The challenges of dismissing an employee

In today's episode, Mattias talks about a quite hushed-up topic: dismissing employees.
He shares how he is having these challenging conversations and explains how he is dealing with toxic people at the workplace.

Learning by doing

Mattias starts off by saying that he wished he would have known more about the sensitive topic of how to let people go at the beginning of his journey. On the other hand, he explains that this is something you cannot simply read a book about. You need to grow with it along the way and collect your own experiences.

For him there are three common reasons why people need to leave an organization:

1. Not a good culture fit
2. Not the right fit for the role
3. Performance issues on the company's side

Understanding different people

He also adds that how you are dealing with dismissing people is heavily influenced by the location you're running your business. Mattias needs to deal with a certain situation completely differently than e.g. his colleagues in the United States. This is due to the different employment laws every country has. In Sweden for instance, the employment laws are always in the favor of the employee. This can make it very hard for Mattias to handle certain situations because you basically only have a timeframe of six months (trial period) to find out if someone is the right fit. In most (sane) cases there is a mutual understanding that employee and employer might not be the best fit and both sides agree on ending their collaboration at this point.

Challenges with less”sane” events

There are cases though where people show their real faces after the first six months in the work relationship - at a point where it is legally quite hard for Mattias to do something. These are usually the "not so sane" cases where the employee lacks self-awareness and might even have a manipulative nature. Those people know many different tricks and will eventually gaslight you causing you to doubt your own memory or perception. This can cause a dangerous conflict with your own intuition.

Overcoming fears

Mattias also shares how back in the day the thing he was scared of the most were the consequences of firing a manipulative person like this. He was afraid of them going behind his back and trying to turn everyone else against him. However, by time he realized that most people have a tremendous "bullshit radar", as he calls it. The majority of people can very well detect lies and manipulative behavior and this is nothing you should fear. Afterall you have to make a decision for everyone's best in your organization and protect your team by removing toxic people from the workplace.

Mattias also shares some tips about how he handles both the sane in the less sane cases when having to dismiss an employee:

1. Trust your own intuition
2. Listen (try the other's person perspective and situation)
3. Don't over prepare things (you cannot predict another person's behavior anyways)
4. Document (e.g. email after the conversation)
5. Involve someone you can trust (an objective person from outside the organization)
6. Keep your cool

💡 EPISODE TAKE AWAY
1. Trust your own intuition
2. Listen (try the other's person perspective and situation)
3. Don't over prepare things (you cannot predict another person's behavior anyways)
4. Document (e.g. email after the conversation)
5. Involve someone you can trust (an objective person from outside the organization)
6. Keep your cool

Which challenges have you faced when dismissing someone?