“You’re Fired!” — Trump’s Human Resources Disaster

Sometimes we just get bad breaks with staff. Sometimes we hire and almost immediately realize we should have paid more attention to that little voice in our mind. And sometimes even the smartest and most careful hire just goes sideways. In other words, from time to time, we just get handed a staffing lemon. We all make mistakes. But nobody has had such terrible luck as Donald Trump.

As he nears the end of four years, he has gone through more, far more, key personnel than any predecessor. He’s closing in on 450 “fired” or “quits”, or roughly a 91% turnover, about one every three days. Even if you are a Trump supporter, you have to admit he’s been either very unlucky or very stupid as a boss.

Either way, there are some key lessons to be learned for those of us with more modest enterprises. But first, some essential background.

As we all know, the Donald really had no previous experience running a legitimate business, unless you count his various bankrupt airlines and casinos and wineries and steaks and developments and “universities” and other such dabblings. But as long as his daddy was around to bail him out, he really didn’t need to learn the nitty-gritty of day to day business.

So after Fred died, Donnie got a day job of sorts, play-acting a real boss on TV. He got phenomenal ratings by braying those trademark words, “You’re fired!”. Soon enough, all his fantasyland followers figured that firing was the secret to being a successful businessman.

But as with everything else Trumpian, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s not the firing which is the Art of the Real, but the hiring.

Let’s drill down on why things aren’t working well for Donald in the HR department.

First, he insists on personal loyalty to the boss. Wrong. The key is loyalty to the mission. If an employee needs to choose between the boss’s ego and the success of the mission… well, you know instinctively where that one should go.

Conversely, he makes it clear that he offers no loyalty in return. Unsurprisingly, he has transformed the nobility of public service into a an unprincipled, transactional “What’s in it for me?” carnival midway.

He hires on the basis of image– he wants “his Generals” to look the part– tough, grizzled, square-jawed. The problem is that the ones who hadn’t already sold out to the Russians eventually quit when they could no longer tolerate the indignity of being his Cigar Store Indian.

He hires to satisfy his base of prosperity-gospel climate-deniers and other assorted carpetbaggers who will vote for him so long as he delivers for them. Wrong, again. If you hire your friends’ kids and your friends’ friends without regard to skills and work ethic, you’ll end up with a bunch of know-nothing, incompetent grifters. Oh, wait a minute…

Finally, he fires wrong. Anybody who is in business knows that occasionally you have to let people go. But you do it with class and discretion, allowing the departing employee to maintain some dignity. You have the courage to do it in person, not on the evening news or by a tweet. And generally speaking, if you hire smart in the first place, firing is a rarity.

Any one of these behaviours is an invitation to a human resources disaster. Combined, they explain why Trump’s sucking HR vortex was inevitable.

And I suppose there’s one more point to be made: if you keep your hiring low key, it’s easier to keep your firing low key. But if you initially insist on crowing about the brilliance of your hire, yet six months later you make them walk the plank, while you moan and whine about their incompetence, you’ve set yourself up to look the fool. Especially when the numbers get into the hundreds. After a while, everybody but your koolaid drinkers begins to notice the one thing these 450 “idiots” had in common. This eventually shrinks your talent pool to toadies who couldn’t get a job anywhere else, which I suppose does explain a few things.

Assuming you don’t have a super-rich daddy or a fantasyland following, and you don’t want to have to bray “You’re fired!’ every third day, you need to avoid these simple mistakes.