Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 11 seconds

HR Lessons from Trump Firing of Comey

Donald Trump rose to reality TV stardom by firing people, but his most high profile dismissal as U.S. President has been panned as a management flub.

Surprise and anger (by some) followed after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey this month amid an ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential collusion with the Trump campaign. For a man who won the White House largely by promising to bring a business approach to fixing a broken Washington D.C., Comey’s firing is being seen as anything but savvy by many.

From a management point-of-view, many question the way Trump fired Comey and the message it sent to FBI staff, according to a recent article in The Washington Post. Trump broke with management protocol by not firing Comey in person or, at the very least, by phone. Instead, Comey learned he was fired by watching the news in Los Angeles where he had flown to give a speech to FBI agents, according to news reports.

“When you let someone go, it’s a basic organizational concept that they ought to know it’s coming, that they've been communicated with before,” says Max Stier, chief executive of the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. Sarah Huckabee, Trump’s deputy press secretary, defended the firing noting that the president had “followed the proper protocol in that process, which is handwritten notification.”

Trump had sent his former security guard and now head of White House operations, Keith Schiller, to FBI headquarters to deliver Comey’s termination letter inside an manila envelope, according to news reports.  Comey’s firing “itself sends a signal to potential FBI directors that they could be subject to the same humiliation,” Paul Light, professor of public service at New York University, told The Washington Post

“It is a traumatic event to lose your leader, and it’s made more traumatic by the way in which it was done,” Stier notes. Trump also created greater risk for himself by not personally telling Comey, says Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who studies human resources. “If the press catches the guy off guard, and they start asking him questions, and he reacts and says things he might not have had he had time to get himself prepared, there can be political damage,” Cappelli says.

Trump owed it to Comey to fire him in person out of respect for Comey and the FBI, writes Oliver Staley for Quartz“A face-to-face meeting also sends a message of accountability to the rest of the organization, that the manager [stands] by the decision,” Staley writes. “Telling someone via email or letter—or worse, via an emissary—looks like cowardice.”

Showing compassion and sincerity, reaching out to FBI employees and being discrete are all common sense approaches Trump should have followed in firing Comey, Staley notes. And Trump also should not have used the firing to try and further exonerate himself. 

“While Trump’s letter is brief, he manages to find room to remind Comey ‘on three separate occasions, I am not under investigation,’” Staley writes. “It’s a political message intended for public consumption, and doesn’t belong in his letter. Likewise, the line about finding new FBI leadership ‘that restores public trust and confidence’ is a cheap shot.”

While Trump may portray himself as gutsy for firing people, his lack of tact in Comey’s firing conveyed a very different message, writes Frank Kalman, managing editor of Talent Economy. “For Trump to have a messenger send a letter to an office where Comey wasn’t even at is, in a word, incredible,” Kalman writes. “It’s akin to breaking up with your longtime partner in a text message. It’s lame — and, in Trump’s case, unprofessional and, dare I say, cowardly.”

Read 2524 times
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Visit other PMG Sites:

PMG360 is committed to protecting the privacy of the personal data we collect from our subscribers/agents/customers/exhibitors and sponsors. On May 25th, the European's GDPR policy will be enforced. Nothing is changing about your current settings or how your information is processed, however, we have made a few changes. We have updated our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to make it easier for you to understand what information we collect, how and why we collect it.