It's weird, I have worked at many organisations - and at almost none of them did my manager have the ability to fire me. Is this an American thing?
In most of these orgs, getting rid of someone is kind of hard work, usually involving a lot of HR. A manager would have much more luck getting you moved to a different team.
In medium/large companies, 99.9% of employees can be fired at the end of a HR process and that HR process is something only their line manager can start.
And while transferring an inept employee to another manager might save you some paperwork, it'll make that manager an enemy (unless the employee's performance is much improved by the move). So many managers would do the paperwork.
> In medium/large companies, 99.9% of employees can be fired at the end of a HR process and that HR process is something only their line manager can start.
True but note in the US this isn’t for the same reasons that happens in (for example) Europe.
Big companies are better to sue than small companies (they have more money) and were you really fired because you never got any work done or because your manager simply didn’t like you because of something you didn’t control or because they didn’t tell you what you were supposed to do? So the company lawyers and HR people put together a long list of things to go through to make such suits hard to file.
One of those processes are to put people “on a plan”: written warning with super-explicit instructions of what to do. I’ve found in a couple of cases this has been the (final) wake up call that has made someone get back on track. But what sucks is that most companies just treat it as a check off item: once someone is on a plan they can never recover.
Also when the problem is the manager, feedback rarely flows in that direction.
A personal improvement plan is not a fun thing to be on :(.
That said, I do wonder how much the perception of them is skewed by their lack of visibility -- of the cases where I have been aware of a PIP, the only one which was had any real visibility in the wider org was the one where the person ended up leaving the company.
It's entirely plausible that my employer is one of the better ones, though. And even then, I've seen (what appeared to me to be) abuses. One of the things that can come out of a manager putting someone on a PIP is that it's actually the manager who is in the wrong. It takes a good HR team to recognise that, though.
From the perspective of that HR process, they generally care about the employee as much (or as little) as about that manager. A manager may start some process, but HR might as well consider that it's better (or easier?) for the organization to replace that manager instead of replacing that individual contributor.
I'm not sure I've ever heard a story where a manager attempts to fire someone, but HR decides to replace the manager instead. Is that something you've seen? I only hear stories about managers being protected as hard as possible by HR.
Yes, I have seen unit-level "personality conflict" situations being resolved by firing the line manager.
It's important to note the distinction between "manager" and "management". In larger organizations an entry-level worker is x levels away from top management, and a first level line manager is x-1 levels away from top management, where x is 5-10 i.e. they are quite far from management and very close to the actual worker.
In a large company, from the perspective of actual decision makers or HR, a first level line manager or a team lead is just a slightly different job description of anonymous interchangeable peon. You have a hundred customer service representatives and a bunch of CS teamleads; you have fifty small branch offices/stores/warehouses/whatever and so you have fifty mostly interchangeable branch managers. Their role is supervising the team and executing the assigned goals and policy with minimal influence on it - any actual policy is set by that manager's boss boss or higher; any policy exceptions are likely to require approval from that manager's boss or higher, etc. Of course, if you have only a hundred or so people in the whole organization, then it's different, and most organizations are small or medium enterprises - but quite a few people do work in large corporations.
I've seen it only once. One manager, not in my department, had a high turnover. Staff were either fired, quit, or transfered. Senior management eventually stepped in and discovered this guy was pretty toxic. But they couldn't simply fire him. Since he was well-connected in the industry they gave him time to find another senior position.
In any remotely sane company, HR does what management says. The manager may well be replaced, but it's the manager's manager or someone even higher in the food chain who makes that call, not HR on their own.
They way I've seen it, the manager's manager formally makes the call, but they wouldn't really know the other person involved (they would just work with their subordinate managers) nor the details of the particular problem. If they care, then they would get into the details and perhaps fire whichever of the two is actually at fault; but if they don't care much (which I've seen happen, especially in more lower paid/mass market positions), they would rubberstamp whatever HR says - especially since it's not that unlikely that the conflict will escalate into a complaint (no matter if real or not) about discrimination or workplace abuse, and so from the perspective of that manager's manager it's very important that a Proper Process gets followed and (for many jobs, though usually not for IT jobs) not that important to them about who stays and who leaves afterwards, as HR will just get an equivalent replacement.
HR has their own obligations to the people they report to. If they can't justify the manager's suggestion without sticking their necks out to a degree they're comfortable with they probably won't.
They'll mostly side with the manager (because selection bias, not a lot of managers are bringing them cases of people they want fired where that outcome is not compatible with the processes) but may very well tell a manager to just deal with it if that's what's "doing their jobs" looks like.
Things like this are never as black and white as people looking for cheap upvotes make them out to be.
I don't think we're disagreeing here? Of course HR can and will push back if (say) firing somebody without proper CYA could result in a lawsuit, but the point is that HR is not the one initiating any firing -- that has to come from management.
In general, in larger organizations with formal processes, HR would look into the situation instead of simply accepting the manager's assertion about someone being a bad performer.
For example, it may be quite clear even from externally looking at other reports (e.g. data from "360-degree reviews" or whatever internal evaluation process the corporation uses) that the consensus around the team is that the person is not a bad performer, but that the team lead has had recorded "problems with cooperation" - in that case, escalating the conflict with an IC to HR may easily be the breaking point that causes the team lead to be removed.
The uniquely American thing (compared to your perspective, at least) is you can get fired for almost any reason, or no reason at all [0]. In any case, whether that decision technically comes from the manager or the manager filling out paperwork which is then approved by HR, or if the manager is merely being used as the bearer of bad news, etc., I think is beside the point.
Yep, it’s usually not possible for a manager to unilaterally fire you here either. However, a manager who has built up trust, by delivering and building a strong team, can tremendously influence that process.
They can start the process. Once that process is started your career inside the company is basically over. Even if you survive it (and/or survive the PIP) you will not want to work there anymore. May as well be fired at that point.
In most US States the company’s ability to fire you is hardly constrained just as your ability to quit is unconstrained.
Everywhere in the US you can’t be fired for your country of origin or due to age (these aren’t always easy to prove of course) but, for example, if the boss decided to get rid of all left-handed people one day that would be perfectly legal.
As a Brit who has been both managed and manager in the UK, Scandinavian and Europe for 2 decades, my first thought was also, "wtf, this must be a US thing".
When managing people, why on earth would joking about firing people even cross your mind?
The other comments are talking about the American-ness of the firing, so I will also say that this is (in my mind) a particularly American brand of humor.
It's very, very standard for people to make sarcastic/ironic/teasing jokes in this vein as a way of trying to break tension or lighten the mood.
In the places I've worked (always in the U.S.), although there may be a procedure the managers have to go through when firing or laying off someone (which does involve HR), I believe it is often considered part of the manager's job to be the one who personally delivers the bad news.
Depends on the type of contract they have. There’s a bunch of people that are on recurring 3 month contracts that can be let go at the end of each period.
The permanent employees however… better be prepared for a year long process.
You can be moved to a bad batch team where you are put on a performance improvement plan that is impossible to satisfy and then be fired. Pretty simple workaround.
In most of these orgs, getting rid of someone is kind of hard work, usually involving a lot of HR. A manager would have much more luck getting you moved to a different team.