By Sunday evening, every NFL team had cut its roster from 90 players to 53. Roughly 1,180 men told no in one weekend. Most leaders will never cut a thousand people, but every leader eventually lets someone go, and the NFL just ran a league-wide clinic on how to let someone go with respect.

The part worth studying happened Monday

The cuts themselves are ordinary. Short meetings, mostly seen coming, dreaded anyway. (ESPN tracked all 32 teams.) The extraordinary part started the next day, when teams began signing many of those same players to their practice squads.

Sit with that. A man cut on Saturday walked back into the same building on Monday, by choice, to work for the coach who cut him. Practice squads are voluntary. He came back anyway.

That is not desperation. That is a verdict on the goodbye.

The leaders who never cut anyone are not kind

Accountability is not a bad word. It is simply asking someone to answer for their actions. Ask the question, receive the answer, and you have held someone accountable. But sometimes the answer requires consequence, because people will continue to exhibit the behavior that is tolerated. A leader who never delivers a consequence is not being kind. When a leader won’t cut a weak performer, the good performers pay the price, and they notice it before the leader does.

So the question is not whether you will ever have to cut someone. You will. The question is what kind of goodbye you deliver when the day comes.

How to let someone go with respect

I know the other side of this one personally. A medical review board ended my Navy SEAL career, and the sentence I remember from that room is “you look fine.” I planned to fight, and instead I cried in front of strangers. Twenty years of silence about my injuries started that day. Here is what I want you to take from it: I do not remember the decision as the wound. The career was over either way. I remember the disrespect. That is what your people will carry out of the room, one way or the other, and it is the part you control completely.

The clean goodbye has four parts, and none of them are complicated.

1. The standard came first. You cannot hold someone accountable if they do not know what they are supposed to be accountable for. If the person is surprised, the failure in the room is yours. The cut conversation should be the last in a series, never the first.
2. In person, eye to eye. Not email, not a calendar invite titled “sync,” not delegated two levels down. The respect is in the discomfort you are willing to share.
3. Behaviors, not character. The reason is what happened, not who they are. “The standard was X and the last three months were Y” survives the parking lot retelling. “It just was not working” becomes a story about you.
4. Leave the door open and mean it. The NFL’s practice squad is institutionalized door-leaving. Yours might be a reference, an introduction, or a real “call me.” The test of your culture is whether they would ever work for you again.

Apply it this week

1. Name the avoided consequence. You already know which one. Write down the behavior, the standard it misses, and how long you have tolerated it.
2. Deliver it this week. In person, in behaviors, with the standard named out loud. If you cannot name the standard, the first conversation you owe is with yourself, because the failure started there.
3. Check your parking lot. Think of the last three people who left your team on any terms. Write one honest sentence about what each probably says about you now. That list is your culture’s report card.

Take it to your team

Read these out loud Monday morning:

• Think about the last person who left this team, on any terms. What do you think they say about us now, and what would we want them to be saying?
• Where are we tolerating a behavior right now because the conversation feels expensive, and what is that toleration costing the people doing it right?
• If it were you walking out tomorrow, what about the way we handle it would feel respectful, and what would sting more than the decision itself?

About 1,180 men got hard news this weekend, and by Tuesday the ones with clean goodbyes were back at work, building someone’s scout team at full speed. That is what knowing how to let someone go with respect buys you: consequences that do not cost you the culture. The decision is sometimes out of your hands. The goodbye never is.

Keep your eyes on the target. — Errol