One of the most difficult things for me to do as a manager is to 
terminate an employee. No matter how I approach it, removing someone from his role is physically hard. I physically feel ill a day or two before I need to terminate the employee.
It is also hard to know when to terminate someone. What level of performance is unacceptable? How long is too long at that level? Have I done enough to motivate and train the employee. At the end terminating someone is my mistake. I have either hired incorrectly or I have failed to mentor the employee correctly.
I have come to the conclusion that once an employee is not successful, the worst thing to do is keep him on the job. The employee will feel a failure, this will lead to him being sour and negative which will lead to more failures.
I know that it is my job as a manager to help my team grow and expand, it is my job to give each employee a new challenge every day, so that they will learn how to solve it and in turn, grow.
We had an employee who wasn’t managing to become successful. He was falling into the pit of negativity, he came everyday (when he didn’t report in sick) and hang around the office, telling everyone, why things are not working, how they can never work, how no one listens to him. I tired to find a better position for him and a good support system to help him, but I had no success. I spent a lot of my energy trying to convince him that his tasks are possible and not really that hard to achieve, but it didn’t help.
We had to go our own ways. Now the former employee found a job in another company and is really successful. This make me really happy, in the end, forcing the employee to leave has helped them grow and expand.
Now, if I need to terminate someone, I think of the employee. Where would he grow, by staying in the company or outside.
When to terminate?
It is really hard to know when to terminate. But if we are Managing the Integrity of our employees, it becomes quite simple. If an employee doesn’t live up to his word, he can’t stay in our team. We are looking for excellence and to be excellent you must have integrity. Once an employee doesn’t intend to do what he says he will do, he must find another place to grow.
What is nice about this, is that when an employee has integrity and does do his controllable actions, he will be successful, which in turn will lead to growth and to results.
When working with integrity, I have also found that, people who feel that they are not adding to the companies value, will leave by themselves and there is no need to terminate them – they do have the integrity to know that they are not growing. How many times can someone stand in front of their team and say that all they intend to do in the coming week is to read e-mails and surf the web, while others are managing to do much more.
The integrity system leads to excellence.