When To Fire Someone Instead of Flogging the Dead Horse

"The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that; When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. HOWEVER, In modern business education and practices, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed:

• Buying a stronger whip!
• Changing riders!
• Appointing a committee to study the horse!
• Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses!
• Lowering the standards so that the dead horses can be included!
• Re-classifying the dead horse as living-impaired!
• Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse!
• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed!
• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance!
• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance!
• Declaring that the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and, therefore, contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses!
• Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses. And of course…!
• Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position!"

The phrase "flogging a dead horse" means to persist in pursuing a goal or outcome that is already unattainable or has already been accomplished. It refers to the uselessness of beating or whipping a horse that is already dead, as it will not respond or be motivated to move. The expression is often used to describe situations where someone wastes time and effort on a task that is unlikely to yield any benefit or result.

This is when you need to fire or relocate somebody. But how do we know if the person is a dead horse?

Based on my experience, the best way to make that decision is to train & show the person that the job can be done in a certain way or within a specific period of time. It is a reasonably good reason to end employment if the person cannot replicate that.

Once, an L&D colleague and I were called to help a restaurant manager who couldn't manage the operation. Staff had no breaks, no training, the schedule changed daily, no day-offs, holiday or public holidays cleared etc.

My colleague had an F&B background, so we concluded that the best way to train him was to show him how it is done. She ran the restaurant for two weeks, and he was only allowed to shadow her. She coached him in operation, and I coached him outside of it. We put policies and practices in place, made a plan to clear all outstanding payroll liabilities, and showed him daily how he could manage training, breaks, and everything else. The staff were pleased.

After two weeks, we handed back the operation to the restaurant manager and coached daily through small chats. Within three weeks, the restaurant was back to square one, and we trainers were blamed, of course. The restaurant manager came up with all sorts of excuses why he couldn't do it. Was he fired? No!

Why? "He is good with guests".

Us: "Great, then make him a guest relation agent or a waiter but not a manager responsible for 50 staff on his team."

This is when you fire or reallocate a person. The job can be done easily, but the person is incompetent at doing it. If one needs to be trained to that degree for a job (s)he occupies, that person is clearly in the wrong role.

People quickly end up in jobs they are not competent to do, which is ok. It happens. But we cannot waste money training the wrong people for any role they will never be good at.

Look for people who are naturally suitable for the role and perfect/fine-tune that innate level of mastery. That is where excellence lies, not in making bad performers to not bad performers by investing an awful lot of energy and company resources in them. This must always be considered when deciding whom we should train or develop.

I said it many times: I wouldn't invest a penny in his/her development that is just a waste of resources.

PS: Many of the soft skills are not trainable! Keep that in mind, and stop flogging a dead horse.