As a new CEO, it is only a matter of time before you have to fire someone for the first time.
Nobody starts a company to fire people, but the reality is that it is rare to run a company for any real length of time without having to do it.
There are many different reasons why you might need to do this. There are a variety of performance reasons and, particularly in fast-growing companies, there is the issue of people who simply don’t scale—some people are a lot better at starting companies than they are at leading large teams.
I am also not going to talk about laying people off or making them redundant, which is a related but actually very different process.
Here, I’m focus on the steps you need to take before firing someone for the first time. For obvious reasons, it’s a subject that is not commonly discussed, so my intention is help CEOs and founders find their way along a path full of potential difficulties, embarrassments and awkwardness.