By Andrew J. Hoffman
Harvard Business Review (www.hbr.org)

When I was 24, I quit an engineering job, declined offers to attend Harvard and Berkeley for grad school, and accepted a carpenter's job in Nantucket. The house I worked on was being built for the CEO of a major multi-national corporation. Without knowing it, I had entered the world of high-end custom building and within two years, I was supervising the construction of a 29,000 square-foot mansion on a 180-acre estate in Fairfield County, Connecticut. In all, I spent nearly five years running a construction company, and in those five years, I learned how to manage.

This is the first of a series of posts on that education. I will relate salient experiences in construction with lessons I teach, and lessons that play out in the real world of leadership, every day.

Lesson #1: How to fire someone.

In B-school, we teach the concepts of selection and socialization. The goal, we say, is to create the right mix of people to work together in a common culture toward a common goal. We teach how to create a recruitment and retention program to make sure that the right mix and balance of talent is amassed. And that getting the balance right may sometimes require letting people go.

When I teach MBAs, we talk about firing people with the cold and academic clichés of "down-sizing," "right-sizing," "letting someone go." But have you ever fired someone? As a construction superintendent, this was a major part of my job. These terms are bloodless and fail to capture the true intensity and anguish that goes with looking someone in the eyes and telling him he's out of a job.

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