What are the key takeaways from this Manager Tools episode?

Key insights include: **Dual Responsibility Standard:** Successful performance terminations require two conditions: the employee must fail to meet job requirements AND the manager must have properly documented issues, provided feedback, and held the employee accountable. When managers skip their responsibilities because the work is difficult, HR rightfully blocks termination attempts. Both parties must fulfill their roles for legitimate dismissal.; **Behavioral Documentation Requirement:** Managers must provide objective behavioral evidence across seven work performance categories: quality, quantity, accuracy, timeliness, documentation, communication, and safety. Subjective impressions or feelings are insufficient legal grounds. HR needs concrete examples like missed deadlines, insufficient work volume, or communication failures that both parties can verify, not manager mood-based assessments.; **Geographic Employment Law Variations:** European termination processes can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in separation payments and require 300-400% more effort than US processes. Some countries have worker boards involved in every termination decision. Italy increases taxes dramatically at 50 employees. These geocommercial differences make keeping failed employees financially preferable to termination in many jurisdictions.

Manager Tools

Why Does HR Make It So Hard To Fire People? - Part 1

February 16, 2026

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Personal Finance, Relationships

AI-Generated Summary

Published Feb 18, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Dual Responsibility Standard: Successful performance terminations require two conditions: the employee must fail to meet job requirements AND the manager must have properly documented issues, provided feedback, and held the employee accountable. When managers skip their responsibilities because the work is difficult, HR rightfully blocks termination attempts. Both parties must fulfill their roles for legitimate dismissal.
✓Behavioral Documentation Requirement: Managers must provide objective behavioral evidence across seven work performance categories: quality, quantity, accuracy, timeliness, documentation, communication, and safety. Subjective impressions or feelings are insufficient legal grounds. HR needs concrete examples like missed deadlines, insufficient work volume, or communication failures that both parties can verify, not manager mood-based assessments.
✓Geographic Employment Law Variations: European termination processes can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in separation payments and require 300-400% more effort than US processes. Some countries have worker boards involved in every termination decision. Italy increases taxes dramatically at 50 employees. These geocommercial differences make keeping failed employees financially preferable to termination in many jurisdictions.
✓Hiring-Firing Equivalence Principle: The difficulty level required to fire someone should match the effort invested in hiring them. If termination requires extensive documentation and process, hiring should involve proportional rigor. One Manager Tools leader interviewed an assistant candidate for 50 hours before hiring, recognizing the person would access personal wealth and family communications, demonstrating appropriate hiring thoroughness.
✓Executive Termination Exception: Executives serve at the privilege of the firm and face different termination standards than regular employees. Organizations typically offer compensation packages with nondisclosure agreements when dismissing executives to avoid embarrassment about poor hiring or promotion decisions. This guidance applies only to performance-based terminations of non-executive employees, not theft, harassment, or ethical breaches.

What It Covers

Manager Tools defends HR departments against manager complaints about difficulty firing employees. The episode argues that 99.9% of managers fail to meet proper termination standards on their first attempt, making HR's resistance justified. Part one covers geographic employment law differences and why managerial incompetence, not HR obstruction, prevents legitimate terminations.

Key Questions Answered

•Dual Responsibility Standard: Successful performance terminations require two conditions: the employee must fail to meet job requirements AND the manager must have properly documented issues, provided feedback, and held the employee accountable. When managers skip their responsibilities because the work is difficult, HR rightfully blocks termination attempts. Both parties must fulfill their roles for legitimate dismissal.
•Behavioral Documentation Requirement: Managers must provide objective behavioral evidence across seven work performance categories: quality, quantity, accuracy, timeliness, documentation, communication, and safety. Subjective impressions or feelings are insufficient legal grounds. HR needs concrete examples like missed deadlines, insufficient work volume, or communication failures that both parties can verify, not manager mood-based assessments.
•Geographic Employment Law Variations: European termination processes can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in separation payments and require 300-400% more effort than US processes. Some countries have worker boards involved in every termination decision. Italy increases taxes dramatically at 50 employees. These geocommercial differences make keeping failed employees financially preferable to termination in many jurisdictions.
•Hiring-Firing Equivalence Principle: The difficulty level required to fire someone should match the effort invested in hiring them. If termination requires extensive documentation and process, hiring should involve proportional rigor. One Manager Tools leader interviewed an assistant candidate for 50 hours before hiring, recognizing the person would access personal wealth and family communications, demonstrating appropriate hiring thoroughness.
•Executive Termination Exception: Executives serve at the privilege of the firm and face different termination standards than regular employees. Organizations typically offer compensation packages with nondisclosure agreements when dismissing executives to avoid embarrassment about poor hiring or promotion decisions. This guidance applies only to performance-based terminations of non-executive employees, not theft, harassment, or ethical breaches.

Notable Moment

The hosts reveal their evolution from a decade-long stance of openly stating hatred for HR to recognizing that managers were using this rhetoric to justify poor relationships with HR colleagues. They now advocate that managers love good HR and hate bad HR, acknowledging that empowering manager complaints without accountability damaged workplace relationships unnecessarily.

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Episode Transcript

Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Sarah. And I'm Mark. Today's podcast, why does HR make it so hard to fire people? Part one of two. The questions this cast answers are, why can't I fire someone? Why does HR prohibit me from firing someone? And how can I fire someone? If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Believe it or not, most managers are never actually trained to manage. They're promoted, they're given a team, and they're told to, quote, figure it out. Manager tools effective manager training teaches you the core skill every manager needs, how to run one on ones, build trust, and drive results through your people. Stop guessing and start managing with confidence. Learn more at manager-tools.com/emc. Alright. So, Mark, HR gets a bad reputation. You're telling me this? I know. I know. Exactly. And, yes, even from us over the years, HR has gotten its share of critiques, if you will. We call them as we see them. What can we say? But in one situation, at least one that we know HR has always, always been right, the blame we place on them is wrong, and we, over at Manager Tools, may be the best source for defending HR's stance on firing. So today, we're here to set the record straight. HR is right about not letting the vast majority, 99.9% of managers, fire just anyone at any time for any reasons. Managers, we managers, have a special duty of thoroughness and ethics that too many of us never meet in our first effort to fire someone, and it's wrong. And HR not only does the right thing, but then gets in trouble for it. And we should change that, frankly. Yeah. We shouldn't treat our colleagues the way we do in this regard. And by the way, Sarah, to your point about, you know, we're the right people to do this because we have proven our our bona feeds regarding our opinion of HR for if you don't know, if you're just starting to listen to Managed Tools for, oh, ten years, maybe longer, at least the first ten years, Managed Tools, 5015. We were famous for saying, actually, I was famous for saying, as the guy who writes the podcast and is likely the voice on Manager Tools said, I hate HR. And the reason is because we were speaking to managers and for managers. And the average manager has less than a great relationship with their HR business partner. Not that HR should think of themselves as a business partner to a manager, but that's a separate discussion. And it's a well deserved tension in the relationship. Unfortunately, a lot of people that are in our community, HR people are in our community. They listen to our cast and they got tired of hearing it because they said it made it worse. It empowered managers to come to them and say, Listen, I listen to Manager …

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