Breaking Up Should Be Clear

I hate listening to the radio while I’m in the car. Actually, it’s not that I dislike listening, it’s more that I dislike having to turn it off just because I got to my destination, instead of turning it off when I’m ready. My husband has found me many times sitting in my car in the driveway listening to the last notes of a song before I can bear to turn it off. There is almost nothing worse that having a song stop in the middle and leave you hanging for the last notes. I really can’t stand it.

Almost as bad as that is getting terminated from your job and being left hanging as to why. No law says that a company has to tell you why you are being fired. But just like listening to a song that stops right before the end, if the boss doesn’t resolve the last note, someone else will. And it may not be the right note. When a worker is not clearly given the reason for a firing, they will fill in their own. And that’s when bosses and companies risk the headache of illegal discrimination charges.

Workers tend to believe they’ve been fired because the boss doesn’t like them, not because their work was somehow below the bar. Bosses say they took action because the worker just wasn’t getting it done.

Workers will almost always tell you that they had no idea there was a problem with their work, while bosses will tell you there’s no way the worker could not have known there was a problem.

When it comes to difficult conversations, we tend to talk in code, hoping the person we’re talking to understands the code so that we don’t have to say anything uncomfortable. That way we get to pat ourselves on the back for saying what needed to be said, and if the other person missed it, well, that’s not our fault. Bosses frequently fail to be clear and unequivocal in their expectations for this very reason.

Workers are not off the hook here, though. While bosses are often guilty of failure to communicate, workers are often guilty of failure to admit they understood. If a worker repeatedly arrives late to work, and the boss repeatedly says in staff meetings that prompt attendance is important, the worker can’t reasonably believe that their own tardiness is okay with the boss just because the boss never had a one on one conversation about it. That’s teenager thinking. Teenagers are notoriously good at drawing a cloud of confusion over otherwise clear instructions. A teenage friend of mine got grounded for coming in two hours after his midnight curfew. His defense was “You told me to be in by midnight, and I was.” Mom then gave him what should have been the gotcha moment. “Then why does your traffic ticket say you were driving around at two in the morning?” To which the teenager replied, “You never said I couldn’t go back out again!”


About the only time it’s ever okay for a boss to be heard saying “I never told him specifically, but he had to have known,” is when a worker brings a paintball gun to the office and shoots paint splats on everyone. Then it’s okay for the boss to say “He should have known better.” Any other time, a boss has no moral right to do anything less than say, out loud, what you want from your worker.

Failure to sing that last note leaves room for a cacophonous chorus of improvised notes, and the only thing worse than not hearing the last note of a song is having to hear it in court.