I consider myself to be a really good boss. If folks are trying to do right by my company, I try to do right by them. Loyalty matters to me greatly, and loyalty is a two-way street.
So my most long-term employee is getting married in June. She's asked for a lot of days off. I've given her all of them. Last week she told me she had a chance to go on her honeymoon for two weeks instead of one. I asked: do you have any plans on leaving the company anytime soon? She said "Not at all." I said "In that case, we'll pay you an extra week's vacation. You only get married once."
Now, I've had some problems with her. Not personally, but in that she hasn't been able to do the job I originally hired her to do. She just didn't have the skills, by her own admission. Nor did she have much of an interest in acquiring them (some of the deficiency was a lack of industry knowledge). Thus, her position has been morphing into more of an office manager/account exec role, and the goal was to get her more towards pure account exec over time..
Now, because she couldn't do the original job, I just hired a third person. (Our company has many people outside, very few inside). I moved our office to a moderately bigger space. Bought new computers. Monitors. All kinds of financial commitments based on the first employee's commitment to staying with me. I've had no complaints from her about her job whatsoever.
Last night, we had a technical problem. Emails got caught in a loopback, and were being delivered over and over and over and over. In checking mail accounts to see which were being affected, I found that my employee had forwarded herself (dozens of times) an email wherein she stated that she had nearly finished her certification training, and was hoping to leave the "Creative Agency" where she was now, and become a teacher in the fall.
Which would have been fine, had she told me before I committed thousands of dollars to an office move, new equipment for her, etc.
So, this morning, I'm firing her. I HATE doing this. I HATE it. But my company is NOT a charity.
3 comments:
That's the crazy thing. It turns out she /was/ pretty forthright. I think. Ugh.
as a veteran of corporate america and trying hard to fight the good fight from their garbage-filled trenches, i really appreciate your struggles with doing the right thing... this may not be what you want to hear but it is my firm belief that organizational america mirrors precisely all the dis-ease and dysfuntion of our larger society and that, the longer you stick around, the greater the odds that you will have your soul sucked from your body... imho...
By that rational, you might as well kill yourself... since you don't want to "stick around" the "larger society."
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