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Several months ago I wrote a post on terminating employees respectfully. You can read it here. Recently I read an article in CareerBuilder.com on how someone was fired by email. That article, which you can read here, focuses on the termination and yet, in my opinion, it’s really a business communication article. We simply do not teach leaders how to treat other human beings. We teach them how to give first-rate presentations, how to wow the boardroom and maybe even how to write with proper grammar and punctuation, but somewhere along the line we have lost the concept of ‘treat others like you would like to be treated’. Are we so consumed with efficiency, multi-tasking and getting things done that we ignore that we are dealing with people? These people have feelings like we do, bleed like we do, have families, responsibilities…they are people, not robots that simply take in data and act. I understand the desire to find the easy solution for distasteful tasks like terminating someone.

I understand that businesses cannot keep on the payroll people who aren’t performing, and that profitability takes precedence over just about everything. But I don’t understand how we have moved the pendulum so far that human beings have not only become disposable, we don’t even see them as human beings any more. It makes me sad. It even makes me mad. Frankly, I’d love to see more business communication articles written about how to treat people, not just about how to communicate better. After all, how we interact with others communicates volumes.

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