I recently met with a young man who is reeling from being fired by a rapidly growing megachurch. The reason they gave for firing him just a few months after he was hired: “You’re not a team fit.” I don’t know the young man well, and I’m only vaguely familiar with the church he was fired from. There may be solid grounds for letting the young leader go. But the “not a team fit” is not the real reason you were fired. The label has become the wonderfully vague catch-all phrase when firing staff members. To quote the ’70s theologian Dave Mason:
There is no good guy, there is no bad guy. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.
Wouldn’t it be fascinating to hear what’s really going on when a leader throws the “not a team fit” card. The real reason you were fired might sound more like this:
The Real Reason You Were Fired
1. We don’t develop people.
We talk about people development, but we just don’t have the time. We are hyper-focused on our mission and we can’t slow down to help someone we think is a B player become an A player. That’s why we almost always hire from the outside and why we have a ‘hire slow/fire fast” philosophy.
2. We value results over people.
We have a set of metrics we have to hit, and our staff is simply a means to that end. If you hit your goals you have a seat on the bus, if you miss the mark its time for you to go. Producers advance, non-producers move on.
