There’s only one thing worse for a founder than firing someone:
Your startup failing.
Any founder would say that if that’s the choice then firing the employee is the obvious answer. Letting your startup fail is not an option.
Your startup isn’t a charity and it isn’t a family — it’s a sports team, as Reed Hastings says. High performance is required.
But most founders don’t fire employees quickly enough. How do you know when the right time to fire someone is at a startup anyway?
When everything is chaotic, priorities are constantly shifting, and there are roadblocks everywhere it can be easy to give people the benefit of the doubt for too long — not to mention how time consuming having to hire someone new may be.
Here are the 6 signals I look for before firing someone 👇
When to Fire Someone at Your Startup
There aren’t actually that many reasons to fire someone — there are a lot more reasons to keep them around. So it’s ok to have a quicker trigger finger than you may think you should, if any of these happen.
You also don’t need to wait for ALL of these to be true. If ANY of them are true, it’s probably time to let someone go.
And lastly if you’re reading this and thinking about a specific person, you probably should. In general if you’re thinking about whether or not to fire someone, you probably should have already.
They Lose Your Trust
When I joined Airbnb in 2018 my manager told me in our first 1:1 that he was “excited to build trust with me” which told me immediately that Airbnb was no longer a startup (and no longer a place for someone like me).
When you hire someone at a startup you’re already making the decision to trust them. You don’t have the luxury to “build” trust over time. That’s what your candidate vetting process is for.
Once they’ve started you need to trust them by default. This is an essential part of moving quickly enough to survive. You want team members who reduce complexity rather than add it.
So if for any reason the employee has lost your trust then you need to fire them.
Here are some common, valid reasons founders lose trust in employees:
They’ve over-promised and under-delivered on quality or deadlines more than once or twice
They consistently exhibit poor communication or reliability
They’ve lied to you, another team member, or external stakeholder
They’ve done some other truly unethical thing
They Don’t Learn from Mistakes
Making mistakes at a startup is expected — making the same mistakes repeatedly is unacceptable.
Spend time with an employee after they make a mistake and be clear with what they should do next time instead.
If they either ignore or are unable to get it right repeatedly, they may not be ready for the work you need them to do.
Startups only get more complex as they grow. You want people on your team who grow even faster and can take on increasing amounts of responsibility — not people who you’re worried will get left behind, or who you already know you’ll need to hire managers for.
Another sign: if you find yourself giving an employee smaller or less important work than you would want to for someone in their role, it may be a sign they aren’t learning fast enough.
They’re Not Taking Enough Initiative
You can’t be there to tell employees everything they need to know to do their role effectively. They need to care and be perceptive enough to realize these things themselves.
This can manifest in a few ways:
Not researching what other similar companies have done in the past to solve a problem (and what their users think about that solution), or other business context
Not getting full project requirements from teammates
Not looking for new opportunities to improve your product or business, specifically the user experience
The third one can be challenging to notice — how do you tell for sure if someone is missing an opportunity if you aren’t aware of the opportunity yourself?
A proxy I like to use is customer obsession. Does the employee truly care about the customer? Do they genuinely want to make their lives better?
If so, I’ve found it’s typically safe to believe they’re actively looking for ways to do so.
They’re Not a Culture Fit
Whether they’re getting things done or not every early employee represents a significant percentage of your entire company’s emerging culture — you must make sure each new person you add fits in some way with that culture.
Ok, sure, but what does this actually mean?
You can look at this behaviorally and in a reflective way.
Behaviorally, the most important consideration is whether or not they work as hard as the rest of the team. If they don’t you’ll have some awkward conversations with everyone else about why you’re ok letting that happen — this can erode the team’s trust in you over time.
Other behavioral factors like communication style can play a big part in creating a cohesive team as well, but work ethic is the foundational piece.
However, the easiest way to explain culture fit is by looking at how others on the team feel around the employee, including you and your cofounders.
Once you expand beyond your first employee, everyone you hire needs to work with other people than just the founders of the company. They’ll have individual relationships and thoughts about each other. It helps for founders to be aware of what these are, early on, so you know what to expect with regard to how your team works together.
So if a majority of your team feel like they’re walking on eggshells around a certain employee then they’re not a culture fit.
Team Members Don’t Respect Them
This is similar to the last point, but slightly different.
Your team may feel comfortable around someone, or even like them, but still not respect them.
Maybe this person works really hard, but they’re just never quite hitting the mark based on the expectations for someone with their role or seniority. Maybe this ends up causing you or others on the team to have to spend time cleaning up messes.
A lack of respect is equally as bad as a lack of culture fit. Your team needs to be able to rely on one another.
Their Work Just Isn’t Getting Done
At a startup you need to make progress. The alternative is death. If it isn’t working and the work isn’t getting done at a level that’s acceptable, it doesn’t matter why.
A common pitfall here is that a founder will recognize someone should likely be fired and instead give them detailed feedback about how to do better — optimistically hoping this happens.
Then, for a short time, it actually does happen! Everyone feels good and moves on.
…but then the employee slips back into old habits and the cycle repeats.
Don’t let yourself get caught in this cycle. If you see an employee fall back into the same patterns and not getting their work done after receiving feedback, have the more serious conversation.
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