Every founder eventually faces it. A senior leader who looked right on day one isn’t working out. The signals are there. Everyone on the team can feel the drag. And yet the decision sits — for weeks, sometimes quarters — because no one wants to be the one to move on it.
When the team finally does act, it acts on a single decision: the exit. And that’s exactly where most leadership teams get it wrong.
Managing the firing is the easy part. Managing everything around it — and everything after it — is the work.
This is a real situation we recently walked a founding team through (anonymized here, as always). Two co-founders, one senior leader who needed to go, and a lot of understandable hesitation. What follows is the approach we gave them. We call it ADAPT — five moves that turn the most dreaded decision on your calendar into something you can actually plan.
A- Assess before you act
Before you hire a replacement and before you let anyone go, ask one disciplined question as a team:
What could we have done better?
Not to relitigate the past or hand out blame — to extract the lesson while it’s still vivid enough to be honest. You are about to make a consequential new hire. The worst time to learn what you got wrong is after you’ve hired their replacement and repeated the same mistake.
Do this first. Everything downstream gets sharper because of it.
D- Date the decision
Pick the date. The end of a quarter, a specific day on the calendar — it doesn’t matter which, only that you name it and agree on it together.
Then answer two questions:
- What needs to be true for us not to make this change?
- What needs to be true for us to execute it?
A date is the single most underrated tool in a hard decision. It converts a vague, swirling dread into a concrete project with a deadline. Instead of ruminating, you start working backwards — and the emotional journey becomes far easier to move through because it now has an end point and a path.
A- Align the leaders
This is the exercise to run today, before any decision is executed — and to run it separately.
Each leader writes down, independently:
- What this person did well
- What they did exceptionally
- Where they genuinely fell short
Then you compare notes.
The goal here is subtle and important: the goal is not consensus. You do not have to agree on everything. The goal is to get these judgments out of your individual heads and onto a shared table — to align proactively, before the pressure of the moment, rather than reactively, in the middle of it.
While you’re aligning, write your leadership manifesto — the explicit do’s and don’ts of how you lead and who you’ll bring in next. Agree on it now, regardless of how this specific situation resolves. It becomes the standard every future hire is measured against.
Teams that do this make fewer mistakes going forward. And the ones they do make hurt less, because the team was aligned before things got hard.
P- Protect the business
Now work backwards from the date you set.
Knowledge transfer. What needs to be documented? By whom? Transferred to whom? Be specific. Some knowledge transfers to you, the founders. Some requires a new person — which means you need to know who you’re hiring and what date they have to be in the building for the transfer to happen in time, alongside the interviews and everything else. This is how you spread risk instead of concentrating it.
Redundancy. Stress-test your three-legged stool. What happens if one of your key people gets sick? Turns out to be the wrong hire? Decides to leave? Build the backup plans and the redundancy before you execute on the main move — not after you’ve already pulled a leg out from under the stool.
T- Transition with intent
Two questions almost every team skips:
Who delivers the message? Decide it explicitly. Rehearse it. The honest, direct conversation — the moment someone has to say here’s what has to change, and here’s what happens if it doesn’t — doesn’t get easier by being left to chance. Walk through it in your heads before it’s real.
What do the next 90 to 180 days look like? Most teams manage right up to the hire or the fire and then go blind. They forget to plan the aftermath. But the plan doesn’t end on the date — that’s where it begins. Do a little scenario planning. Build the future you’re transitioning into, not just the exit you’re transitioning out of.
The pre-mortem: do the post-mortem before the event
If you take one thing from ADAPT, take this.
Most organizations run a post-mortem after something goes wrong. The highest-performing leadership teams run it before — while they still have the power to change the outcome.
Writing down what your leader did well and where they fell short, now, before the decision is made, is a pre-mortem. So is naming the date. So is scenario-planning the aftermath. You are deliberately doing the reflection early, when it can still shape the result, instead of late, when all it can do is explain the damage.
Write the eulogy before the funeral. Run the autopsy before the event.
You will still make mistakes — every leader does. But you will make smaller ones, and you’ll make them aligned, because you did the hard thinking proactively instead of reactively.
That is the whole game. Adapt before you’re forced to.
