Develop Your Skills Exercise: This chapter’s Develop Your Skills feature presented you with some tips on how to terminate an employee. Identify a partner and choose who will be the first to be terminated. Imagine that the person being terminated has been a front desk manager for Sunrise Hotel for three years. After performing very well the first year, the manager earned mediocre performance reviews last year, and even lower reviews this year. After going to two development programs in the last year to improve the front desk manager’s customer service skills, his or her performance continued to worsen and the company has decided to terminate the manager. The termination is effective immediately, and the hotel is willing to offer two weeks of pay as severance if the manager is willing to sign a release of his or her legal rights to sue for wrongful discharge. The person doing the firing is the hotel’s general manager and has been the front desk manager’s supervisor for the entire three years. In fact, the two of you have become friends.

Using the additional background information your instructor gives you and the tips in this chapter’s Develop Your Skills feature, conduct the termination interview. The person getting fired should resist the news and try to make the termination interview as realistic as possible. Don’t make it too easy for the general manager!

When you are finished, the person being fired should give the person doing the firing feedback on what he or she did well, what could have improved the termination interview, and how you were made to feel during the process. Now switch partners with another group and do the exercise again playing the other role.