"Ethical Firings: Compassion in the Workplace": "And recently, I was talking to cofounders of a company that are clients of mine, and they were dealing with some situation. And as we were exploring, we surfaced that in twelve years of doing business, they had never fired a single person."

Navigating Leadership Challenges in Social Impact: "When you look at our values in this space, when I think of you, our listeners, I know that you care more than the average amount of business leader around things like equity, inclusion, and emotional intelligence."

The Cost of Avoiding Tough Conversations: "Avoiding direct conversations about performance and not, you know, giving people the feedback they need or not following up on those conversations, and also letting emotions drive decisions rather than clear metrics."

"When You Need to Fire: Handling Performance Issues in the Workplace": "So for a performance based firing, that's when an employee is not meeting expectations, and they're not moving the needle on the goals that you have for that person or that team. And I would say you only want to be thinking of a performance based firing if you've already had conversations and you've documented those conversations."

"Navigating Complex Employee Situations": "You wanna make sure, a, you have good legal frameworks and an understanding."

Mindfulness in Layoffs: "First of all, we wanna be mindful that implicit bias doesn't play a role when we're letting somebody go. So in other words, be mindful of who gets extra chances and who doesn't when somebody's underperforming or who might if we weren't paying attention to DEI, who would be the first on the chopping block?"

"Leadership and Letting Go: You've done your best and let's not be those leaders I was talking about in twelve years of running a business with the substantial team. They never fired anybody and they realized some of the people that they had concerns about, it was their reluctance to let them go. It was the only reason they were still there."

"The Impact of Layoffs on Team Morale": "In addition to being mindful from an emotional intelligence perspective of the person you just let go, we also wanna pay very significant attention to your team and how do you keep morale and trust intact. There's quite a bit of research that when we fire people, if we do that in an unskillful way, particularly if like in the US government, the federal government right now is firing lots of people. If that's done unskillfully, the effect on morale and sense of trust can be profound."

Mission-Driven Reallocations: "And those of you who are still here, you are doing the mission critical work, and we're super glad you're here. And that's how we came to this decision, and that's why we can say we're confident that if you're doing good work on these teams, you have a job."

Handling Uncertainty with Compassion: "Handling these challenging situations well is very important particularly when the economy is more uncertain or is on a downturn."