Joe.Budde.Jr

We naturally think of severance when companies downsize, but what about situations where employees are laid-off/terminated/fired/removed due to poor performance or destructive behaviors? Should these individuals receive severance? They weren’t chosen to remain in the job so why continue paying them through a severance arrangement? 

Well, lets take it through our new framework for business decisions:

“Given the core competencies of my organization and the assets under it’s control, how can I best direct the organization to serve? Which products or services could we produce that would best enable my community to flourish?”

We need to ask if the employee is a part of our community (yes- they are because you hired them in the first place!), and then we ask how do we enable him to flourish?  Do we produce enough revenue to enable us to remedy the employment situation yet enable the individual to have a bit of a runway to find work?  Granted, my first response when reading through this framework, was YOU ARE KIDDING ME!  Severance for this guy or that guy?  I was making the decision about me, and not about the community.  So it’s a daily challenge to think differently; but, it’s exciting to know that thinking differently is possible.