Once a year, I have the pleasure of being a guest lecturer for an ethics and social leadership class at a local university. The class participants include master's students in nursing and healthcare informatics.

My topic is always the same: I am asked to demystify human resources. This year, the students' questions focused on the following: negotiating an offer, dealing with bureaucracy, performance reviews and terminations.

Terminations

One of the biggest fears across cultures and generations in the class was that of being terminated. But, like many other things, it was based on a lack of understanding of the process.

It may seem easy to fire someone, but it is not. It takes a combination of factors working in concert, and that rarely happens. Where there is a will, there's not always a way.

How many incompetent people have you worked with, been served by or interacted with? Ever wondered why they have not been fired? It takes someone making the decision to do it and the commitment to see it through.

In many organizations, unless you do something egregious, there is a process for firing someone that includes write-ups and a number of chances to improve. That already requires time and patience on the side of the manager, not to mention the extra work.

For managers, it is a lot easier to just give employees you do not like a hard time and hope they quit rather than go through the pain of the process of firing them. And if the manager does go through all the extra work to try to fire the employee, they still have to sit there and do it. That is something even the most callous people have a difficult time with and will thus try to avoid.

But let's just say the write-ups are complete, the manager is ready and you are about to be fired, what are the odds that it is a clean termination? There are a million attorneys out there just waiting to examine your situation. What are the odds they would not find anything wrong with the process that led to this point?

The bottom line is, most people that worry about being fired are not the type of people that get fired. And lots of people that should be fired are not. The best thing to do is realize that and do your job accordingly.

Now, if you are a manager or supervisor and wish you could fire one of your employees, realize it can be challenging. Many organizations fear the risk associated with terminating an employee and either make it difficult for you to get an approval or make the system so long and tedious that it seem easier to just work with or around the employee than to fire them.

When you find yourself in this situation, the best thing to do to keep yourself motivated is to think about the other employees on the team. Consider how unfair it is for them to come to work every day and try to do the right thing while their teammate is not. That one bad seed can spoil the whole bunch.

Being a good leader requires more work and a bigger perspective. It may be challenging, but in some cases you have got to commit to push through the long process to get the best results for everyone.