Reason to terminate

I need some input from other HR Professional on this subject.

Got a Supervisor, different culture and he managed to build his department (assembly line) with 80% ee of his own culture. I know, we in administration should have seen things happening. The employees generally are hard working people and have been with us for many years.

The Supervisor's problem is that he protects his culture group, his people as he calls them. He was counseled that all the employees reporting to him are his people and should be treated equally.

About 2 weeks ago we terminated one of his employees, the person had been through our disciplinary program and caused no problems, realizing we had been generous by giving him a couple extra chances. We could not have the Supervisor present at the termination meeting because the Supervisor verified incorrectly the wrong parts to be place on a machine for this employee, which caused 9000 panels processed with the wrong part, expensive error.

The Supervisor also received a written warning on this issue and on his lack of Supervisory skills, motivation, and support of his Manager's directives. In the Disciplinary meeting with his Manager this Supervisor made the statement "You should be more careful of whom you terminate", when the Manager, also different culture, asked if he tried to intimidate him, he claimed not, but the Manager and I view it as a threat. The Manager had to leave the country for 10 days the next morning to visit with a terminal ill parent, but when he came back we discussed his meeting with the Supervisor.

While the Manager was out of the country the Supevisor counter acted some of the Manager's work directives, and made statements to his direct reports like "He does not like me and is trying to fire me".

His professional ethics and behavior is unacepptable to us. Any input from the Forum on how best to handle this and how you would interprett the above information if it was in your busines is appreciated.

Comments

  • 4 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
  • Okay, here's what I see. It appears that you have counseled and warned and have decided that he needs to go away. You missed a good opportunity to terminate with the expensive production error. But, he is writing his own exit papers by continuing to act contrary to his own supervisor and unacceptable behavior (gossip demeaning upper management, favoritism to select employees, destroying employee morale). So, you issue another written warning or if you do not have strict disciplinary procedures, terminate based on insubordination to his manager. If you have to issue another warning make it very strong and perfectly clear to him that termination is inevitable if he continues to do the same things. He will not go away quietly, but he will find out that “his people” need their jobs more than they need him. If you have good documentation of the counseling and warnings, you should be okay.
  • You need to be very careful that you don't treat this supervisor any differently than you would treat supervisors of other cultures. If other supervisors had made costly production mistakes, changed operating directives from their manager, and told their employees their boss wanted to fire them, what would you do?

    If it were me, I would sit him down one more time, explain the behavior you find unacceptable, give examples of what he needs to change, give him a timeline in which to make the changes, and let him know that if he fails to make satisfactory progress that it could lead to termination.

    Good luck!
  • Thank you both for your time and input. Yes we domented very carefully with quality documents attached, his signature etc. We would not make a difference because of nationality, at last count about 12 different nationalities work here, including this writer, and yes we have written up other Supervisors for infractions.

    We actully given this one more breaks, we ar short on personnel and only as a last resort will terminate him, which will be after a bit more investigating.

    Just for your information, I forgot to mention I also received an anonymous letter complaing about this Supervisor showing favortism and not following company policy. We never could determine who could have written it. When I showed him the letter he put it to petty jelousy on other ee's.
  • [font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 03-22-02 AT 02:59PM (CST)[/font][p]
    As long as you have everything documented, based upon what you posted, sounds ready to reduce out of the supervisory level or terminate.

    Since there is a good chance the employee will file a discrimination complaint with either the state or federal agency, do two things before you fire --

    1. review everything from the supervisor's point of view as if you were the supervisor and wanted to establish the employer's action was discriminatory; see what your weaknesses are if you had to defend your action against such a charge.

    2. have your legal counsel review to make sure that your action can withstand a discrimination charge (That will make all the attorneys on the HRHero Forum happy. I'm helping to keep their brethren and sistern -- is that the right word? -- working). x;-)
Sign In or Register to comment.