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Make sure you’ve done your job
No matter how many people you’ve hired over the course of your career, you are going to make mistakes. But before you go right ahead and fire fast, you need to first identify why someone is not succeeding. Are they not succeeding because they’re not trying? Or are they not succeeding because they’re trying, they’re just not getting it right?
If they are just not trying, yeah, fire them quickly. Because every day that you allow someone who’s not trying to stay on your team, you are sending a message to everyone else in your team that it’s okay to not try. And that undermines the very culture that you presumably have invested so much time and energy trying to build.
But in the latter case, if they’re not succeeding because they’re trying and they just haven’t yet figured it out, that’s an opportunity for you to identify what is going wrong. Either you have not yet given them the tools required for them to succeed, or perhaps they’re just in the wrong role. I can’t count how many times I’ve had someone struggling in one role. But when I took the time to get to know them well enough, I recognized that their talents were more well-suited for a different role.
Make sure you’re investing the time and energy to get to know the people before you fire them because you might have a superstar on your team. You just haven’t done your job in putting them in the place where they can succeed.
Lay the groundwork for difficult conversations
Now how you fire someone is just as important if not more important than how you hire someone. No one should ever be surprised when you eventually have that last difficult conversation. If you’re leading with discipline and integrity, you’ve made very clear what your expectations are, and you’ve had multiple conversations where you make it very clear to that person that they aren’t living up to those expectations, and that they need to in order to continue being a part of the team.
When you finally sit down to let them go, you should have had that same conversation a couple times. You should have given them the opportunity to correct whatever behavior was being addressed. Now, whether they agree with the fact that they’re being fired or not, you can never control for that. But if you do your job well, they should never be surprised.