dp.cx blog

There's a decision that managers put off more than almost any other: letting go of someone who isn't working out. I've seen it at multiple companies - someone consistently produces bad work, creates extra work for the people around them, and stays employed anyway because nobody wants to make the call.

The reasons for keeping them varied. Sometimes it was "we can't afford to be short-staffed." Sometimes it was a manager who didn't want to deal with the confrontation. But the worst one, in my experience, is fear of a lawsuit. The employee is on a performance improvement plan, the documentation exists, and yet nobody will pull the trigger because somewhere in the chain, someone decided that the legal risk of termination outweighs the cost of keeping them.

I understand the instinct. Employment lawsuits are expensive and distracting, and nobody wants to be the person who greenlit one. But that calculation misses the real cost, because it only looks at what firing someone costs and ignores what keeping them costs. I wrote a while back about how managers are often functions of the system around them - constrained by the priorities and fears above them. The fear of termination usually doesn't start with the manager; it starts with someone above them who decided the risk isn't worth it.

The rest of the team knows who isn't pulling their weight. They've known for months. They watch this person produce substandard work, miss expectations, and face no real consequences. The first thing that happens is the workload shifts. Someone has to redo the bad work or pick up what didn't get done. That someone is usually your best people, because they care enough to make sure things don't fall through the cracks.

That works for a while, but it doesn't last. Your best people start wondering why they're putting in the extra effort when the standard is clearly optional. Some of them quietly lower their own output. Others start job searching. And the people who leave are almost always the ones you can least afford to lose.

Then there's the risk side. I've seen situations where a company keeps a struggling employee in a role where the quality of their work directly affects the company's liability. If that person's mistakes lead to errors in contracts, filings, or client-facing documents, the company isn't just carrying a morale problem - it's carrying a legal one. So the company won't terminate because they're afraid of a lawsuit, but the employee's work product is creating the conditions for a bigger one.

If you're a manager sitting on this decision, the comparison is worth laying out. The cost of a wrongful termination claim, if the documentation is solid, is usually a settlement and some legal fees. The cost of keeping a bad employee adds up every day - in lost productivity, in the good people who leave, in the errors that accumulate, and in your team losing confidence that you'll actually hold people accountable. I've seen what happens when fear becomes the operating principle - it doesn't protect the company, and it doesn't protect the team either.

If someone has been on a PIP and isn't improving, the plan did what it was supposed to do. It gave you a documented answer.