Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before I get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, it's time for our monthly solo episode.

With yours truly, my name is Paul Zellizer, the founder of Awarepreneurs, we think the longest running social entrepreneur podcast on the planet, and I have been a business coach focused on social entrepreneurs and climate tech companies for the past eighteen years. Our topic today is how to fire people compassionately and ethically. And let's start this off with two stories to give some context. As I record this episode, we are seeing mass firings of US government employees by the new Trump administration. I'll put a link in the show notes to an article that came out today by Bloomberg Law that states over 30,000 people have been fired to date, And reports are that the goal for this new administration is to fire as many as 200,000 employees of the US government. And this is having pretty significant impact, and it's also sparking a lot of conversation. 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.

And due to a combination of inflation and slower than desired growth and economic uncertainty, it was time to get them ready to fire for the first time. And it was bringing up a lot of feelings, and I realized that I had never seen a social entrepreneur podcast episode on how do you fire people ethically and compassionately. So here we are. Welcome to this episode. I would say that firing people is one of the hardest parts of leadership for any kind of leader, at least for many folks, but especially for impact driven leaders. And given the leadership decisions we're seeing, it's true here in The US, but this leadership style, we're seeing more of it around the world, mass firings. We're also seeing increasing talks of tariffs, and that's creating economic uncertainty, which many people I trust, economic experts are saying oftentimes lead to a downturn. It's hard to see steady growth in times of great uncertainty.

So I wanna both acknowledge the emotional difficulty because our listeners care about people deeply, which makes it extra tough to fire people. And I also wanna help you navigate how do you do it when you do need to do it in a way that is compassionate, ethical, and legally sound while also paying attention to the morale of your remaining team. So let's dive in. First of all, let's talk a little bit about why leaders in the social impact space struggle with firing more than many. 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. And, therefore, it can feel like firing is almost a having to fire or seriously considering it is like a failure to our mission, our goals as having positive impact in doing business in an ethical way. So what I see is that there's some common patterns among leaders in the impact space, and these include things like over investing and struggling employees for too long. Now that doesn't mean as soon as somebody's struggling, you fire them that day.