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SCHOOL FOR SACKING

The bank bailout announced on Tuesday by Tim Geithner was embarrassingly short on detail. Reportedly, this is because America's treasury secretary spent so much time fighting off pressure to sack and humiliate bankers that he had little left to consider how best to save the country's financial system. David Axelrod was clamouring for dismissals, and apparently Rahm Emanuel had it in for bankers, too.

It seems top government officials might need a lesson in the etiquette of giving someone the boot. They could start by taking tips from Ken Lewis, the Bank of America boss who may have invented the ingenious 15-minute sacking technique all by himself. It's a cut-throat world on Wall Street, and presumably a quarter of an hour is all Lewis had to spare for commode-loving ex-Merrill boss, John Thain.

The art of office discharging is comparable to the art of romantic dumping, so the professionals say. Firmness must be mixed with delicacy. Employees and ex-loved ones desire a satisfactory explanation cushioned by vagueness.

Both sacking and romance are nearly unavoidable subjects these days. Over dinner with Aurelian Lis, president and chief operating officer of a New York-based skincare firm called PRESCRIBEDsolutions, the conversation naturally drifted to matter of firing employees. While working at Unilever, he learned the art of effective sacking at an “organisational behaviour class”. Lis now tends to forego the so-called “praise sandwich”, which he says is “patronising”--if you wouldn't use this method on a lover, why would it work on your gibbering wreck of an employee? Instead he embraces the so-called Exocet Missile Technique. Used during the Falklands War, exocet missile warheads were designed to fly through the air, seemingly undirected at the intended battleship, only to suddenly change course and destroy the target before the enemy could defend itself. “Missile is when you want a fundamental shift in the person’s sense of self from ‘I am a person with a job’ to ‘I am a person without a job’”, Lis explains.

Yet, this aggressive approach is not an employer’s only option. Lewis, arguably the most powerful man in American banking (albeit a potential target for Geithner's exocet), could instead have plumped for what the industry calls the SAEWA (Shock Anger Emotion Withdrawal Acceptance) process. This sacking approach takes an employee through each of these stages, much like someone in mourning. “The key idea is to help them through the stages swiftly so that they reach anger and emotion when in a controlled setting, not on national TV”, says Lis. A potential drawback of this tactic is that it sometimes leaves everyone in tears--both sacker and sacked. “The most difficult thing is how to start the conversation," Lis explains. "Don't chat about the fun they had over Thanksgiving.”

With SAEWA, the mission is to ensure there are no hard feelings once the sacked employee leaves the building with his potted plant and his stapler in a cardboard box. But, like the post-jilt snatching of your toothbrush from your boyfriend’s bathroom cabinet, stuffing your profession into a box after being fired is still a necessary and invariably humiliating element of your final exit.

According to a lucky ex-Merrill worker who now works for Bank of America (who wished to remain anonymous), his department had piles of boxes stacked ominously in the corridor the day before the mass Merrill bloodshed. Bankers desperately “counted how many there were” in a vain attempt to calculate the number of dismissals to come. Some wondered whether they would get to use a whole box, or if they might have to share. 

The worst, however--everyone agrees--is what's known as the Blatant Lie. Rather like, “It's not you, it’s me” or, “We can’t see each other any more, I'm doing my taxes”, telling someone they are, say, too good for the job they are being fired from, is plain insulting. Lucy Kellaway, an award-winning columnist for the FT, hands out annual prizes for management twaddle. Her “Best Term for Sacking People” is “upgrade”, as in “we’re going to upgrade you: allow you to move on so you can upgrade your career elsewhere”. It's the equivalent of “You deserve better than me”.

Unfortunately for Thain (though fortunately for the American taxpayer), this disgraced banker won’t be seeing an upgrade any time soon.

~ KITTY KALETSKY

Picture credit: The Marmot (via Flickr)