Fire, fired, firing…

When they heard about the Aurora, Illinois, workplace rampage, was anyone really surprised to learn that the employee who shot and killed a number of his co-workers had been fired? It had to be that or a “domestic”, i.e., someone going after a spouse or partner in their place of work and taking out others as collateral damage.

I have been on both sides of the layoff equation, both layoff-er and layoff-ee. And it’s especially unpleasant if you’re the one doing the laying off.

But on the other side of the equation, I’ve been laid off three times.

The first time, I was semi-blindsided and upset as hell. Basically, I was added to the lay-off list after I got into a very heated argument with my boss, the company’s president, about how we were going to discuss our upcoming RIF with the surviving employees. What got me on the the list was throwing down this gauntlet: ‘You say what you’re going to say, and I’ll say what I’m going to say, and we’ll see who they believe.’ In retrospect, not the wisest thing to say if I wanted to stay employed. But professionally speaking, after the first couple of days of shock and anger, getting fired – and I was really more fired than laid off – turned out to be a very good thing.

For my second layoff, I had volunteered for separation. It was touch and go for a while, as word had come down that the president was refusing to lay anyone off who’d taking part in a recently concluded program in which about 50 middle-ish level managers were tapped to participate in a mini-MBA week at Babson College. Our mission: figure out how to save the company. (Hah!) Anyway, I had a good network of more senior managers, which I worked aggressively to get on the list. Again, it turned out to be a very good thing.

My third and final layoff was long-anticipated, and a natural outcome of having been implicated in a knockdown drag out battle between two factions in the company. Oddly enough, the breakdown was tall men vs. short men. I reported to one of the warring tall men, and was closely allied with the others. Anyway, the tall guys lost, and with them went any of their directs who were perceived as at all political. My two closest friends at the company were also fired, and we still laugh about the ridiculous way in which it all came down. And about the fabulous going away party we threw for ourselves – with the tab picked up by one of the tall guys who hadn’t yet been fired. Yet again, losing that job turned out to be a good thing.

But when I lost my jobs, I was never in economic jeopardy, or in fear that I’d never work again.

On the other side of the layoff equation, I was, on a number of occasions, the one figuring out who to get rid of. Talk about gut churning days and sleepless nights. Even when it’s pretty easy to figure out who needs to go – and as a manager I was certainly guilty of sandbagging: not getting rid of problem employees who deserved to get fired when they deserved to get fired, because I knew there was a looming layoff – as a manager, it’s really hard to make the choices.

You have to balance skillsets with potential, short term vs. long term needs, and all the other business-y type considerations. Plus you very likely know about the personal circumstances of your team members: whose wife is pregnant, who’s providing financial support for aging parents, whose kid has problems. And you almost never know how people are going to react to the news that they’ve lost their job.

But what I feared were tears, bitterness, disappointment, anger, acting out. I never feared for my life.

Although there was that one time when I was peripheral to a firing decision, and we did discuss the possibility of violence.

A colleague had hired an administrative assistant who was completely unstable. Her resume raised all sorts of red flags that I won’t get into. I had interviewed her as a favor to my colleague, and had recommended against hiring her.

She turned out to be a disaster on just about every front. She was incapable of getting any work done and, on top of that, had become romantically involved with the head of a small company that we were in discussions over partnering with. To make matters worse, the potential partnership went south, and the potential partner had become an arch rival.

She would get into screaming matches with her manager. He was admittedly a difficult character, but this was just beyond. She would seek me and another colleague out in the ladies room to cry on our shoulders and go into a rage about her boss.

At one point, after I coached both this woman and her manager on a couple of things that might make their relationship better, I asked her how things were going.

Her answer?

She reached up to the top of my office door and dragged her long and sharp nails from top to bottom, while telling me ‘fine.’

This was at a very small company, with little by way of HR: the nice woman who was the office manager was our de facto HR department.

We were in no way equipped to handle the problems that this woman presented.

Anyway, her manager decided she needed to go. Somehow, I got sucked into the planning for her release, and I remember expressing concern that she might do something violent.

She ended up going pretty quietly, but I’m pretty sure that the very nice office manager who was our de facto HR department did alert security. And I remember looking out at the parking lot to make sure she’d actually left. And hoping that she wouldn’t come back armed.

Memory is a funny thing. I can picture her perfectly: she looked like Alice in Wonderland. And I very clearly recall a number of the details on her resume. But I can’t for the life of me remember her name; which is why I couldn’t google to find out what had become of her.

As I write this, the full details of the Aurora workplace murder spree aren’t yet known.

But firing someone can be perilous. Especially if the person being fired has mental health issues (which would come as no surprise in the Aurora situation). And especially when the person has easy access to a gun.