In competitive sailing, fix error first, then discuss

Some good advice from Union Square Ventures' Albert Wenger, garnered from his experience in the 2012 Vineyard sailboat race. This is among six valuable lessons he learned:

Recover quickly from errors. When something goes wrong on a boat, there is no time to go sulking. Instead the problem needs to be fixed or it will generally get much worse. There is time to discuss what went wrong and how to avoid it once the problem has been fixed. Put differently, a moment of crisis is not a good time for the team to start questioning each other. That too is a good way to operate as a team at work.

"You can't fire me - you don't even work here!"

Another story from entrepreneur and venture capitalist Albert Wenger:

I know of a subsequently very successful entrepreneur who in the early days of his first company was so mortified of having to fire someone that he sent in his wife instead to do it. When the employee in question caught on to what was happening, he said to the wife: “You can’t fire me, you don’t even work here” to which she apparently replied “yes, that’s the point — neither do you.” The next day the entrepreneur decided he needed to hire a right hand person who could help with this going forward!

I hope this entrepreneur eventually got the courage to do difficult tasks like this himself. However, I'm very impressed with his wife--there's no doubt about her courage!

Albert Wenger: when you have to fire someone, don't dither

This story is from entrepreneur and venture capitalist Albert Wenger's blog Continuations:

Firing is probably the hardest thing to do and I was terrible at it at first as an entrepreneur. I put off firing my first mis-hire (a developer) for weeks while I was looking for ways to fix a situation that couldn’t and shouldn’t have been salvaged. There were (and often are) difficult additional considerations such as the employee’s personal financial situation. In the end once I had done it the impact on team morale and productivity was tremendous and I realized I had dithered. A tough lesson to learn and while firing never got any emotionally easier for me at least I knew not to let it drag.

There are a lot of hiring stories on the site but many fewer firing stories. People have to be fired on occasion and doing it properly is difficult. But, as Albert writes later in his post, "Always keep in mind that much as the firing may be difficult for you, it is more difficult for the person being fired and putting it off or doing it in a disrespectful fashion only makes matters worse." I've been on both sides of the "firing line" and I can tell you that Albert speaks the truth.