Firing the only innocent employee

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I asked my father today if during all the years of being a boss he'd ever fired anyone. He said a few times, and that he remembered once when he had had to fire an employee because he was so naive that everyone in the office was busy all day playing weird games with his head instead of working. I froze in place...

Oh no that's terrible That poor guy!

Being able to get along with people is as important as being able to do a good job. I am sure whatever job the person did, he wasn't difficult to replace.

That post has lost me .... Some one please explain

The original post? An employee was fired because his presence was disruptive because the other employees wouldn't control their urges to make fun of him. I assume this, or something like it has happened to Greentea?

Or are you talking about Kevin's post?

It sounds like your dad went for the quick fix, rather than the more appropriate, but more difficult, attempt to improve the culture and working environment. The other employees were being totally inappropriate and I'm sorry that the innocent employee had to suffer for it.

Or maybe Greentea just related to the idea of being naive and having people play weird games with your head.

Been there, seen that. If you have a supervisor who can't supervise and you have an office full of people who are not self-directed (and it does happen), you have to fire and replace the supervisor with someone competent so the work gets done. I would hope some interventions had happened prior to the firing, but in a professional setting you're not expected to need a lot of intervention if you're in a supervisory role. You were/are hired with the assumption that you can already do the job....

Sad, but true.

i feel that your father may have done the wrong thing. if i were in his position, i might:

spend some time observing the interplay - without interfering at all. NTs usually have a pecking order and a pack leader. i wouldn't give up until i had identified the mastermind or pack leader. and that is who i would fire. then i would call in all the employees and ask - who wants to be next? such action might put a damper on the activities distracting them from work. if it continued, i would replace them one by one. then i would keep an eagle eye on the situation.

obviously your father chose the easy way out. his solution was surgical and effective and he probably gave little thought to the fairness of his remedy. he wasn't able to walk a mile in the shoes of the innocent one because he didn't care. or because he cared more for a quick fix.

on the other hand, i suspect there is more to it than your father has revealed to you. i would guess the naive employee wasn't as skilled, experienced, tenured, or valuable as the pack leader or the pack members who were following his/her lead.

i was twice fired from jobs in which the excuses were very lame. in the first one, i was required by a cruel employee, in what i thought was a practical 'joke', to put my bare hands into caustic liquid and i refused. the gloves normally supplied for that activity weren't available at the time. i said i would do it with the gloves but not without them and the gloves had to be in good condition - no holes in them. the following day i was fired for disobeying my superiors and being incompetent. when i thought about it later, i decided it was too risky even with the gloves. in the second job, i was fired because i was working with radioactive substances and got radioactive contamination/poisoning. the reason they gave was my footwear was inappropriate which wasn't even true. they fired me because they wanted to get rid of a potential lawsuit asap. i was punished either for being uncooperative with people who desired to inflict injury upon me or for actually being injured on the job.

being uncooperative with people who want to injure me is the story of my life. more times than i'd like to admit, they have succeeded in their desires to harm me. that's why i'm now a hermit. apparently i don't "play well with others". i've had to learn the hard way - to avoid being a magnet for sadistic pack leaders whose reason for being is to parasitically suck energy from people like me. if i could find a pack of aspies, i'd like to get revenge on them. but i need the support of my own pack before i'd make an attempt to get even.

Your father sounds like a jerk. It was illegal firing he did.

I thought that was what everyone did. Though I have noticed in the last few years that usually the fairer person is the one punished in any social conflict. But still, I hoped I was wrong...

Most employment contracts are "at will." You don't have to show any reason for firing, as long as it wasn't clearly done out of bigotry.

Now ...

Be clear, I am totally sympathetic with the employee who was let go. But as someone who has watched numerous smart employees be let go over the years, I can say with 100% confidence that it pretty much alwasy turns out better for the employee. That situation would have been very trying on the naive employee, and he would be better off in a place where such antics did not occur, and he could focus on his work, and be appreciated for his work. The trick, of course, is for someone to convey that to the employee so that he leaves with a sense of confidence and not just of utter failure. More often than not, it will have to come from a supervisor who wasn't the one giving the firing notice. That counselor, helping the employee see the light in his future as he leaves, is a role I ended up playing more than a few times, and those I counseled always ended up in better situations. I know it's hard hard hard to see in the moment of being told you are out of a job, but the world of work really is more about "fit" than ability, and you may as well figure that out sooner rather than later.

And just to let you know, I've sat on the other end, having been fired from my first professional job after 3 months. I was about to leave believing what the owner of the company had told me (even though he had never seen any of my work directly), but when my direct supervisor heard, she picked up her purse and said she was taking me to lunch. She made it quite clear that the partners had not asked any of the supervisors for evaluations, and so must have based their choice on the simple fact I was female (not that we could prove it), and if that was how the company was going to work, I was far better off without them. I didn't land on my feet right away; the next job I took was also a poor placement, but I was able to find a really good opportuntiy after that (leaving job #2 of my own choice) and there actually came a day when company number 1 hired a firm I worked for and, essentially, me, to get them out of a mess. I would have stayed at company number 1 forever if they hadn't forced the issue, and my entire career has been so much better off, SO much, because I didn't.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 09 Jan 2009, 1:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ok, it was illegal. Now prove it in a court of law. The father does not have to testify against himself and the coworkers do not have to testify if it would implicate them in a crime. You are required to come up with the proof because you are the plaintiff. That is why most workplace lawsuits fail.

The next issue is that for most employment in the USA, you are an at-will employee. That means your employer can fire you for any reason whatsoever. That includes not liking the cloths you wear, your hair color, or how you relate to other employees.

Sure it says they can fire you for any reason so why the hell is it illegal then to fire someone based on race, sexuality, gender, disability, etc?


I guess my mother was wrong then. She was the one who told me you have to have a reason to fire someone and I said "Isn't disliking you the reason to fire you?" and she said "no because I can sue her for that. She has to have a reason" so I asked her what are the reasons to fire someone and she told me them; not showing up to work, not doing her job, treating her patients poorly, showing up late, always getting behind because you are too slow, not doing what the boss says. Those are valid reasons.
Her boss didn't like her so she bullied her so my mother quit and went to another job.
My mother even says they can't fire me if I take things literal or fail to read between the lines, etc. because then it be discrimination.

I've had people playing headgames with me like that, it becomes the focus of the office attention and the daily 'game' which must be played. In my later years I am careful not to become 'living entertainment'.

Clan or pack behaviour isn't about upholding what is true or right, it's about social cohesion and pecking orders.

In Canada we have clear laws about when a person can and can;t be fired. If the conditions are not met, they cannot be legally fired.