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I fired my real estate agent last week. Non-performance.
Just before I called her, I got nervous. My breathing quickened and became a bit shallow, my palms got a little sweaty. She had sold us this house eight years ago, she lives in my small town...I've known her for a while.
But for five months I've gotten nothing from her. It's not just that my house hasn't sold, there hasn't been a sniff. She almost never calls. Seldom stays in touch. And when I asked her the plan to turn things around she had none.
So, I decided to fire her.
But how to do it? I thought that maybe I could just shoot her a text. That would be easy. Or email her. Or leave a message at her office. Anything, but talk to her personally. I felt squeamish, no doubt.
A Florida restaurant owner was squirming similarly, I suppose...
Gregory Kennedy decided a few weeks ago that he needed to shut his store down. On the Fourth of July, at least twelve employees of Barducci's Italian Bistro in Winter Park, Florida received a text message that the restaurant was closing and they had been fired.
Yes, fired over a holiday...by text message.
There was no notice. The restaurant was immediately shut down. As you might guess, the employees were hurt and resentful.
Certainly businesses come and businesses go. Some make it, some don't. I'm sure Kennedy would not have shut the place down unless he had to.
It's a very tough thing to look one's employees in the eyes and admit failure. It's tough to tell them that you're going to have to let them go. There is no question that I would have lost a lot of sleep leading up to that conversation.
It can be brutally tough to see disappointment and/or hurt rise on another human being's face, knowing especially that you are the cause of it.
So our tendency is to avoid these situations at all costs. We duck issues we should face head on, and we withhold conversations that we owe.
But at some point, as leaders, we've got to put the big boy pants on. We need to show people the respect they deserve and have the conversation.
What's in it for you? Well, if you want to look at it that way, think of this: If you show respect to people on the way out the door, they are less resentful, less likely to retaliate and more likely to want to work for you again down the road should you need them.
Never burn a bridge.
In the case of my real estate agent, everything in me wanted to avoid that conversation. My stomach did its gesticulating flips. But I knew that if I acted on the thoughts flitting through my mind, I would be a coward of the first order. I would have deserved her disdain.
I also knew that, no matter how poor her performance, she deserved the respect of a personal conversation.
So I made the call. It was unpleasant as expected...but I made the call. | 
