Well, tonight’s going to be interesting for someone.

A coaching client of ours was out of town yesterday for work and will be flying home to Singapore tonight. But he won’t leave the airport; instead, he will get a couple hours of sleep and a shower at the airport’s transit hotel, then board a red-eye flight to Shanghai. After landing at 6:30am he will clear Immigration and take a taxi for about an hour to a client’s offices where he will give a one-hour presentation, then have a one-hour meeting, then climb back into the taxi, return to the airport, fly home, and finally get to re-enter his country this time.

Total time in Shanghai, including taxis and waiting for flights: 8 hours.

Total time flying back and forth to Shanghai: 11 hours.

How did this set of circumstances come about?

It happened because he’s covering an event for a colleague who was fired last Friday. The firing happened after much deliberation, and seemed to be timed to coincide with the (voluntary) departure of a senior manager who made the decision. After the firing happened, someone else in the leadership team said, “let’s check his calendar to see if he had any big events coming up,” and of course, he did. Hence the last-minute trip to Shanghai, despite a conflict with a previously scheduled business trip during the two days before…and thus, the landing at home without actually going home.

The funny thing, according to this young consultant, is that this was his second trip to Shanghai in a week. The first was a last-minute trip to cover an event that was originally to be done by someone else who is voluntarily leaving, so it ended up being kind of a “hand-off” event. Hmmm. Lots of short-notice trips to Shanghai. Good thing he already had a multi-entry visa, or the trip would have been cancelled and the company would have looked very bad.

Now, these personnel decisions were being kept quiet for good reasons. It’s not always a good idea to broadcast the departures of people, whether voluntary or otherwise, around the office, especially if those individuals want to keep it quiet. What this demonstrates, though, is the ripple effect that such decisions have, and you need to always remember that when someone leaves, the work must go on, and there is not always going to be a replacement lined up. This is not to say that if someone needs firing, you shouldn’t fire them; instead, it simply means you need to consider the implications of that before it happens. In some cases, you may decide to wait and do the termination later; in others, you may need to break your silence early and let someone know they may have to cover an event or two. According to this particular individual, he knew something was up before the first Shanghai trip, but didn’t know why, nor did he know anything definitively until a couple days before leaving. In the second case, it was a complete surprise.

When you are making personnel decisions you need to consider how it impacts the person who’s the subject of that decision, but also think about how others will be affected. The work must go on, so do what you can to make that process continue as smoothly as possible.