Making the rest of the employees complicit in getting someone fired a month before vesting is a pretty shitty thing to do. A manager should be able to take responsibility for their decisions and not foist them onto the team. It works, as the Romans would attest to, but it sets a pretty crappy culture imho.

It depends on if you’re a manager or a leader. A leader would, in fact, consider the whole team because they operate on trust. A manager wouldn’t give a fuck.

There is a big difference between considering the whole team and making them complicit in a decision that hurts someone. Framing escaping responsibility as the mark of a true leader is I feel a pretty crappy way to define a leader.

Leading your team to a decision that works for them, and the team member who should have been fired but wasn’t is the mark of a true team. Dude needs to get his head out of his ass and if he needs his team to pull it out, so be it. But yes, a leader will involve a team in a decision that affects the entire team, the won’t unilaterally make a decision.

I couldn't agree more. Most of the members of the team here will most likely vest as well, and the way employee performance can affect vesting is very much a relevant question to them.

To go back one step, saying a manager must decide alone otherwise it's an escape from responsibility is quite a bizarre claim to make. Making a decision without consulting your team, when your goal is to establish trust, will 100% backfire. It will come back to haunt you EVEN if people agreed with the decision, simply because that decision was taken arbitrarily. That such important decisions could be arbitrary, without meaningful involvement of the team, signals to the team that they are all at the mercy of such future arbitrary decisions. Finally, consulting the team does not mean that the decision is carried by everyone. A consensus should be sought, and the founder would be foolish to make such a decision against his team, but ultimately, the founder is in charge of the final decision and will bear the responsibility for it.

There’s both a logical and an emotional component to this. Logically the team would understand why the employee was terminated right before vest. Emotionally however it will gnaw at them, wondering if that could happen to them.

In my opinion I’d make it clear that the termination and the equity decisions are separate, that it was a bad fit but that you are building a culture of doing right by people. That doesn’t mean eliminating vesting, it means that you approach these exceptions on a case by case basis. I’d say 6 months vest would be fair, given the performance management issues - and it strikes the right balance showing you won’t be pushed around and that low performers will not be treated the same way as high performers.