How to lay off your friend

Every business re-positions and changes. And that means that some of the great, early employees suddenly aren't needed. This is always tough, but never more so than when one of those early recruits was - or has become - a friend.

A lot of HR experts will say: This is business, not friendship. If you have to lay off a friend, you have to do it just the same way as you would lay off anyone else. In your heart, you know this is stupid but it's easy to give way to expected procedure.

Don't.

When I was last in this position, I agonized over it for weeks. I couldn't treat my friend - let's call her Liz - like any other employee because she wasn't. She had joined the company early and recruited many of our most stellar employees. Always ready to fill in gaps, her job had morphed considerably through the years. But as it slowly became clear that there was no longer a great fit within the business, treating her as "just another" employee would have been a betrayal of all she had contributed to our success.

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Instead, I ignored the HR people and took her out for lunch. We talked about where we'd been and where the business was going. I'm pretty sure she knew what was coming but, like the exceptional intelligence she was, Liz took the lead. She didn't, she said, see quite where she fitted into the new strategy. And that being the case, there were certain ways she'd like to manage her exit.

If you hire adults, and treat them like adults, it's a reasonable assumption that that is how they will act. If you treat them like cogs in a wheel, you can expect the same degree of creativity and responsibility.