When the boss gets fired

‘My boss got fired today!’ Is that a cue for celebration or concern? What kind of power vacuum has this left and are you now wondering who in your team might get promoted over you? Or worse, will a stranger fill that vacancy? 

When someone leaves the team, morale may drop across the remaining members as they start to think, ‘am I next?’. (Furnham, 2017).  When it is the team leader who is shown the door, this can also create a destabilising effect as confusion over roles and responsibilities emerge in the absence of a singular authority. 

Additionally, the loss of a trusted teammate can reduce the trust between team members – if that person was someone others relied on for help or honest feedback, the team’s sense of psychological safety may dip. Psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999) refers to a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. A departure can undermine this if remaining members feel less comfortable or more uncertain in the altered group.  

On the other hand, if the team has strong pre-existing trust and the departure is handled with transparency and fairness, trust can endure. When employees view the process as fair – that is to say - the exiting member was treated respectfully, and the team was informed appropriately – trust in leadership is preserved and team commitment tracks higher. 

Research examining the difference in company performance in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has highlighted marked performance differences in companies that were transparent and open in communicating the reason for layoffs, as compared with those who were perceived to be deceitful and lacking empathy (McGrath, 2013). 

So be honest. Everybody recognises that companies need to cover costs to stay in business. If this is not possible with the current level of overhead, changes need to happen. Transparency in these situations will preserve trust. And what’s more -  being clear on what the plan is after the changes have taken place will prevent any confusion or politics jumping in to fill the space left by exiting teammates.  

As the ex-President George W. Bush said of his country’s inauspicious invasion of Iraq – ‘We wanted regime change, the trouble was we just didn’t know which regime to change it to.’ 

References: 

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative science quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. 

Furnham, A., & Treglown, L. (2017). Disenchantment: Managing motivation and demotivation at work. Bloomsbury Publishing. 

McGrath, R. G. (2013). The end of competitive advantage: How to keep your strategy moving as fast as your business. Harvard Business Review Press. 

Image source: PA