Nandita Kochar
One of the hardest things in life is to relieve someone of their services or to put in millennial language, to fire them. We experience this difficulty because we want to be seen as good by others and telling someone that they are fired will not get us such a response.
But have we ever asked ourselves, “What it is to be good?”
The usual understanding of good is making others happy, being warm and sensitive to their needs. This idea of good has been forced into our minds right from the start, with the bad cartoon becoming good after learning how to be nice and sweet to those around it. Happy Ho organizes best Meditation and Tarot classes in Noida and Delhi NCR area in India.
And firing someone is the exact opposite of such behaviour. We know we will cause the other person huge distress, make them feel humiliated and they might end up telling us that we do not care about them one bit.
But there’s another kind of goodness that does not get as much attention – goodness-as-excellence. When a participant is able to win a marathon, we do not see her as being cruel to others or showing others down. Rather we focus on how she was able to perform good in terms of her skills.
So when we fire someone, we are not doing so because we wish to be cruel to them or hurt them but because they are not good at their job. We are looking not at their goodness-as-niceness but at their goodness-as-excellence.
As a boss, you will often find yourself conflicted between choosing one of the two kinds of goodness. But remember that at the end of your day, your job is a mix of both a candy shop and a doctor’s clinic. And to make sure the company prospers, you will have to sometimes be more of a doctor than a candyman.
As a boss, you are following a lonely but genuine path towards a different kind of goodness.
