I cannot count the number of times per month a client calls and explains that they want to terminate an employee, and starts the conversation along the lines of, “I know you are going to tell me I should have terminated him/her a long time ago but [fill in the poor excuse here].”. I used to think this was Minnesota nice. We don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, try to see the best in everyone, and think that everyone needs a second, third, fourth, tenth, etc. chance. For most, I tell them their initial gut was the best one and yeah, after reviewing the file, they should have been terminated long ago (and now they have a mess on their hands as the employee has made discrimination complaints, etc.). If the person is not cutting it, you typically know within 30 or 60 days. They either have it or they don’t. The fit the culture, or they don’t. They can grasp the concept or they can’t. Why keep them longer?

Apparently, this may have less to do with “Minnesota nice”, and more to do with an economic theory called the sunk cost fallacy. I was reading a BBC article today discussing the phenomenon of why we make bad decisions, such as the losing gambler that just keeps losing, the poor business model that we keep trying to pump money into to make it work, watching a bad movie all the way to the end, eating way too much at an all-you-can-eat buffet, staying in a bad relationship, or, yep, you guessed it, keeping a poor performing employee when we know that additional training is not going to make the person perform to expectation no matter how much more money we spend on him/her. What about the recruit that you relocated? The high-dollar guaranteed severance executive? The sign-on bonus for the new CDL? The more money/time/effort put into an employee, the harder it becomes to terminate the employee when need be.

These economists and physiologists theorize that people hate cutting their losses. We are more likely to irrationally continue to sink money into a lost cause, rather than to admit failure. And, according to the University of Minnesota’s own study, it is not just humans that do this. Mice and rats are apparently sensitive to time invested in something and resisting giving up something after the decision has been made to plow forward without any indication of future success. How do we fix this thinking? According to the BBC article, it is simply to pause, step back and ask yourself the pros/cons with staying the course and the pros/cons with changing the course. In our world, it usually means calling your employment law attorney and having them tell you what you already know should happen, but you need us to tell you. Which is fine by me.  Oh the stories I could tell…