Fantasizing about Firing
May. 2nd, 2008 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebI've almost never been a supervisor and I've never had a position involving hiring and firing. I'm afraid of hiring, because how could you possibly know who's good? I've seen too many people who are great workers and bad interviewers and vice versa.
But firing, that might be a different story. At my employer, people think it's hard to fire someone because you have to document what they're doing wrong, tell them this, tell them how to fix it, give them a chance to fix it, and then they don't fix it. Three times. Sounds straightforward to me. And of course I'm the type to be overly sympathetic and have a Bartleby situation on my hands, except now I'm older and have heard a lot of stories.
Lately I've been noticing that about half my headaches at work can be traced back to a single guy. Today I found another set of those courses that are the same and different, only even more blatant. But happily, the instructor was someone else. Nope, turns out those courses were improved by the original guy's wife.
When a single employee (okay, actually a married pair of employees), out of a total of 10,000, who's not even in my department and is not one of my contacts and is not anywhere in my line of bosses and who in fact I never talk to, can wreak so much havoc on me, I'd really, really like to have the power to fire. How can someone get that much power?
We are actually getting together a committee of people to discuss when we can just reject things that are on forms that don't make any sense. There's only so much you can abuse the system. I hope.
But firing, that might be a different story. At my employer, people think it's hard to fire someone because you have to document what they're doing wrong, tell them this, tell them how to fix it, give them a chance to fix it, and then they don't fix it. Three times. Sounds straightforward to me. And of course I'm the type to be overly sympathetic and have a Bartleby situation on my hands, except now I'm older and have heard a lot of stories.
Lately I've been noticing that about half my headaches at work can be traced back to a single guy. Today I found another set of those courses that are the same and different, only even more blatant. But happily, the instructor was someone else. Nope, turns out those courses were improved by the original guy's wife.
When a single employee (okay, actually a married pair of employees), out of a total of 10,000, who's not even in my department and is not one of my contacts and is not anywhere in my line of bosses and who in fact I never talk to, can wreak so much havoc on me, I'd really, really like to have the power to fire. How can someone get that much power?
We are actually getting together a committee of people to discuss when we can just reject things that are on forms that don't make any sense. There's only so much you can abuse the system. I hope.