The Quirky Side of Work

Sometimes you have to fire your clients. It doesn’t happen often, and as a consultant, it always feels risky. This week I had a falling out with a CEO. After he’d had a falling out with one of my team, and after we’d spent a lot of time trying to pour oil on troubled waters.

We’d been working together for about a year and had been referred by an existing client. The CEO was direct, knew what he wanted and we’d already helped him to exit a couple of ‘troublesome’ team members. He called one day to say there was a safeguarding concern about an employee who was working their notice: what could we do about it?

Without going into details, it turned out that the CEO and this employee had had a disagreement. The CEO wanted them out quickly – and cheaply, despite the contractual notice pay they were owed. Our proposed approach was a light-touch response, to acknowledge and de-escalate the situation. We could communicate with the employee and leave the CEO to get on with running the business. The employee would leave immediately with pay in lieu of notice. The CEO was much more bullish, calling the employee all sorts of names and determined to go for the jugular. Suspension letters, grievances and data subject access requests flew back and forth.

It leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. I’m trying to build a business our clients love to work with, and a business our clients trust. Ultimately this CEO didn’t trust us enough to feel we had his interests at heart or to trust our approach, based on years of experience, over his emotional reaction to the situation. Sometimes the beauty of being an external HR consultant is the the objective perspective you can bring to the tensest conflicts. But we have to be invited in. In this instance we just weren’t the right fit.

The weirdest thing? They were both employment lawyers!