A Strategic Approach to Your First Employee Termination

Sooner or later, every leader faces it. Someone on your team isn't working out — and the path forward is a conversation you've been dreading.

For a first-time manager, it can feel like personal failure. You hired them. You believed in them. You invested time, energy, and goodwill. And now you have to let them go. For a founder who built the team from scratch, it's even harder — this person helped you get somewhere. The emotional weight is real.

But here's what 20+ years of HR executive work has taught me: the leaders who handle terminations well aren't the ones who feel nothing. They're the ones who prepared everything. The instinct to search for the perfect script, the clean checklist, the legally safe language — that instinct is understandable. It's also the wrong place to start. There is no clean termination. The goal isn't clean. The goal is honest, human, and well-prepared.

Why Most First Terminations Go Wrong

The mistake isn't usually the legal part. Most managers have enough sense to consult someone, document something, or at least Google what not to say. The mistake is being underprepared for the human part — and the ripple effects that come after.

I've worked alongside managers who delayed a necessary termination for six months because they couldn't bring themselves to have the conversation. That delay didn't spare anyone pain. It extended a situation that wasn't working, sent confusing signals to the rest of the team, and ultimately made the final conversation harder — because by then, everyone already knew what was coming.

Delay is its own kind of harm. So is over-preparation of the wrong things — scripting the perfect words while the documentation is incomplete, the severance is miscalculated, and no one has thought about what to say to the team the next morning.

This is the full framework. Not just the conversation — everything around it.

Layer One: The Legal Foundation — Get This Right Before the Conversation

Before you sit down across from someone to deliver this news, your legal foundation has to be in order. That means documentation — every performance conversation, every written warning, every accommodation discussion, clearly dated and specific. It means consulting employment counsel if there are any complicating factors: a recent complaint, a leave request, a protected class situation.

Timing matters legally. Terminations that occur shortly after a complaint, a leave request, or a protected disclosure carry elevated legal risk. Know your exposure before you move.

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The documentation you're creating today during performance management is what protects you later. If it isn't written down, it didn't happen.

What Does a Defensible Documentation Trail Actually Look Like?

This is where many managers discover they have a problem — not on the day of the termination, but in the weeks leading up to it when they go to pull the record and realize it barely exists.

A defensible trail isn't a stack of vague emails. It's specific, dated, and shows a pattern: what was expected, what fell short, what was communicated, what support was offered, and what continued despite that support. Each entry should be able to stand on its own. Anyone reading it — an employment attorney, a mediator, a judge — should be able to understand exactly what happened and when.

If you're realizing right now that your documentation is thin, stop. Don't proceed to termination until you've shored it up or gotten a legal opinion on whether what you have is sufficient. Rushing forward with a weak paper trail is how you end up with a wrongful termination claim that costs far more than the months of discomfort you were trying to avoid.

Layer Two: The Conversation — Be Direct, Be Brief, Be Human

State the decision in the first 30 seconds. Don't build to it. Don't apologize your way into it. Don't over-explain. The decision has been made. Say that clearly.

Here's what that sounds like in practice: 'I've made the decision to end your employment, effective today. I want to walk you through what happens next.' That's it. That's the opening. Not a performance recap, not a justification, not a list of every way they fell short. The conversation that comes next is about transition — their final day, equipment return, final paycheck, benefits continuation.

Have those answers ready before you sit down. Uncertainty in this moment doesn't feel compassionate — it feels cruel. The person sitting across from you is trying to process something significant. Practical, clear answers are a kindness, not a cold formality.

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A Real Scenario: What 'Prepared' Actually Looks Like

I worked with a founder — 40-person company, first real HR hire hadn't started yet — who needed to let go of an early employee. The relationship went back to the founding days. This person had helped build something real. But the role had evolved, the performance had stalled, and the conversations over six months hadn't moved anything.

Before the meeting, we built the documentation summary, reviewed the severance package with outside counsel, prepared the team announcement, and walked through the conversation word for word — not to script it, but so the founder knew exactly what to say in the first 30 seconds and what not to say after that. We also talked through what he was actually feeling, because that mattered too. The grief was real. So was the relief.

The conversation lasted 18 minutes. The employee was upset — that was expected and appropriate. But it was handled with dignity. The team knew by end of day. The transition plan was already written. No one was left in the dark, and no one was blindsided by ambiguity.

Preparation made that possible. Not because it removed the difficulty — it didn't. Because it contained it.

Layer Three: The Team — How You Handle This Tells Them Everything

The way you handle a termination tells your remaining team more about your values than any all-hands presentation. They're watching — not just to see what you say about the departure, but how quickly you communicate, how transparently you address the impact, and how clearly you signal what you expect from everyone still there.

Announce the departure promptly — same day where possible. Ambiguity breeds speculation. When people don't have information, they fill the gap with whatever story fits their anxiety.

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HR Acuity's 2026 employee relations research makes this point plainly: the organizations that handle difficult personnel decisions well are the ones that treat every interaction as data — consistent documentation, consistent communication, consistent standards. The teams that trust their leaders do so because they've seen how those leaders act when things go hard, not just when things are good.

When It's a First Termination vs. a Pattern Problem

There's a distinction worth naming. A single termination handled well is a leadership moment. A pattern of terminations — high turnover, repeated performance issues, recurring documentation gaps — is a systemic problem. One requires tactical support. The other requires a harder conversation about what's breaking earlier in the process: hiring, onboarding, manager coaching, performance expectations.

This is exactly where SURI™, The HR Intelligence Platform, changes what's possible. Most companies don't have the infrastructure to catch these patterns early. They're reactive — they see the outcome (a termination, a complaint, a resignation) without ever understanding the signal that preceded it.

SURI doesn't just handle the moment. It captures what's happening across the organization — manager interactions, escalation patterns, documentation quality — so HR and leadership can see what's developing before it becomes a problem that ends in a termination conversation.

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Most HR systems capture transactions. SURI captures signals. Traditional HR tells you what happened. SURI helps you understand what's happening — and what's likely to happen next.

You Don't Have to Navigate This Alone

If you're approaching your first termination and want a thought partner before the conversation, reach out. Not after — before. This is exactly the kind of situation where experienced HR guidance makes the difference between a decision that holds up and one that creates new problems.

At Surge People Partners, we step in with interim and project HR support for companies navigating exactly these moments — the ones that require real HR judgment, not just a checklist. And for the ongoing work of catching issues earlier, building manager capability, and keeping documentation where it needs to be, SURI™ gives your team the intelligence layer that makes the next hard call less hard.

This is the kind of work that shapes how your team sees you. It's worth doing right.