I agree that firing someone is probably the worst experience you can have as a manager (and as an employee!) There are two things I'd like you to think about.
First, in IT we have the keys to the kingdom. If we have system admin rights, we can look at any email, any report, any data. But these should be rare exceptions. The value and rule in IT is that, though we can, we cannot look.
I remember a case where we conducted an employee survey where we wanted candid feedback on our management team. To ensure we had the honest and frank responses, I guaranteed that their information would be anonymous and secure. One of our managers violated that trust. He not only looked at individual responses, he identified the author by the address of the computer making the response. He knew who said what about him. When I discovered this, I called him into my office and confronted him with the evidence from the system log. I reminded him of the guarantee of privacy I made to our team and how disappointed I was that he violated that trust. I asked for his resignation and got it. The security we are entrusted with in IT cannot be breached.
Second, firing someone is ultimately a management failure. How and why, you ask? Either we did not emphasize the rules, did not coach as we should, or we hired the wrong person in the first place. I can hear your protest, that sometimes it's simply the employee's fault. It's never "simply". It takes two to tango. |