I have hired the wrong person more than once. I have also fired the right person too quickly. Both mistakes cost me a year of my life and a chunk of trust with the team. The first one taught me to hire slow. The second one taught me to fire even slower.
The version of this advice you hear at conferences is “hire slow, fire fast.” It is half right and half lazy. Hire slow keeps a bad teammate out of the boat. Fire fast often skips the harder question, the one no leader wants to ask, which is whether the seat was rigged to fail before the person ever sat in it.
Most of the time when someone is struggling, four things are happening at the same time. The person has gaps. Their direct leader has gaps. The org has gaps. And the leader at the top, the one quietly itching to make the call, has gaps too. Firing only addresses one of those four. The other three stay in the building, and the next person you put in that seat inherits the same trap.
Hire slow, the same lesson you have heard
Dave Ramsey says you should multiply your hiring time by four. If you think it should take a month, give it four. If you think it should take a quarter, give it a year.
That sounds insane until you do the math on a bad hire. A bad hire is not just a salary line. It is the time you spend training, the time the team spends covering, the time you spend in difficult conversations, the time you spend rebuilding morale, and the time you spend hiring again when it ends. If a hire is late by a month, that is expensive. If a hire is wrong, that is catastrophic.
The way I run it now at the agency is intentionally inconvenient. Multiple conversations. Practical work, not just talk. A real conversation about how the person handles a hard moment, not a pre-rehearsed answer to a behavioral question. A second look from at least one person on the team who is not me, because I am too easily charmed by people I want to like. And a slow yes, not a fast one.
We have lost candidates because of it. That is a real cost. We have not lost the wrong candidate because of it. That is a much bigger gain.
And there is a 2026 wrinkle worth naming. The cost of holding a seat empty has come down. The work that used to demand a warm body for forty hours a week can often get done in a fraction of that time with a contractor plus AI, or with the existing team plus AI. Stitching six weeks of coverage is now a real lever, and it buys you the runway to refuse a panic hire.
Fire slower, because firing fast usually fires the wrong thing
Here is the part of the lesson I had to learn the hard way. When someone is struggling, the easy story is that they are the problem. The harder story is that you might be. So before you build the exit plan, run four checks honestly, in this order.
1. Check yourself first
You are the one who hired them. You are the one who set the expectation. You are the one who decided what a win looks like. So before anything else, sit with the question, “Did I tell this person, clearly and in writing, what success in this seat actually is?” In most cases the answer is, “I told them the version that lived in my head, but not the one that lives on paper.” That is on you, not them.
2. Check their direct leader
If you are not their direct manager, the next honest check is whether their manager is leading them well. Are they meeting weekly. Are they giving real feedback in the moment. Are they protecting their teammate’s focus or piling on. A struggling employee under a checked-out manager is not a personnel problem. It is a leadership problem the manager has not been told to fix yet.
3. Check the org
Sometimes the seat itself is broken. Two competing bosses. A scope that has quietly tripled. A system the company never finished building. A culture that punishes the thing you are asking the person to do. Run the test, “Could a strong version of this hire actually win in this seat, given the tools, the systems, the cross-team support, and the constraints I am handing them?” If the honest answer is no, no hire will save the seat.
4. Check whether you actually equipped them
This is the one that gets skipped most often. Equipping is not orientation. Equipping is not a Notion doc with three links and a Loom video. Equipping is, “Have I given this person the training, the access, the budget, the air cover, the time, and the explicit permission to do the thing I just asked them to do?” Most of the time when I am tempted to fire someone, I find I have not. I asked them to win a fight while quietly tying their hands.
If you can answer those four checks honestly and the answer is still that the person is the problem, then a parting conversation is the right move. But by the time you get there, it usually does not feel like firing. It feels like both of you finally agreeing that this was not the right fit, with dignity intact on both sides.
What “firing slower” looks like in practice
Firing slower does not mean letting things drift. Drift is the worst version of cowardice in leadership. It means moving fast on clarity and slow on consequence.
Clarity fast looks like a written summary the same week you notice the gap, a specific list of what good would look like over the next thirty to sixty days, a real cadence of weekly conversations where you check both sides honestly, and a documented effort to remove the obstacles you found in the four checks above.
Consequence slow looks like giving the person an actual chance to win once the obstacles are cleared. Sometimes they cannot, and you both know it inside thirty days. Sometimes they shock you. I have seen both. The one outcome I have never seen end well is firing without ever giving the person a written shot.
If you do all of that and the person still cannot deliver, the parting is mutual, not a surprise. The team watches the whole thing, and what they see is a leader who tried to hold the line on standards and on dignity at the same time. That earns trust you cannot buy back any other way.
Hire slow. Fire slower. And before you sign anyone’s exit paperwork, make sure you have signed your own learning paperwork first.
