Make the hard decision
The toughest thing I have had to do is to make personnel changes. It is hard. Even after you have done it many times. It impacts people’s lives. But it needs to be done.
As a leader, you need to balance the needs of the employees, the customers and the shareholders. If an employee is causing imbalance in the needs of any of your stakeholders, you have to take action. Sometimes it results in asking people to leave.
It is difficult to ask people to leave not just because it is hard on them and you. It is disruptive to the company as well. These decisions are not to be taken lightly. But I have found that letting people go for the right reasons is always the right thing to do, for both the employee and the company. The employee moves to a place more aligned with their values and skills. The company opens up opportunities for new talent, or an opportunity for someone else to take the role.
These are the reasons that often mandate changes. You owe it to the employees to give feedback and give them an opportunity to improve. But if they do not, you need to balance the needs of other employees and shareholders in the decision.
- Lack of culture fit: This means not living up to the values of the company.
- Marching to their own beat: This is very often a good thing — you want disruptive thinking that can open new ways of doing things. But someone who insists on doing things their own way after decisions have been made is hurting the rest of the team.
- Not meeting commitments on a regular basis: This means not delivering value for our shareholders and customers. This could be a skills or a commitment mismatch
A common — and completely misplaced, IMO — concern is that a person has so much knowledge that they cannot be replaced. This has never been true in my experience. First, you need to make sure that you do not get to this place by rotating engineers to new roles regularly. Secondly, engineers who build a fortress around their code such that no one knows whats happening inside are playing a dangerous game of isolating knowledge. Don’t let that happen. If it does, you will find that getting rid of the gatekeeper will help tremendously in making the design and code better.
