I Hate Wussy Managers

There is a saying in business that you should always put someone between you and the problem.  And while that is a good management principal in terms of solutions, it is not an excuse to have someone else do what you should be doing.  

I meet many people who have been terminated.  Most of these people tell me that the deed has been done by human resources or a creative manager, not by the person they reported to..  In many cases the people doing the termination were people not previously known.  I find that appalling. 

While terminating employees is never pleasant or easy, it should never be done by a stranger.  Yes, I know a lot of human resource people think it is there job and most managers don’t want to do this as part of their job either, so it gets delegated to HR.  But that does not make it right. I have met executives who have been terminated after ten years or longer working for the same person, but that person was too much of a wuss to do it themselves so they delegated the deed to a stranger. And, to make it worse, they then avoid the terminated person.  

Part of being a manager is to face up to the fact that all aspects of management are not pleasant.  But for goodness sakes, if someone works for you, the least you can do is have a personal conversation with them, even if that conversation is unpleasant.  It just comes with the territory of being a manager.

Now there are cases, and I have heard about many of them, where human resources does the deed even before the manager of the person being let go knows that the person working for them is being let go.  That is equally appalling.  When that happens, the company is being merely expeditious and not very caring.

Delegation of negative jobs is not limited to terminations.  It also happens with negative evaluations which are often delivered by HR rather than the true evaluator. 

It is acceptable for the manager and the human resources person to do this together, but barely.  I understand that sometimes this is done to insure that there is proper communications of the event.  However, I find two on one, although acceptable, to be unnecessary and unfair, especially if the person being told the bad news barely knows the HR person.

When I ran account management, I always took the position that if someone worked for me, they needed to be given bad news by me and not a stranger.

The sign of a leader is to accept the responsibility for what has to be done.