When is it time to fire an executive?

Sometimes when I’m mentoring an earlier-career founder/CEO, I cover a topic and think “I must have written a blog post about this, or a chapter of Startup CEO or CXO or Boards, in the past…” and then am shocked to discover later on that I haven’t. This topic is one of those topics, which came up in a recent conversation, and since sometimes the top-of-mind answer is the best one, I thought I’d recount it here.

Let’s say things aren’t going well in a specific area of your company. Maybe even things have started going worse on a new leader’s watch. How do you know if it’s time to fire the leader? Worse – how do you deal with the nagging feeling that the root cause of the problem could be something else (e.g., a product problem, not a sales problem, or vice versa). Even worse – how do you deal with the nagging feeling that “maybe New Leader knows more than I do, after all, I’m 26, and she’s 50!”

Here’s a simple framework that may help guide your thinking, in priority order. You need a “yes” to all three to NOT fire the person.

First, does the person have the functional expertise and the depth of experience required to do the job? First pass filter – is the raw capability there?, or is this actually just a hiring mistake? If the answer here is no, admit your mistake and fire the person immediately.

If the answer to that question is yes, then the next question to ask is, does the person have enough self awareness to acknowledge that he or she might not be doing a good job? Ask the person to write up a one-pager on why X happened, or why X isn’t going to plan, and see what you get back. If the answer is a list of excuses or complaints about other people or teams or market conditions and nothing else, you have a problem that you should probably deal with by firing the person. If the list is at least balanced by, or even largely a list of things that he or she could do better, the person has enough self-awareness to not fire them, as long as the next condition is met, you are in good shape.

The final question is, is the person coachable, interested in learning, full of intellectual curiosity? Or does the person think he or she has all the answers? Make some suggestions…see what the response is! There’s a world of difference between an argument, a sigh, and crossed arms and, well, anything else.

If you get a yes to the trifecta, proceed with feedback and coaching. If you get a big no at any point along the way, it’s probably time to say goodbye. I didn’t even get a chance to talk about firing for cultural fit reasons above, but you can probably modify the process above for that as well.

Final point – one saying I’ve come to appreciate more and more as my career has gone on is “you never fire someone too soon.” If your instinct, backed up by some thinking and facts, is that Person X is the problem, then Person X is probably the problem. As they say in a number of different contexts, the best time to deal with the problem is to never have hired the person in the first place. The second best time is today.

Also note that this post explicitly doesn’t address firing an executive when there’s a cultural mismatch. That’s a different topic, and an extremely important one. I’ve written about it here and there over the years, probably most usefully in this post called Top Three Mistakes Early Stage Founders Make.