Nobody should love firing people. If you enjoy terminations, that is its own problem and a different blog post.
But I have sat in these conversations with more owners and managers than I can count, and the far more common problem runs the other direction. Owners and managers who dread terminations so much that they simply do not do them. They know, sometimes for a year or more, that someone needs to go. And they wait. They hope the person improves on their own, or quits, or that the problem somehow ages out.
It never does. So let me make the case for something uncomfortable. You do not have to like terminations. You have to be okay with doing them when they are needed. And there is a way to lead that makes them rare, clean, and surprising to no one.
What Avoiding the Termination Actually Costs
When you keep someone who consistently cannot or will not do the job, you are not being kind. You are just moving the pain onto people who did nothing to earn it.
Your solid performers carry the extra load, and they know exactly why. Your standard quietly resets, because whatever you tolerate becomes the new bar. Your credibility as a leader erodes, because everyone sees the problem you are pretending not to see. And your best people, the ones with options, start taking recruiter calls. Underperformers almost never leave on their own. Top performers leave constantly, and they leave over this.
Here is the part almost nobody says out loud. Keeping someone in a job they are failing at is not kind to them either. You are spending years of their career letting them fail slowly in a seat that does not fit, instead of releasing them to find one that does. I have watched people land somewhere new and thrive after a termination that their old manager agonized over for two years. The delay helped no one.
A termination should never be a surprise. If your employee is shocked, you skipped the ten conversations that were supposed to come first.
The Real Secret: Terminations Are Decided Months Earlier
Managers think the termination is the hard part. It is not. The termination is just the last sentence of a story you have been writing for months. Whether that sentence lands clean or lands ugly depends entirely on the chapters before it.
The single best accountability tool ever invented is consistent, honest communication about performance. Not the annual review. Not the ambush meeting after the final straw. A steady rhythm of conversations where the employee always knows where they stand.
When you communicate consistently, one of two things happens, and both are wins. Either the person corrects course, and you never need the termination at all. Or they do not, and by the time the final conversation comes, they have heard the concern clearly, more than once, with real chances to fix it. There is no shock. There is no scene. Often, they saw it coming before you did.
What Consistent Communication Actually Looks Like
Hold the one-on-one every time, and talk about performance in it. Not just project status. Where they are strong, where they are short, and what good looks like next. If performance only comes up when something is wrong, feedback becomes a threat instead of information.
Give feedback within days, not quarters. Address the missed deadline this week, while everyone remembers it. Saving up six months of examples for one big meeting is not documentation. It is an ambush, and it makes you the villain in a story where you were right.
Be specific enough to act on. "You need to step it up" is not feedback. "Three of your last five orders shipped late, and here is the impact" is feedback. Specific problems have solutions. Vague problems just have anxiety.
Write it down as you go. A two-line note after each real conversation. This is not about building a case against someone. It is about being accurate and fair, and if the day ever comes, being ready without scrambling to reconstruct a year from memory.
Say the hard sentence out loud. When it gets serious, the employee deserves to hear it plainly: "If this does not change, your job is at risk." Managers skip this sentence because it is uncomfortable, and then the termination becomes a betrayal instead of a conclusion. One uncomfortable sentence buys an enormous amount of fairness.
When the Day Comes
If you have done the work above, the termination itself is short, calm, and respectful. You are not relitigating a year of performance. That already happened, in real time, when it could still have changed the outcome. You are simply delivering the conclusion both of you have watched approach.
Treat the person with dignity on the way out. Be direct, be brief, be human. How you terminate someone is watched by every employee who stays, and it tells them exactly what they can expect from you if their day ever comes.
Being okay with terminations does not make you cold. It makes you the kind of leader whose standards mean something, whose feedback can be trusted, and whose team never has to carry a problem you were too uncomfortable to solve. Do the talking early and often, and the hardest part of leadership gets as close to easy as it will ever get.
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