Most organizations will have strict policies and procedures regarding harassment, discrimination, and termination. You may inherit these issues from the previous manager, but hopefully you will not be forced to face them immediately. The legal counsel will most likely handle the harassment and discrimination issues. Your involvement cannot go beyond impartially protecting the rights of your employees. You will provide any information relative to the charges as requested but will not generally enter into the decision process. Legal difficulties that arise as a result of a termination can be significantly reduced if adequate performance records are maintained.
Terminating an employee is probably one of the most traumatic experiences for any manager, regardless of their amount of experience. Whether that termination is related to some major infraction of organizational policy or human behavior, lack of competence, major mistake in judgment, dissolution of a department, or organization-wide downsizing at the direction of upper management, the impact is essentially the same. You may look forward to the day when you can terminate a particular individual but the day of judgment arrives and reality restarts the thought processes. You’re terminating a person with whom you’ve been working with for perhaps many years. You may have put forth a great deal of effort in coaching the person to be a productive employee. You know their family. But this is not the time to rationalize the decision to terminate. Once you have made that decision you have no alternative but to follow through. One caution: make sure you have provided opportunities for improvement and base your decision on undisputable facts.
Most managers do not pay sufficient attention to employees whose performance drops below expectations. A comprehensive plan to improve performance, an accurate documented response to the plan by the employee, defined opportunities for improvement, close follow-up, an agreed-upon timetable, and close communication determine the level of difficulties that lie ahead. You can’t rate an employee’s performance as satisfactory or better for years and then terminate because of lack of performance for a short time. If the previous manager bequeathed to you such problems you have no alternative but to develop a plan for improving performance.