I Had to Fire the Guy

This content was produced by 21 Hats.

See Full Show Notes By 21 Hats

Podcast Transcript

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Paul, Jay, and Sarah. It’s great to have you here. I want to start today with a Wall Street Journal story that I recently highlighted in the Morning Report. It’s about how being CEO can be hazardous to your health. In fact, more CEOs died in office in 2023 than in any year since 2010. Not surprisingly, the story focused on the stress of the job, on people working too hard, on not taking care of themselves. And right after I published it, I got an email from a regular on this podcast who said she has been really sick since Monday, she can’t walk up a flight of stairs, but she has a meeting scheduled with her biggest client. Which leads me to ask: Are you guys taking care of yourselves?

Jay Goltz:
Can we check out the article first? Because I have to tell you, what kind of journalism is it? Nineteen out of 100? Out of 10,000? Out of a million? If the average CEO is 58 years old, the odds of them dying in a year is 1 percent. So, what kind of context is that? Nineteen CEOs died?

Paul Downs:
Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing, Jay. It’s complete bullshit.

Jay Goltz:
Yeah. Thank you.

Loren Feldman:
Well, the 19 number is ridiculous. You know, all they told us is that the number went up. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an issue here with CEOs stressing themselves.

Jay Goltz:
No, you’re leaving out the fact that, in the last 10 years, the Baby Boomers are now getting older. And for all we know, the average age of the CEO has gotten older, and that it’s turning now.

I’m a middle Baby Boomer. I’m 67. The average age of CEOs has gone up over the last few years, and it will start to go down as the Baby Boomers are retiring. So there are so many things missing from that, so to act like this actually means something, I think, is kind of silly, because they gave us no information.

Sarah Segal:
I was also struck by the source of some of the data. It was from Chief, which is a women’s group. I mean, to me, I just looked at that and went, “Oh, they did some sort of survey so that they could get PR out of it.”

Jay Goltz:
Yes. And I don’t like using this phrase, but it sure seems like fake news.

Paul Downs:
Yeah, I mean, down at the bottom, or in the middle of it—here we go: “Most of the more than 1,600 CEOs in this study lived into their 80s—longer than average for the general population—but shorter, in some cases, than they might have lived with less stress.” Well, there you have it folks. A) My headline is not true. And B) if it is, I can’t prove it. So what kind of story is that?

Sarah Segal:
So there’s also the question: The lifespan and the career span of a CEO usually tends to be pretty short. CMOs as well. The average job duration is like 16 months to two years maybe. So how do these short-term gigs add up? Probably it’s the stress of the job. But bouncing from job to job as well provides a level of anxiety and stress for a lot of these folks.

Jay Goltz:
It’s a bad control, because the fact is, the average, quote-unquote CEO has top notch medical care, probably doesn’t smoke cigarettes—probably. So it’s just a non-controlled study that has absolutely—I don’t know how you can draw any conclusions from that.

Sarah Segal:
There was one point in the article that did sit with me a little bit, and it’s how female CEOs tend to suffer in silence a little bit more than men. I was listening to, I don’t know, some podcast or TikTok the other day, and it was talking about how women, if they indicate that they are dealing with any health or mental issues—as a leader, I feel like there’s still a double-standard, in terms of expectation. Like, “Oh, she’s weak,” as opposed to a male CEO. It would just be like, “Well, it’s a stressful job.” But that’s just my kind of novice perspective.

Loren Feldman:
So I think everything you guys are saying makes perfect sense to me. You’re raising legitimate criticisms of the story. But I doubt you’re suggesting that the whole phenomenon is wrong. I mean, there’s a lot of stress in these jobs.

Sarah Segal:
What I would say is that I think pinpointing stress and jobs to a particular title is wrong. My mother became ill and passed away, and she had a very high-stress job. And we always thought that the demands of her job and the stress that she felt impacted her physical wellbeing. And I think that that’s across the board. It doesn’t have to be a CEO. It could be a CFO, it could be the rank and file person—

Jay Goltz:
A doctor.

Sarah Segal:
A doctor, right. One hundred percent

Paul Downs:
Yeah, I think that, if you compare the stress of being a CEO to the stress of being a single mom who’s going to take a bus between three part-time jobs, where they never tell her at the beginning of the week when she’s working, I’ll take CEO any day. I just don’t think that this is a meaningful article. It’s just clickbait.

Loren Feldman:
All right, so let’s talk about—

Paul Downs:
Got anything else for us, Loren? [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Yes, I do!

Sarah Segal:
Poor, Loren. Sorry.

Loren Feldman:
Wait a second. Don’t apologize. This is what we’re here for. We’re here to bring reality to every situation that can affect the running of a business. So, you guys are providing a service.

All right, let’s talk about real stress. Jay, you recently had a stressful situation with an employee, a long-time employee who got in trouble and forced you to make some difficult decisions. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jay Goltz:
Not much—for his own privacy, but—with me 29 years, since he was 17 years old, and falls under the category of sexual harassment. And it was just a difficult situation of which there are some lessons from this. Sexual harassment, if you think that it’s not happening at your company… Maybe it isn’t, maybe it is. If you’ve got 30, 50, 100—I’ve got 130 employees—it’s a problem. And you can have all the training you want, which we do. We do the training. But it’s very difficult.

And one of the worst phrases ever made, in my mind—usually, usually—is zero tolerance, because it takes out judgment. And the fact is, things are not always black and white. Is it sexual harassment for someone to ask someone out for a date? Is it sexual harassment when they ask them twice? Is it sexual harassment when they close the door, and they grab their arm? It’s not black and white.

And anyone who goes, “Well, people should speak up.” I fully understand that, especially for a woman, it is very difficult to speak up. It’s embarrassing. They’re worried about getting in trouble. They’re worried about losing their job. It’s very complicated. And then they worry about, “Oh, the manager is tight with the owner, so they’re not going to do anything.” At the end of the day, I had to fire the guy. And it was very sad. Very sad. Very sad.

Sarah Segal:
You did the right thing. I mean, it’s a hard thing. But you have to, as the owner. I mean, it all comes down to you. If you hadn’t acted, then I think that the the risk of being held liable for something would have been—

Jay Goltz:
That’s part of it. Let me tell you the other part: What does it say to the rest of the employees? That’s a problem. It’s both the risk with the one employee, but then you’ve got to take a stand sometimes, because everybody’s watching this stuff. And it’s a problem. And I will also tell you—which is all part of why we do this podcast—did I sleep that night? Yeah. I gotta tell you. I’m a warrior.

I’ve had to fire people for all kinds of reasons over the years, and it was a very sad moment with him. And he was very upset—did not argue with it. But if you’re in business, and you’ve got a lot of employees, you’d better just toughen up, because this stuff happens. If it’s not this, it’s something else. And I haven’t had one in many years that was personal like this, where I knew the guy for a long time. But, like, whatever! I do what I gotta do, and I’m not whining about it.

Loren Feldman:
Jay, was it obvious to you that you had to take this action?

Jay Goltz:
Here’s why: This does make it black and white. This wasn’t the first time. Ten years ago, there was something else. And that’s why it wasn’t that hard, because it’s like: Okay, I’m big with second chances. I’m not big with third chances. And if it wouldn’t have happened before, maybe the outcome would have been different, but this is the second round, and, like, enough.

Sarah Segal:
I was going to ask what the timeline was on all of this. How long did this—

Jay Goltz:
Process take?

Sarah Segal:
Yeah.

Jay Goltz:
It starts—and I don’t think this is unusual—we had to fire a co-worker of hers, who just wasn’t doing the job, blah, blah, blah. And she decided to be the whistleblower. And she’s the one who made the complaint, and then revealed that he was harassing so-and-so. And that’s how we found out about it. So then we interviewed the person, and she told us the whole story. And we immediately suspended him while we were doing this investigation, and the whole thing took a couple of weeks. And I might add, my daughter-in-law is a labor attorney, and she does this for a living: investigations. I didn’t bring a lawyer in because I didn’t think it was necessary, and it wasn’t, but it took a couple of weeks. But we immediately took action.

Paul Downs:
Normally, if I have an employee who is misbehaving in some way, we’d have a procedure to tell them what the problem is, what the solution is, how we’re going to help them. But they get a second chance, in many cases.

Jay Goltz:
Sure.

Paul Downs:
And I’m curious whether sexual harassment—not like an obvious grabbing someone, but just a remark or something—whether that’s something where it’s okay to give that person a second chance, or are we in a world where you’ve basically got a get rid of them?

Jay Goltz:
No, that’s why I started out with this zero tolerance. I don’t believe that phrase. I’m sure there are some cases. I think that phrase is overused. I don’t think it’s practical. If someone makes a bad comment, yes, I absolutely believe they get one warning. It’s just not that complicated. You get one. People say stupid stuff. Men, women, it happens.

But to your point: they grab them? Okay, yeah, there’s certainly some stuff like that where yeah, that’s it. I’ve gotta tell you, somebody calls someone a racial slur, that probably would be it. I don’t know that that’s a warnable offense, because I don’t think you can undo the damage from that. So I’m not saying there aren’t things that are zero tolerance, but not many.

Sarah Segal:
What’s the complaint process for your company?

Jay Goltz:
Well, I have an HR person, which most companies don’t, because until you have 100 people—the fact of the matter is, 99 percent of small companies don’t have an HR person, because they’re not big enough to justify it. So I do have an HR person. They would either go to the HR person, or they would tell their manager. And then the manager would go to HR, and then we would do an investigation on it. It hasn’t happened a lot because we do try to keep an eye on things. Am I torturing myself on, “Oh, this was going on too long. We should have known about it”? That’s easy to say. But what’s going on in an office… I’m not going to indict my other managers, because I don’t know that they had any reason to think this was going on.

Loren Feldman:
Jay, do you have a policy about dating or not dating?

Jay Goltz:
Now, that’s interesting that you ask that, because 40 years ago, “Oh, there’s no dating here.” And like, you know what? Why don’t you make a policy that the sun can’t come up anymore because I don’t like it? It’s too bright in my eyes. I don’t know that you can have a policy that says there’s no dating at work. You can try. And I have tried. But I just don’t know if that’s practical.

And I will tell you, I’ve had five people who were dating here who got married over the last 45 years. Of the five, two were really disruptive to the company, caused major problems, and I had to fire the people. And they were married. It was a bad blow up. But there were some others where they got married. I don’t know that you can do that. You can try.

Sarah Segal:
Do companies really do that anymore? Is that normal? To prevent people from having a personal—

Jay Goltz:
I don’t think so.

Paul Downs:
How would you even do that?

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, I can remember that when I first started in my career, there were weird things. Like, I worked for a company where men were not allowed to have facial hair and women were not allowed to wear pants. [Laughter] And I don’t think you were allowed to date within the company.

Jay Goltz:
Just in a practical sense, you’re not going to stop it. Who are we kidding? You’re just not gonna stop it. I mean, that’s just ridiculous. So, the question is, do you try to put in a policy that is reasonable? Like, the boss certainly shouldn’t be dating the employee? That one is a black-and-white one.

Loren Feldman:
When you say the boss, Jay, you’re not referring just to you. You’re talking about managers.

Jay Goltz:
No, I’m talking about the manager, a supervisor. I mean, you see it on the cop shows all the time where they’re dating the other cop.

Loren Feldman:
You’re watching a lot of TV, Jay.

Jay Goltz:
Well, I know, I got to do something to get my mind off of business. So, I think you could have some policies about that. But it’s very naive to think, “Oh, I’m just gonna put in a policy—there’s no dating at work—and think that’s gonna hold.” Because no, it’s not.

Paul Downs:
I think these days, most people are kind of aware of the risk they’re taking. If somebody was dating someone farther down in the power structure, that is a risk.

Jay Goltz:
That TV show Jennifer Aniston’s in, The Morning Show? Everybody that’s in business should have to watch that because it’s extremely painful to watch what happened in the company. And Steve Carell is the big boss, and it’s extremely painful. And you realize that sometimes the boss just doesn’t understand what they’re doing.

Paul Downs:
No, that never happens, Jay.

Sarah Segal:
I love that you, like, analyze everything based on a television show.

Jay Goltz:
Well, it’s not everything on the TV show, but I certainly learn things from TV once in a while.

Loren Feldman:
Jay, back to the matter at hand for just a moment here. You said, I think, that this person had been at the company for 29 years. He’d started when he was 17. You had a personal relationship with him. Were you involved in the firing? Did you do it yourself?

Jay Goltz:
No, that’s a good question. I stayed out of it. Everybody took care of it. But I feel a responsibility, because we all—I don’t want to say we. I’m always balancing being the boss and humanity. I try to be the best human I can be, and at the same time, be a boss. There’s a balancing act going on there. I thought it would be irresponsible and cruel to just have him gone and not say something.

So I went over there. I waited for it to get done. I called him into the room by myself with him. And I said to him, “Look, I’m not mad at you”—because I know that would torture him. “I’m very sad this happened, and you made some real bad choices, but I want you to know: Pick yourself up and dust yourself off.” And I gave him a hug and he sobbed like a baby and said, “You’re like a father to me.” It was a very sad thing. But I have to tell you, compared to 20 or 30 years ago, there were no second thoughts in my head. I didn’t think, “Oh my God, what are you doing?” I knew it was the right thing. And I was sorry for him, but he screwed up twice. Like I said, if it was once, I don’t know that I would have done it.

Sarah Segal:
Do you do a soft-landing package for somebody like that?

Jay Goltz:
I’ve absolutely given lots of severance pay out in my life. Just in the last few years, I had a couple people who left after years for various reasons. But in this case, it was not appropriate to go give him months of severance. It just wasn’t. So I gave him some severance pay, but not what I would have given him if it was like, “Gee, you’re over your head,” or whatever. I mean, I’m pretty generous with severance pay, but I wasn’t in this case, because I don’t think it’s appropriate.

Loren Feldman:
Would you give him a reference?

Jay Goltz:
You know, that’s another good question. Yes, my manager gave him a very lovely: “He was here for X amount of years. He was great at this and this and this. And he left to pursue a new opportunity.” I have zero guilt about it. I feel like I owed it to him. And if somebody’s dumb enough to hire someone after 29 years who’s out of work and doesn’t think to pick up the phone, that’s their problem.

Loren Feldman:
Well, if somebody calls you, what are you going to say?

Jay Goltz:
First of all, here’s the fun part that you should know: No one’s going to call me. Trust me. Trust me. I’ve been in business for 45 years. I’ve gotten four reference calls after hundreds of employees. People don’t generally—not everybody—most companies don’t do reference calls, which is insane, as far as I’m concerned. So if somebody calls the manager, and they say, “Well, why’d he leave?” I don’t think we’re gonna go say what happened. This is part of the business game. You’re supposed to figure it out. If I had a resume from someone after 29 years, and they’re not working, and they’re looking for a job, I’d be saying, “There’s something wrong here.”

And I would interview the person to say, “I’ve gotta tell you, this doesn’t make any sense. What’s the real story?” And they usually tell me. So it’s tricky, but I felt good giving him a letter. I don’t want him to not work. He worked very hard. He was very dedicated to the company. I want him to get a job. Do I think he’ll do it again? I would hope not. I would think not. And just to be clear, it’s not like he did something horrendous. That’s another story. I’d have him arrested if that was the case. But that wasn’t the case. It was the asking out and not letting up on it thing.

Loren Feldman:
Did you feel you had to offer some explanation to other employees?

Jay Goltz:
You know what, I really wasn’t involved personally, but yeah, sure. I think that’s a controversy in the world. There are some people—and this is an opinion—who think you’ve got to keep everything private. And though I think Jack Welch—may he rest in peace—was a horrible human being, I once watched him say that he thinks you owe it to the rest of the employees to let people know what’s going on. I don’t disagree with that part. I think you owe some explanation. Otherwise, they make up their own story. And I don’t think that’s healthy.

So yeah, everyone knows what was going on, to a degree. That’s a tricky one, though. I mean, you’re trying to balance personal privacy with other people who work there thinking, like, “What do you mean so-and-so doesn’t work here? What happened?” And then somebody can make up, “Oh, I think it’s because… Remember that order last year?” I mean, everyone draws their own conclusion, and that’s not healthy for your environment.

Paul Downs:
That’s one of my rules. You always have to provide a story. Otherwise someone will make something up, and it may be way worse than what actually happened. So I haven’t had too many situations like this. But when I terminated someone, I made it clear to the rest of them that we’d done this, because I want them to know, A) there’s things you can do that will get you fired, but B) that I did it because I wanted to defend the integrity of the group. I usually fire people because I think that what they’re up to is something that the group won’t tolerate, more than I won’t tolerate.

Jay Goltz:
Do you have any women working for you?

Paul Downs:
I do now. It’s been an interesting year. The last three hires I’ve made have been women. So we now have more on the shop floor than we’ve ever had. We have another one starting on Monday. And I believe it’s going okay.

Jay Goltz:
This might give you an opportunity to have a whole new experience down the road.

Paul Downs:
Could be. We’ll see. I mean, certainly my eyes are open for issues, because I think that it’s good to have people who didn’t used to work in wood shops now be available to work in them. I’m gonna need workers. I want whoever’s out there who wants to do the job. And it’s easier to get the next hire to see what we’re all about when there’s not just a bunch of white guys out there.

Jay Goltz:
I can tell you the profound difference between me now and me at 30 years old. I’ve had to deal with some really uncomfortable sticky problems with employees. And I used to say, “Oh my God, they don’t teach this in business school. Why do I have to deal with that?” And now I understand: If you’re in business, you have employees. This is part of it. You’re dealing with human beings. They’re coming to work, and I don’t complain about it. I don’t whine about it. It is what it is. And I accept that if you’re in business, yes, you are going to have to sometimes play psychologist, and you’re going to sometimes have to play dad or mom.

There’s a limit, though, obviously. How far will you go for an employee who’s having a hard time? Paul, we’ve talked about that. I certainly cut some slack and will give it a month or two to see if we can fix it. So I do balance the humanity part with the business part. But you’ve got to make sure you’ve got that balance right. Because if you go too far with the humanity part, you’re gonna end up with a lot of pissed off customers and pissed off employees. And if you go too far to the other side, I just don’t want to live in that world. I don’t want to be Jack Welch. I mean, he was heartless.

...

Read Full Podcast Transcript Here