“Hire slow, fire fast” is common advice, but in practice, most leaders struggle to follow this advice. Typically, leaders are in a rush to fill open roles, and then they hang on to struggling employees for too long.
Whether a manager is backfilling a current position or creating a new one, leaving the position open can feel costly because it slows down progress toward operating goals. So, making the hire feels urgent.
This urgency often causes managers to settle for the best candidate they have found so far, rather than waiting until they find a great hire. Then, the new hire underperforms, and this underperformance is even more costly for the company than the open position was.
However, rather than taking swift action, most managers either take no action or are slow to act. There are three ways this happens:
1. For newer managers, the challenge can be that they do not realize when it is necessary to fire a person.
2. The manager may realize that the new hire is struggling, but will delude themselves that the problems aren’t so bad or that, with time, they can train and fix the person.
3. The manager realizes that they have made a mistake but is hesitant to act.
Throughout my career, I have succumbed to all three of these traps and have seen many others do the same. Why is this problem so pervasive? Managing people is a personal and emotional task. History is full of examples of great leaders making bad decisions because their emotions clouded their judgment.
In this case, we seek to avoid the emotional pain of:
a) admitting that you made a hiring mistake
b) thinking about the pain you will inflict on the affected individual to be fired, and
c) going backwards — reverting to an empty position that needs to be filled.
While coaching and mentoring can be helpful, they cannot transform someone’s fundamental weaknesses or flaws into strengths. When the manager finally does fire the person and fills the role with a strong performer, the conclusion is always the same: “I should have acted sooner.”
To hire slowly at Amazon, we used the Bar Raiser process (and they still use it to this day). I have written extensively about the process in other posts so that I won’t go into depth here. The Bar Raiser process addresses the three deadly biases inherent in any hiring process: personal bias, confirmation bias, and the bias of urgency.
When it comes to firing fast, the first step is to nail the two fundamental skills of people management:
1. Clearly document and communicate the responsibilities and goals to your direct reports
2. Deliver clear, real-time, actionable feedback in weekly 1:1s.
When these are done right, both parties are clear on where things stand and what needs to improve. But even when managers do this, they may still resist firing someone who’s not performing because of the emotional toll and sunk cost fallacy.
(cont. in comments)
