I just sat in on the firing of my fashion designer wife Daniela Corte’s latest sales/assistant this morning. Yes, it was an awful experience.

I’ve worked at companies where no one ever got fired.  That was pretty awful too. Everyone knew who the bad people were and tried to avoid having them on their projects. Sometimes you got stuck and you made the best of it.  But it always felt wrong.  And the really great people always left because the situation was simply too frustrating.

Fast forward to today.  My wife  has been trying to fill a sales/assistant slot for years. She has tried

• experience/expensive
• young/inexpensive
• some experience/still lots-o-money.  

Nothing has seemed to work. In the end, it always seems as if it is easier and better to have no one sitting in that chair than the person she has hired.  Which is seriously not a great option. Of course, the process does force you to streamline and automate if only to get through the day.

But, what is my wife doing wrong?  

There have been 5 of them over the last 6 years. Each person lasts between 1-3 months.

What was wrong with them?

• one of them was stealing
• one of them was just genuinely crazy… really crazy
• one of them could not keep details straight - shipments were lost, everything was a rush to the finish, there never seemed to be control
• one of them was really, really bad with customers
• the rest some combination of all of the above

You get the idea.

My wife has other employees that are great and have been with her forever. But this one position appears to be Murphy Brown personal assistant doomed.

And here is the new awful twist.  My 4yo son and 6yo daughter spend a bunch of time in our offices. They become friends with the soon-to-be-fired employees who are regardless of their professional failings actually nice, well-meaning people. And oddly they are all good with kids.

So we now have these conversations at the dinner table.  Mommy what does it mean to fire someone?  Was so-and-so doing a bad job?  Why? What did they do wrong?

Sigh…

Seriously, I have to put more money in my kids therapy fund.  Frankly I probably have to put more in ours too. And frankly, I hope the employees have a therapy fund too.

In the end, firing someone, while a better idea than leaving a bad person in place to drag down morale, is still a failing of management.  It is a sign of a broken hiring process or a broken on-boarding process, or a broken training process.  But it is a failing of management and an expensive one at that.

The next candidate starts in a couple of weeks. She seems great. And every firing forces you to look yourself in the mirror and change something, fix something. I’m sure this one will be the keeper.