Page 152 - Executive Warfare

EXECUTIVE W ARF ARE

FIRING IS NOT ALWAYS THE ANSWER
There is no question that firings are political, and they will have ramifi-
cations throughout your organization. So you have to consider what are
firing offenses. Incompetence, clearly. Any kind of fraud, clearly. An
offense against a client, clearly. But insubordination, talking out of school,
being undermining—those things are only a maybe. And sometimes you
can accomplish more by not firing somebody who’s offended you. I
learned this from one of my bosses at John Hancock, who handled a dif-
ficult situation in a truly classy way.
I’d recently gotten a promotion and was overseeing a sales force that
was new to me when I was told by our investigators that one of my peo-
ple had moved money from his client’s account to his own personal
account. We’ll call the salesman Rick. He had used the money for six or
eight months and then repaid it. In effect, Rick had borrowed from his
clients without their permission. In most circles, this is called stealing.
I was new at my job, and I was getting a lot of pressure to let this pass
because Rick was one of our top producers and had a lot of friends in the
company.“Look, kid,” people were saying to me,“he’s an honest guy. You
need to apologize to him.”
So they arranged a lunch. At lunch, I
MAKE SURE THAT
asked Rick, “Did you move this money
YOU HAVE A
or not?”
WITNESS IN THE
He said,“I moved it, but I was always
ROOM,
good for it, and the client didn’t get hurt
PREFERABLY AN
at all.”
ATTORNEY WHO
I said,“What if you’d died before that
HAS BEEN FULLY
money had been paid back?”
BRIEFED IN
He couldn’t answer that question.
ADVANCE.
I pushed myself back from the table,
left my lunch on the plate, and said,“I’m
going back to my office. If your resignation isn’t on my desk in the next
half an hour, we will prosecute you.”

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