Many supervisors feel tremendous angst when they must fire a coworker. But there are two groups for whom the termination process is easy: bad supervisors and great supervisors.

Bad supervisors find terminations easy because they are oblivious to their own failures in the hiring and development process, they don't care about the person they have failed, and they don't make the connection between these failures and the company's performance. And since they face no repercussions from the bad supervisors to whom they report, it's easy to place the blame on the terminated coworker, wash their hands of the whole affair, and move on to the next victim. E Pluribus Kinko's (BookSurge, 2009) author Dean Zatkowsky calls them "bossiopaths," because they bring a sociopath's self-centeredness to the workplace.

Great supervisors, on the other hand, find it easy to fire poor performers because they do so to benefit the terminated coworker and the organization. The difference between the good supervisor and the bad supervisor is that the good supervisor knows that his or her top priority is the success of the people supervised. Even if that success must be found elsewhere.

Generally speaking, there are two reasons to fire a coworker: poor performance and values violations. Termination for values violations should be a no-brainer, because what you tolerate, you encourage. If, for example, you let a top performing salesperson get away with dishonest behavior, you will quickly build a culture of dishonesty. Fire them fast and don't look back.

Great supervisors devote tremendous effort to hiring and developing coworkers, but the need to terminate for poor performance still arises. Perhaps a coworker's skills or self-motivation were misjudged. Perhaps a coworker's motivation has lapsed over time. How do you fire a poor performer in a way that benefits the coworker?

Bad supervisors tend to handle terminations through the annual performance review, which UCLA professor of management Samuel Culbert calls, "...the most pretentious, fraudulent, ill-advised exercise taking place at companies." In his book, Get Rid of the Performance Review! (Business Plus, 2010), Culbert says that instead of holding an annual adversarial meeting where coworkers defend their mistakes, companies should engage in "performance previews."

In other words, do what great supervisors have always done: maintain a constant dialogue with coworkers to ensure everyone understands each other's goals, objectives, and performance on an ongoing basis. In such environments, termination is neither a surprise nor a humiliation - it is merely the fulfillment of an agreement between responsible parties. The coworker leaves knowing what went wrong and how to find a better fit at another organization.

Just as with values violations, poor performers must be terminated quickly. Do not live with a problem - whether you are motivated by kindness, laziness or discomfort, your tolerance of poor performance hurts you, the coworker and the organization. The longer you let it go on, the more damage you do.

When you do your job well and maintain an environment of accountability and transparency, firing people is easy. I did not say it's fun. It certainly is not fun. But after hiring, it's the supervisor's greatest responsibility to his or her coworkers.