There was a drama called The Newsroom that I really liked. I recall enjoying most of the earlier episodes. One of the things that still sits in my head is an episode where Jane Fonda´s character (or her son´s - I can´t quite remember) wanted to get rid of someone from the organization.
It´s nearly never easy to fire people from big companies - maybe unless in a mass lay off.
In this fictional organization too, they wanted to fire someone, and it was brought to their attention that firing isn´t so simple.
She (he?) went on to say that they understand how difficult it is to fire someone in a senior position, but all they need to do is create a context.
As a 25-year-old watching this drama, I didn´t quite get it.
But as someone in a mid-senior position in a company, having seen so much corporate drama and politics across companies, countries, and industries, this sentence resonates very well with me.
I now know context is everything. Context can very cleverly be developed gradually, over a period of few months, no one will suspect a thing. We humans love gossip, love to hear what anyone and everyone has to say about someone else - this way context spreads.
To the extent that we start to normalize the next bit of contextual news. It no longer surprises us that so and so is doing a bad job (he probably is doing the same job as he always was doing), but perhaps, someone said something about him - being late, smoking too much, errors in emails, never opening the doors for women, unpolished shoe etc. And this beef - scattered over a few months, targeted strategically, will question his actual output (even though his output is the same).
It´s subtle, quiet, effective and spreads quickly. And there you go, you have context. So, when you want to finally fire someone, no one is surprised because a strong context looms in the background.
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