Mark C. Crowley, a Twitter “colleague” of mine, recently tweeted this:

Have the #courage to weed out employees who make everyone around them miserable. Let go of the non-collaborators & employees no one trusts. In truth, there’s much #heart in this: It honors & supports the majority people who live your values every day. #Culture #LeadFromTheHeart

I agree 100% with him. Leadership is about making tough decisions for the good of the whole team. If you don’t weed the misery-producing people out, the rest of your team will lose respect for you because you tolerate the bad behavior. Keeping the negative or non-collaborating person shows you care more for the negative person than for the team as a whole.

When I led City Harvest, I had to make exactly this kind of decision, and similar ones.

The first time, I kept the person on too long. Eventually, a couple of my direct reports came to me and told me that keeping this person on was damaging morale throughout the organization. It had been my intention to let him go, but because I was relatively new in the Executive Director (non-profit-speak for CEO), I was moving slowly to build a case that would convince key Board members that this person was not capable of doing the work he needed to do. What I wasn’t aware of was his badmouthing of me and the direction I was taking the organization, nor was I fully aware of how little he was doing to support his colleagues. After letting him go, morale gradually improved, and I found that we were having more fun together.

I learned the lesson well: my reluctance to take swift action to remove the non-collaborative and poor performer was hindering our ability to grow and serve more hungry people.  Our mission was threatened because morale declined.

People felt it was unfair that this person earned a lot of money yet wasn’t performing at that level. They began asking why they should work so hard. And they wondered what the heck I was doing and what I was seeing. Was I blind to this poor performer? If so, did they really want to work for me? Fortunately, I took action and explained to some key people why I had waited so long. This restored their faith in me, and they were able to restore their teams’ confidence in me as a leader who put the mission first.

There’s a lot involved in firing someone. It’s a difficult thing to do. Not as difficult as being fired, yet still difficult. Waiting too long isn’t the answer, though. I fired him with as much kindness as I could, with a severance package (money really helps ease the transition) and the ability for him to say goodbye to people – two key elements of a compassionate “work end.” This also helped restore people’s confidence in me, because I did treat him as a human being who had made a contribution – not as a pariah. That cold almost shunning approach to firing someone sends chills of fear through the people remaining at the workplace.

The job of a leader is to hold all the elements of a positive workplace in mind and make the decisions and take the actions in a way that contributes to a healthy, happy and high-performing workplace. So “weed out” those who demonstrate that they aren’t a great fit with that kind of workplace.