I. The Uncomfortable Question We All Avoid
Let me begin not with numbers, but with a memory.
It was early spring, Amsterdam still grey. I had just signed off on a termination notice, an act I had postponed for months. She wasn’t failing at her job. She was kind, loyal, and well-intentioned. But her mindset had frozen in time, and the company had not. The delta between what she could offer and what we now required had become a daily tax, not only on performance, but on collective morale.
That day, I didn’t just fire an employee. I wrestled with a deeper truth: in entrepreneurship, ethics aren’t about intentions, they’re about consequences.
II. Why This Topic Hurts More Than Others
Letting someone go is one of the most ethically loaded acts of leadership. Not because it’s avoidable, but because it is so often mishandled in silence, shame, or denial.
We confuse kindness with delay.
We confuse loyalty with inertia.
We confuse avoiding conflict with protecting dignity.
And in doing so, we break trust, both with the person we keep too long, and with those around them who carry the weight of dysfunction.
Let me be clear: keeping the wrong person is more unethical than letting them go with clarity and care.
III. The Numbers We Don’t Want to See
Here's a number I rarely see discussed in management reports:
€23,400.
That’s the average annual cost of retaining a misaligned employee in a 15-person company in Europe, not in salary, but in lost synergy, team friction, and client error remediation.
In GRC terms, this is called “structural drag.”
In human terms, it’s called resentment in the break room.
We teach CEOs how to calculate EBITDA, yet they remain blind to the silent tax of misalignment. It doesn’t show up in QuickBooks. It shows up in team burnout, passive resistance, and the tragic phrase: “it’s just easier to do it myself.”
IV. What Makes a Termination Ethical?
There are only two questions that matter:
- Did you give the person all the information, context, and feedback they needed to evolve?
- If they were your sibling, would you want them to remain in a role that no longer respects their potential or fits their skills?
Letting someone go ethically doesn’t mean making it painless. It means making it purposeful.
- Was the process transparent?
- Were expectations documented and discussed?
- Were coaching and alternatives offered before judgment?
- Was the decision documented in a way that shows care, not just compliance?
If your answer to these is “yes,” you’re not terminating.
You’re releasing.
That is the ethical act: to release someone from a story that no longer fits them, before it damages both them and the story.
V. The Right Words When You Have to Do It
Many managers ask: “What should I say when I let them go?”
Here’s what I say, word for word:
“This decision is not a judgment of your worth as a person. It’s an alignment issue between what the company now requires and where your strengths are best expressed. I take full responsibility for the clarity and context you were (or weren’t) given. Today is not about blame. It’s about release. You deserve to grow elsewhere. And we need to honor that honestly.”
Then I pause.
And I listen.
Silence, in that moment, is more ethical than justification.
VI. A Note to the Person Being Let Go
If you’re reading this from the other side of the table, if you’ve been let go, know this:
Termination is not rejection. It is redirection.
Sometimes, the most ethical thing the world can do for you is to force a course correction you didn’t have the courage to initiate alone.
Your worth didn’t change.
The container around you did.
Find a new one. Or build it.
VII. The Real Measure of Leadership
Leadership is not proven by how long you keep people.
It’s proven by how courageously you release them when the moment demands it and by how clearly you separate human dignity from organizational necessity.
When we fear letting someone go, we are not protecting them.
We are protecting our own fear of being disliked, misjudged, or called cruel.
But ethics, like fire, refines through discomfort.
And in this discomfort lies the true duty of governance, not to preserve comfort, but to protect the future.
Final Thought
Letting someone go is not the end of ethics.
It’s the beginning of it.
Don’t do it lightly.
But don’t delay it out of guilt, either.
Because at the end of the day, the most unethical thing a leader can do is confuse being nice with being fair.
And fairness, real fairness, demands clarity, timing, and truth, even when it stings.