Counseling Before Termination: Two Employees Who Almost Crossed the Line

Adapted from Dr. Steve Cohen’s book Mess Management: Lessons From a Corporate Hit Man. Names and identifying details have been changed or left out.

People call me a corporate hit man because a lot of my work is structuring terminations. But a termination should be considered only after specific steps have been taken to fix the problem. Done right, counseling saves a lot of jobs. Here are two cases where it did.

Three strikes

The approach I teach works like baseball. First, tell the employee what is wrong, how to fix it and how long they have. That is an oral warning, and it is not discipline. If the problem comes back, do it again and document it as a written warning, writing up the earlier oral warning after the fact. If the employee still fails, a termination stands on solid ground. That is due process, and in my experience it is what holds a termination up when it is challenged.

Case one: a concern, not a complaint

A large organization with several buildings on one campus called me in. An employee I’ll call Mark had a legitimate reason to visit another building now and then, and he used those trips to stop by and see a woman there I’ll call Ellen. The visits got more frequent. Ellen didn’t welcome the attention. On her birthday, Mark brought a small gift and tried to hug and kiss her. She turned her head, and all he got was a kiss full of hair. She reported it to her supervisor, the supervisor told the department director, and I was asked to do a preliminary investigation.

Ellen told me the visits had been increasing for months, and her subtle signals weren’t getting through. I asked whether she was making a formal complaint or voicing a concern. The distinction is subtle but important: a complaint is more formal and more public. She was voicing a concern. She felt annoyed, not threatened, and just wanted to be left alone to do her job.

Mark wasn’t defensive. He admitted he was attracted to her and getting nowhere, and I didn’t get the sense he was fixated. I told him he was on a path that could end in a formal sexual harassment complaint, probable termination and damage to his whole career. He started to look sick. I told him not to contact her and not to do anything that could be seen as provocative.

Mark had a good record over about two and a half years, and his supervisor asked whether I would recommend termination. I said no. Mark hadn’t crossed the threshold. If Ellen had felt threatened, I might have concluded otherwise. I told Ellen we took her concern seriously and asked her to report any unwelcome attention immediately. Then I gave Mark a very unsubtle “no.” In the workplace, no means no, no matter how subtly the no is stated. I documented an oral warning and kept it in my own file rather than his personnel file, to be added if anything happened again.

Nothing did. About eight months later, Mark applied for a promotion, and his supervisor asked me whether to mention the incident in his reference. There had been no relapse, so I advised against it. Mark got the promotion, and we told him we had kept our end of the deal because he had kept his.

Case two: the busted fiddle

The second case was a sheet metal shop with about 85 employees. The owner was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met; his son was the COO. One of their three highly paid programmers, whom I’ll call Dan, had a tardiness problem that had been growing for about a year and a half. Coworkers were complaining, and the owner was angry but too nice to deal with it.

I started with data. A 12-month time card audit showed Dan was late about twice a week, roughly 35 minutes each time. That was about 100 incidents and more than 58 hours of lost time in a year. The other two programmers averaged about one late arrival a month, around 14 minutes. A random sample of other employees showed normal arrival times.

Then I checked the policy manual. There was no policy setting a start time. “You mean we have to have a policy demanding that people show up for work on time?” the owner asked. Not quite. You need a policy that states the official start time. In my experience courts will not hold employees accountable to practices, only to policies. They were angry at Dan for breaking a rule that didn’t formally exist, so we fixed that first.

I came to the meeting with Dan carrying a violin case holding an old, battered fiddle with a cracked face and broken strings. Dan, given no notice, arrived on time that morning. He thought he was due at “about eight o’clock.” Not about eight, I told him. Eight. He guessed he was late about once a week, maybe 15 minutes. His reason: his wife’s car was unreliable, her job required her to be on time, so he drove her. As he put it, “Well, I didn’t think I had to be at work on time.”

Her job paid about $27,000 a year. His paid about $80,000. I asked whether he was willing to put his job at risk to protect hers, and you could watch the light come on. He sat up straight, which was a good sign. Contempt or indifference would have told me the problem was much more serious. When I showed him the real numbers, more lost time than his vacation, he started to look sick. Also a good sign.

Then I handed him the fiddle and told him it was a 1794 Stradivarius, worth a little over $5 million as it was and about $50 million restored. He cradled it more carefully. Then I told him the truth: it was a beat-up fiddle worth almost nothing, and a metaphor for his job. Some days a job feels like a busted fiddle, with plenty you’d like to fix. But it is still a Stradivarius. It supports your family and gives you your identity as a professional. He agreed.

I told him plainly that if he couldn’t arrive on time consistently, I would be back, and the next time we saw each other I would be terminating him. Could he live on $195 to $245 a week in unemployment? No. We set the expectation: aim for perfect punctuality for the next four months, with no more than one late arrival a month tolerated, and call his supervisor with an explanation if he would be late for any reason.

The written warning followed my standard three-paragraph format: what went wrong, what the policy or expectation is, and the corrective action plan with a timetable and consequences, including the words “further disciplinary action, up to and including termination.” I’ve sat in hearings where a terminated employee said he never realized he could lose his job. Spell it out.

Four months later I called the COO. Dan had bought himself a new car and given his old, still-dependable one to his wife. He had been on time ever since. The COO asked whether he should now remove the warning. Absolutely not. The record should show the whole chronology: a problem, raised and fixed. Instead, I suggested a new memo noting that Dan had completed his probation and that attendance would continue to be monitored.

What leaders should take from this

• Counsel first. Problems caught early, with an employee who takes them seriously, can usually be fixed.
• Use data, not frustration. A time card audit turned “he’s always late” into facts nobody could argue with.
• Write the rule down. If it’s only a practice, you can’t hold anyone to it.
• Put “termination” in writing, and never pull documents. The file should tell the whole story, including the happy ending.

Frequently asked questions