How (not) to fire HR

As the front line person who's often brought in to assess risk, I have tough news for employees. Your complaints don't usually lead to "Oh sh*t" calls to lawyers.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not condoning a*holery, nor am I minimizing its effect. It’s just that interpersonal complaints are subjective, and the deck is stacked against the employee. There are a lot of things we can do to deescalate before getting lawyers involved. 

No. We pick up the phone when a boo-boo leaves a paper trail. With luck, the victims don’t even know there's anything wrong (yet), so we have time to make it right. That’s why we call the lawyers in the first place. 

But when the risk wrangler is on the receiving end of the dirty deed, things get weird. 

When you’re the one who makes sure that everything is done by the book, there’s no one left to manage your exit correctly. That often means that you’re more likely than anyone to be underpaid or have your exit mishandled. 

Since you’re the only one who can recognize what went wrong, no one else thinks it’s a big deal when you flag it. “No... you can’t do that!” you try to say, but no one’s there to listen.

The people your knowledge used to protect might think you're weaponizing it to extort them. That now that you're on the other side of the table, they don't have to follow the rules. 

A kind of Stockholm syndrome kicks in and you gaslight yourself. You know how these people make these kinds of decisions, after all. You already know how this conversation will end.

And what are you going to do? Sue them? You know better than anyone that the deck’s stacked against you. 

So you just move on and start looking for something else to do.

And that, children, is the weird, warped world of leaving a job when you're an HR department of one. Or two. Or three. Or five. I guess it depends.

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