manager or supervisor externally. (I got this treatment at least once a year...)<p>4) Repeated or dumb mistakes meant being terminated, usually within the same business day. (I saw this happen many times. Not fun but then again they were dumb or repeated mistakes.)<p>5) Lots of communication within the team. Supervisors and managers were always available or actively participating in the projects.<p>In other words, there were high expectations and they were strictly enforced, with nowhere to hide mistakes or divert responsibility. Or, more bluntly, "we want to work with adults, not children".<p>Sounds harsh perhaps, but these were the best teams I've ever worked for and no one who stayed for more than 6 months felt used, abused, or anything other than lucky to be working with fine people. When long-time employees left, it was to start their own businesses or go back to school and there were always a few tears in the parting days.<p>Now, if you read in some book or learned in a training course that you need to cover your butt legally at all times, give everyone plenty of chances to do the right thing, and take everybody's situation into consideration before taking disciplinary action, your teams are going to start sucking. Why? Because all of those things are the opposite of management. Those things are what you do to avoid management.<p>This whole article, to me, says "boy, it'd be so much easier to run this business if I didn't have to actually run this business". Here's a hint: If your strategy for managing a team or community or whatever is "people should do the right thing and we should give them every opportunity to do that", then your team's problems aren't actually your team's problems.