I once heard that “to succeed, you’re going to have to piss on a lot of people“. On the other hand, I kept reading authors who said you should never lose your humility, that you should always do the right thing, and that the most important thing is to sleep soundly at night with a clear conscience. In the end, all this advice got mixed up in my head. Today I know these ideas don’t contradict each other: we just have to apply them in the right context.
So yes, you need a clear conscience, but you’ll also have to make tough decisions that will probably screw up someone’s life, and you’ll have to learn to sleep soundly at night with decisions like that.
For this story we go back about 11 years, to when a mid-sized company contacted Victoria Bernal to restructure it. The company was like an ocean liner heading straight for an iceberg.
Victoria called me to take charge of the company’s sales department for six months. That was the deal between the company and us: six months, with a possible three-month extension, to “redesign” the company’s future and leave it in better shape than we found it, ready to survive the new times ahead.
When we met with management and got a closer look at the company’s problems, things got worse by the minute. For my part, I had never seen so many incompetent people working in sales, from the salespeople right up to the supervisors. From Victoria’s point of view, things didn’t look much better. In other words, a lot of people were going to have to be let go and replaced by other professionals, or a share of positions (mostly management ones) would simply have to be cut, because they were useless and only caused the company unnecessary costs.
In cases like this, and very much against the most professional protocol, when our human side comes out, rather than just the convenience of severance costs and business savings, we make the mistake of feeling compassion for older employees who, although incompetent in that case, tend to share a common profile: they’ve been with the company for many years and they have children, and you know in advance that they’ll find it very hard to get a new job.
When we analysed the staff we would have to dismiss to get the company back on track, we found that at least 15 people had been there for more than 10 years and had families. They didn’t seem like bad people, quite the opposite, but they were completely expendable.
That was when Victoria and I met to talk, since at that point we still hadn’t accepted the engagement.
Victoria was very clear. She told me:
“We’re going to be in this company for six months, nine at most. Then we leave. If you want, we’ll take the job, but think tonight about whether you want to carry on your conscience all the people we’ll have to fire. People who, after we come in and push them out, probably won’t find another job.”
I had never seen Victoria as a sentimental person, so this surprised me quite a bit, and it did make me think again. Although I would have liked to take on the challenge, to add to our list of successes (let’s be honest), all the families I had seen torn apart by unemployment came to mind. And no, I didn’t want to be part of that.
Of course, at the time I could have told myself that if I didn’t do it, someone else would come along and do it. But Victoria’s doubts helped me turn the job down, even though I was left wanting to do it.
Up to this point, it would be one of those stories people like, where the heart wins the battle against ambition. But the truth is, I was an idiot.
In less than two years, we found out that the people we hadn’t wanted to fire had been stealing from the company for years through its customers, and stealing from those same customers as well. The books were dirty, and the accountant was in on it.
There was even a seemingly charming 51-year-old woman who had diverted more than 7,500 euros from her customers.
(See: 6 signs you should fire an employee)
The company we didn’t want to save, because we wouldn’t fire those people, ended up in insolvency proceedings, and I learned a lesson about incompetence.
Since that day, the way I see it, being incompetent at your job is already an offence in itself, because you’re stealing a professional role from someone competent. Over time I realised that when you see an incompetent person in a job that’s too big for them, there’s almost always a dirty story behind how they got it. I say almost always, because sometimes it’s just down to the incompetence of whoever hired them.
Deep down, incompetent people know what they are, and so they’re more likely to act in bad faith to profit and hold on to a job they don’t deserve.
So that day I learned that it’s not that you have to become a cold person, but your hand must not shake when it comes to sending an incompetent person home and “swapping” them for a competent person who does deserve a job. And once you understand that, you can carry out mass layoffs and sleep with a very clear conscience.
Because that day, for the sake of a clear conscience, we allowed an honest company to be swindled by its own employees, and more than 400 customers to pay more than they should have.
See also: A crash course in understanding people and understanding yourself
Featured image: Crew of SS Birma, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
