The First Time I Had to Let Someone Go

I had been managing a team of four in Pune for about eighteen months when it became clear that one member of the team was not going to reach the standard the role required.

I had documented this carefully, had provided specific feedback across six months of formal check-ins, had adjusted the support I was offering twice based on what she told me she needed, and had arrived, with the sign-off of my own manager and the HR department, at the conclusion that the employment needed to end.

I knew this was the right call professionally. I knew it with considerably less certainty personally. The meeting itself lasted fourteen minutes. I had rehearsed it, if that word applies to something so unpleasant, with the care of someone who wanted to be humane without being evasive.

She was professional and then she cried and then she was professional again and I sat with both of those things without doing what I desperately wanted to do, which was to find some reason to reverse the decision that the previous six months had made necessary.

I drove home in a state I had not anticipated - not guilt exactly, because I had not done anything wrong, but a specific heaviness that I had no prior experience of and no framework for carrying.

I called my own manager that evening, not for reassurance but because I needed to describe what I was feeling to someone who would understand its texture. She said something that I have returned to many times: the weight you are feeling is appropriate. It means you understand what you have done.

The managers who feel nothing are the ones to worry about. The weight reduced over time. It did not disappear, which I think is also appropriate. I have let two people go since then. Each time has the same specific cost.

I have learned to carry the cost without being paralysed by it, which I believe is the correct balance but which I would not have known how to find without the first time.