Terminating Team Members: The Aftermath

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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Terminating a member of your team is never a step that should be taken lightly, but it is also not a step that can always be avoided. Failure to take the step when it’s necessary will never work out well and will cause far more disruption than the termination will.

In this article I want to look at the impact of a termination on the rest of the team. I’m not going to spend too much time on the termination itself (perhaps I’ll cover that in another article); as project managers, we need to ensure that the way that we lead our team after a termination is optimal for team success--regardless of whether we made the decision to terminate or whether someone else made it.

Communicate early
No project in the history of the world has moved as fast as a rumor. If something dramatic--such as the termination of a team member--has happened on your project, then you need to ensure that you are communicating that fact to the team as quickly as possible. You can’t stop rumors--people will inevitably talk about what’s happened and why it has happened. But you need to make sure that you have provided the team with the relevant facts--that someone is no longer with the organization/project, and that their work items will be reassigned (along with any other appropriate information).

It’s just as important to ensure that you don’t …

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