Journal of Sacred Work

"You’re fired."  – Donald Trump,(left) "The Apprentice" (NBC)

   Donald Trump’s favorite phrase may seem like a joke when he delivers the line on his television show. The line makes sense for Trump because Trump likes to run his organizations in a control-oriented, fear-driven way. For Trump, fear is a leadership style. He believes this is how you show who’s boss. In hospitals and charities built on the concept of caring, Trump-like behavior destroys trust, damages care, and undercuts Love’s energy. Ripples from abrupt firings travel far beyond the individual who has been terminated.
  Recently, In a hospital in one faith-based system, a veteran caregiver and Chief Nursing Officer was abruptly forced to resign after experiencing a string of positive performance reviews. From the standpoint of other nursing leaders and nursing staff, not to mention the rest of this hospital’s thousands of employees, a key presence in the hospital suddenly vanished…

  "This kind of think scares me to death," one long-time nurse commented.
"It spreads fear in the organization." She’s right. And the truth is,
there is no need for this. In a loving culture, terminations can be
handled with respect and dignity.

   Every non-profit hospital and charity carries a mission to live Love. Faith-based hospitals, in particular, have a responsibility to deal with separations in a far more caring way than appears to have happened in the hospital in this case.
   How do loving cultures deal with separations? Radical Loving care calls for a process that goes roughly like this. (Note: the assumption here is that there was no criminal wrongdoing by the person to be terminated.)
   1) Lay out out a pattern of performance reviews that articulate areas for improvement. If the issue is acute, accelerate and intensify the review process. The leader in the above example said she had zero warning that there were any issues with her performance.
   2) If the review process does not bring results, advise the employee of this. Make it about performance, not about the person. Again, in the above case, all reviews leading to the sudden, forced resignation had been positive.
   3) Give the terminated employee a chance to share the news with her colleagues in a constructive way and a reasonable opportunity to clear his/her office or locker. In this case, the employee "vanished" on Friday and had no opportunity for in person communication with her team.
   4) Give the individual a going-away party sponsored by the hospital honoring his or her work. This kind of thing is not only important for the terminated person, but for the rest of the staff. If the termination has been simply because the hospital wanted different leadership, than why not honor the departing person for his or her work? In this case, the nurse leader had worked at the hospital for more than twenty years.
   Here’s the bottom line: Leadership cannot build an environment of trust, love and respect by firings that seem more like savage ambushes than respectful terminations. Sudden, forced resignations fire fear instead of advancing Love. Perhaps companies and football teams can succeed using fear. But Love-based missions cannot thrive with Trump-style terror.
   It’s hard to understand why some leaders who claim to be mission-driven seem to have so much difficulty understanding this. Ambush terminations can smack of leaders who are more power-hungry than mission driven. When leaders are truly in touch with Loving leadership, they come to understand that Love calls leaders to act with respect, firmness and compassion; not with suddenness, terror, and disrespect.
   What do you think?

-Erie Chapman