How to get rid of your best employees
Some organizations are just teeming with good employees. They’re everywhere and they won’t leave you alone. They’re always asking questions and wanting to make things better or more efficient. They take up space on the elevator. They use up all the good desks and computers. And they do all the work. Argh! What a nuisance.
Luckily, I have compiled this definitive guide to getting rid of all of them. That’s right, this simple set of rules will drive even the most dedicated employees away. And the best part is that if you follow these instructions to the letter, you won’t even have to fire them. They’ll just leave on their own. Guaranteed!
Ready? Let’s get started.
First, make sure it’s hard to tell who is in charge of a project.
This is possibly the most important rule. It’s like Bilbo’s ring, but it’s a rule. So it’s the one rule to rule them all — if that even makes sense. Without it, many great employees will find ways around the other rules and help your organization thrive in spite of your best efforts.
Seriously, think about it: if nobody knows who’s in charge, they will have no idea where to turn for help. Sometimes, it’s almost enough to implement just this one rule to confuse and undermine the best and brightest on your staff.
Here are some great tips to help ensure that nobody will be in charge of anything, ever:
Never designate an actual project lead.
Sounds simple, right? Careful! Leadership abhors a vacuum. It’s surprisingly easy to accidentally give someone the idea that they’re in charge of a project.
The best way to prevent this is to make sure there’s a large group of people around any time you talk about a project. Also, avoid eye contact with — well, with everyone. It’s probably best to just look out the window or at your phone. Eye contact is one of those non-verbal cues that will lead people to believe you are talking to them.
With no project lead one of two things will happen. Either multiple people will try to take charge and give conflicting instructions to the project team, or nobody will take charge and no one will give any instructions to anyone. It doesn’t really matter which outcome you get; they’re both equally effective at frustrating your smartest employees.
Only talk about projects to top-level managers.
If you let people ask you questions about projects, you might feel like you have to answer the questions. The best way to avoid answering questions is to avoid questions in the first place.
Top level managers will almost never ask questions because they are “too busy” and often think that asking questions makes them appear uninformed. If you only ever mention projects to top level managers, this helps to prevent any potentially useful information flowing down to the team that will do the actual work.
As a bonus, sometimes the managers wil forget about the project and won’t even mention it to their teams until it’s too late to reasonably complete the work. Confusion, frustration and unreasonable deadlines, FTW!
Avoid talking about projects with the employees that actually do the work.
This is a corollary to the previous rule, but it still needs to be said. Remember that a smart employee who has even one converstation with someone who understands a project can become successful. Avoid this at all costs!
To ensure that no one who actually does any real work in your organization knows any specific information about projects, build a firewall between the smart people and the people with the information.
If the worst happens and somehow a project team member ends up in a meeting with someone who “knows stuff,” make sure you’re in the room. Any time specific useful details are mentioned, derail the conversation by talking about grandiose plans and “big ideas”.
Make sure all projects are vaguely specified (if at all).
This rule can be tricky because most intelligent and resourceful employees will fill in the gaps of a poorly defined project using their vast personal experience and careful research to help them figure out the best way to implement “your” idea.
Truly great employees will nearly always try to confirm that they’re on the right track before they spend too much time on a project. This is part of the reason it’s important to make sure that nobody knows who’s in charge. (See previous rule.) A near total lack of understanding goals and intended outcomes about a project will typically leave smart, dedicated people frustrated.
Remember, a frustrated emlpoyee is a dissatisfied employee. Great employees who are dissatisfied with the impact they are making are only one step away from leaving your organization to go bug some other employer. Nice!
Don’t help your team figure out what the priorities really are.
This is an easy one. Get a team working on multiple projects that are all due at about the same time. This will mean that the team is put in the position of choosing to complete one project on time and delaying the others.
The effect? There’s always at least one manager who will be upset and will blame the team for missing a deadline.
The takeaway: Without any information about the actual priorities of the organization, there’s a good chance the project team will prioritize the wrong project. This means that even if one project gets completed on schedule, it won’t even be the one that should have been done first. Bam! Two mistakes at once. It’s like a double-whammy!
Tell your best employees to be creative and use their expertise, but reject every idea they have.
This is virtually guaranteed to demoralize even the most loyal of your great employees and the best part about this step is it takes absolutely no skill or expertise to execute flawlessly. In fact, having any expertise can make it harder to pull this off.
In the unlikely case you do have some expertise, a sharp blow to the skull with a blunt object will take care of that for you nicely. Alternatively, you can bang your head against the wall until you forget why you are banging your head against the wall. Easy-peasy.
If someone does a good job, change the project scope.
Let’s face it, even a blind pig sometimes finds an acorn now and then; and no matter how much you try to prevent it, smart people will sometimes do something great in spite of all the obstacles you put in front of them. They’re like relentless zombie hoards — except they already have brains.
The easiest way to remedy this situation is to change the scope of the project. Here’s a few choice phrases you can use in this situation:
“That’s good, but where’s the rest of it?”
“Ok, but for this to really work we need to add another one.”
“Let’s try something different.”
“This is nice, but I need one that goes to eleven.”
Note: It doesn’t really matter if any of these phrases actually make sense in the context of your project. In fact, the more nonsensical they are, the more confused everyone will be!
Constantly move the deadline.
This is a great tactic to generate frustration. If a team has already made progress on a project, move the deadline out. The team will usually re-prioritize and start working on the next project in the queue. Then just before the original deadline, tell them that you will actually need the project done by the original deadline. Ha!
Conversely, if a team hasn’t yet started on one project, but is making good progress on another, move the deadline of the pending project up to some unreasonable date. This will force the team to abandon the potentially successful project putting them in a situation where it’s impossible to do even a moderately good job, thus killing two projects with one deadline change. It’s a spirit-killing ninja move!
Remember, it’s impossible to deliver something that’s good, fast and cheap. So, forcing under-resourced teams into impossible deadlines is nearly certain to ensure the delivery of a crappy project and there’s nothing that talented people like less than being forced into delivering crappy projects.
Ha! Take that you smart bitches!
Let them know you’re disappointed.
When the outcome doesn’t meet your expectations (and let’s face it, if you follow these rules, you’ll almost certainly never get the outcome you originally wanted), let your team know that you’re disappointed and that you expect them to do better.
It’s just basic psychology. Forcing someone to do a bad job and then berating them for it is probably one of the best ways to demoralize and demotivate employees. A disheartened employee will have one foot out the door before you can say, “I really hoped this would have turned out better.”
Bonus Tip: Don’t pay market rates.
There’s always some other sap out there who will pay market rates for great employees. Avoid fair pay and you’ll create even more incentive for your employees to jump ship faster than rats on the Titanic.
It’s pretty simple stuff really. Even a brain-dead, diseased monkey could follow this advice. (Actually, most of this stuff sort of comes naturally to mentally deficient leaders.)
After a few months of this regimen, you’ll be left with pretty much nothing but the lazy and ineffective people who keep showing up and plodding along because, let’s face it, nobody else would hire them anyway.
But that was the goal, right? Getting the best employees out of the way so you never have to ruin your diet with the taste of sweet success ever again. So imagine a lackluster workplace where talent dies and failure breeds more failure. Go ahead. Take a minute and actually imagine it. (That’s when you see pictures in your head that don’t go through your eyes.) Got it?
Now get in there and fail!
Note: This article is based on the composites of a large number of people I have worked with over the past 20 years. Any similarity with actual persons, living or dead should be plainly apparent to them and those who know them. All events described herein actually happened, though on occasion I have taken certain, very small, liberties with chronology, truth, and the liklihood that anything suggested will work because that is my right as an American.
