Case study “Fire Me Why Don’t You”

• The case study “Fire Me Why Don’t You” cites McKay (2008), who states, “… managers and leaders have three opportunities to do something about their employee’s performance: at the time of hiring (hire correctly in the first place); through training and coaching; show poor performers the door. [However,] if a manager feels they have hired an individual who does not have the right personality, mental ability and attitude to do the job, no amount of training or coaching will matter. Take a stance and select oneof these positions:
  • Do you think Paul:
    • Was promoted to his highest level of incompetence (Peter Principle)
    • Was the right person for the job (hired correctly in the first place)
    • Can be cured through training and coaching, or
    • Should be culled (show poor performers the door).
  • Explainwhy you chose your stance and
  • Supportyour position with examples from the case study and the article “Cull or Cure.”

Answer 1

According to me, Paul was promoted to his highest level of incompetence. I selected this answer because it seems that he was not at all happy with the Jim Bausch who was the production manager at the Generations. It is apparent that he was promoted to the next position because of his performance. He showed excellent performance in his earlier days of joining. It is apparent from his promotion as a Shift Supervisor. He was promoted because of his current performance in the job. Even he was rated “Outstanding” after the performance review of first six months as a supervisor. He did not have required skills which were necessary as a shift manager. It is apparent from the case study, “do it the way they think they should do it.” He was not guiding the employees or helping them to complete their job because he was himself unaware of how to do the job.

He might become demotivated after such performance evaluation. This is the reason he said the Jim and Judy to fire him when they were conducting performance appraisal meeting with him. But this option is not trustworthy enough, as he reacted badly during the meeting. It is not possible that a number of employees can speak against him. But I think all this situation raised because of his lack of knowledge and skills in the intended area of work.

Answer 2

After reading the case study, “Fire me Why Don’t You,”, I would say that Paul should be culled as a result of his poor performance, incompetence and especially his poor attitude. The reason I chose this stance is very simple, Judy and Jim, Paul’s superiors, were incredibly fair and thorough in their efforts to determine what was going on with the poor production of Paul’s section of the company. Paul may have been very qualified for his other job and the training and leadership courses offered to Paul were very generous and had the enormous potential to set him up entirely for success as a supervisor. However what confuses me is the fact that Paul was given all of this opportunity and yet he still chose to waste time, mistreat his employees and generally showed an incredibly negative attitude towards his job. A perfect example of this is his constant interaction and multiple hour breaks with the ADC coach. This shows that he is less interested in his employees and really only does things as he wishes in a very selfish manner. As the Cull or Cure article stated, most organizations have at least 10 percent of their employees in the wrong job with the wrong skill set. Sometimes for performance sake, action must be taken. In this particular case, Paul just made it even easier for the company to fire him because he showed no remorse or incentive to increase performance. Companies cannot have someone who drags them down in such a manner over the long term, especially in a supervisory role because that attitude will be felt through the entirety of the company.

Answer 3

Looking at how things unfurl in the given scenario – backlogs, major clients threatening to pull out, and the overall performance and reputation of the company at stake, Paul must be showed the exit door. He might not have done any of the following, which are grounds for absolute and immediate termination fraud, falsification of documents, drug abuse/dealings, sexual harassment or immoral acts in the workplace, violence, theft or embezzlement, disclosure of  confidential information/documents, and criminal acts (Monroy & Rieders, 2014), but his below par job performance, obvious policy violations, and unwillingness to work things out, even threatening the management with litigations, are reasonable grounds for firing an employee (Neugebauer, 2016). I think trying to develop, coach, train and further embrace an employee who clearly doesn’t deserve it, and shows no remorse for the mess he made, is a complete waste of time, money and resources of the company. Paul clearly doesn’t want to be developed or rehabilitated.

References

Monroy, M., & Rieders, L. (2014). Firing an employee: protecting your practice from a lawsuit. Medical Economics,91(11), 50-51.

Neugebauer, R. (2016). Overcome the Fear of Firing: Ideas from 30 Directors. Exchange (19460406), (228), 44-47.