The central truth of church scattered is that every Christian should integrate their faith into every area of their life starting at home and then taking it to work. When we take our Christian values to work how does that impact difficult decisions like the termination of an underperforming employee?
We as Christians are to demonstrate both grace and truth every day at work. Grace in this context is wanting to give people the benefit of the doubt and truth is being willing to do what is right for the person and the entire organization.
When people are experiencing personal tragedy in their family or having serious health problems there is no doubt we should give some grace on performance. In addition, we always have to make sure as leaders that we have given every person the right amount of training, performance reviews, coaching and resources to help them be successful.
On the truth side, we also have to look at the overall impact on the organization or team if the person is able to do the job but for whatever reason is unwilling to do great work. This becomes more of a character problem than competency.
When someone needs to go and the leader is unwilling to make the hard call, the leader must understand the people most impacted will eventually lose confidence in the leader more than the person. One of the reasons this is true is they have seen the poor performance and probably have been negatively impacted in their ability to get their own work done. They can’t understand why the leader would value the person over the team.
This is where the biblical principle of speaking the truth in a gracious way must rise to the top of the list. If the truth is this person for whatever reason is unwilling to do the work, it is equally true they are also hurting others.
We also must trust the Father that if this is indeed true, the one person that needs to be impacted by this the most is the person who needs to be fired. There is no Christian virtue in giving a person good performance reviews when they are failing. That can never be seen as really helping them move forward and make the changes that need to be made.
Does every person I have terminated have a transformation and get better? No they have not. However, there have been many who have and years later reach out to thank me for helping them get to a better place.
Speaking the truth to another person in a gracious way may be the most loving Christian thing you can ever do. Your Christian values will help you to be a more effective leader for your organization and for the kingdom. Welcome to church scattered and Christianity in the 21st century.