Traction Outsourcing
Almost every company has one staff, and your business has had this one for about 5 years. He started with you when you were still small. He was among the first people you hired, back when the office was two rooms in Lagos Mainland and salaries were paid after a tense conversation at the end of every month. He knows where every file is kept, which client prefers a phone call to an email, and exactly how the business survived its hardest year. Every quarter, he meets his targets, and sometimes surpasses them.
Last year, your HR manager placed him on a Performance Improvement Plan. A PIP is a programme that sets out what must change in a staff member's conduct or output, how that change will be measured, and the date by which it must happen. This staff refused to sign it or engage in it. This year, 3 months ago, your HR had to bring up another PIP. He called it an insult in front of the entire staff. When his line manager followed up, he went behind the line manager and went straight to you. He knows you very well and even considers you a friend. Yet, he is secretly destroying the culture your HR manager was employed to build. In the past 2 years, 5 amazing staff have resigned and they stated that he was the reason they had to go. The remaining staff treat him like a demi-god, and they are always careful what not to say around him.
You know he is hurting your company's long term growth but you keep postponing every meeting your HR manager scheduled to discuss his issues.
So, here is the real question: When will you fire that staff?
Why This Kind of Staff Survives
Three things usually protect a staff like this, and none of them tells you whether the person is good for the business.
The first is the target. Leaders look at a sales figure or a list of completed projects and treat it as final proof of value. A target measures output. It says nothing about what that output cost the people around it, or who quietly carried the work that made the numbers possible.
The second is tenure. Long service builds loyalty and knowledge, and both are worth something. In many Nigerian workplaces, though, years of service slowly turn into an unofficial rank that sits outside the organogram. On paper the staff reports to a manager. In practice they report to nobody.
The third, and the hardest to say out loud, is closeness to the top. When a staff is known to be friends with the CEO, every manager below does a quick calculation before correcting them, and most decide the risk is not worth it. The CEO believes the managers are in charge. The managers believe the CEO has taken sides. The staff sits comfortably in the gap between those two beliefs, a gap our article on when the CEO becomes the weak link covers in more depth.
What Keeping Them Actually Costs
Keeping a high performer who misbehaves feels like a sensible commercial decision. The research points the other way.
Research from the talent management firm Cornerstone found that good employees became 54 percent more likely to quit when just one toxic person joined a team of 20. A study published in MIT Sloan Management Review, which analysed 1.4 million employee reviews, found that a toxic culture was 10.4 times more powerful than pay in predicting whether people left a company, with feeling disrespected listed among its main ingredients.
Then there is the wider cost of people who stay but stop trying. Gallup's 2026 global workplace report found that only 20 percent of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, and it put the cost of that lost productivity at around $10 trillion. In our experience at Traction Outsourcing, few things drain engagement faster than watching one person break every rule and face no consequence.
Bring that home to a 30-person business in Abuja or Lagos. Losing two good officers means recruitment costs, weeks of empty desks, new staff learning on the job, and client relationships that walk out of the door with the people who built them. The staff who "meets targets" may be costing you far more than their targets bring in.
Fire or Train? A Practical Guide
Not every difficult staff should be let go. Most performance problems can be fixed, and firing too quickly carries its own costs. The useful test is to separate skill from will. A skill problem means the person cannot yet do what the role needs, and training usually solves it. A will problem means the person can do it but refuses, and once a fair process has been offered and rejected, training has nothing left to fix.
| Type of Staff | What You Notice | Fire or Train? | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| The struggling new hire | Mistakes, slow output, asks many questions | Train | Early mistakes usually point to missing onboarding, not a bad hire |
| The willing but outdated veteran | Loyal and respectful, but struggling with new tools or systems | Train | The attitude is right and the skills can be updated |
| The low performer with a good attitude | Tries hard, accepts feedback, misses targets | Train, with a clear deadline | Give a structured PIP; if there is no progress by the deadline, move to exit |
| The staff in the wrong role | Poor results in one role, strong signs of ability elsewhere | Redeploy and train | The person may be fine and the role may be wrong |
| The burnt-out former star | Once excellent, now withdrawn and slipping | Train and support first | Find out what changed before deciding anything |
| The low performer with a bad attitude | Misses targets and resists correction | Fire, after due process | There is neither output nor willingness to build on |
| The high performer who defies authority | Meets targets, refuses PIPs, undermines managers | Fire, after due process | The damage to the team outweighs the numbers, as the research shows |
| The staff involved in fraud, theft or harassment | Serious misconduct, confirmed by investigation | Fire | Keeping them exposes the business to legal and reputational risk |
Letting Go the Right Way in Nigeria
Once the decision is made, how you carry it out matters as much as the decision. A careless exit can turn a staff problem into a court case.
Document everything. Every PIP, query letter, warning and refusal should be written down, dated and filed. A pattern on paper protects you far better than a pattern everyone simply remembers.
Get the CEO to agree the process in advance and then step back from the individual case. If the friendship is the reason previous efforts failed, the CEO's most useful contribution is to back the managers publicly and let the process run.
Give a fair hearing. Where you are dismissing a staff for misconduct, Nigerian labour law expects the employee to be given an opportunity to defend themselves before the decision is taken. In practice, that means a query, a written response and a proper disciplinary panel.
Respect notice periods. Section 11 of the Labour Act sets minimum notice by length of service: one day for under three months, one week for three months to two years, two weeks for two to five years, and one month for over five years. Many contracts set longer periods, and salary can be paid in lieu of notice. A nine-year staff is owed at least one month, or more if their contract says so.
Pay every final entitlement, including salary to date, unused leave and any gratuity their contract provides. The National Industrial Court can award damages where termination is found to be wrongful, so speak with an employment lawyer before any sensitive exit. Our guide to employee leave and compensation in Nigeria covers what a fair final settlement should include.
What You Need To Know
Reporting lines, disciplinary policy and the authority of managers have all been quietly overwritten. Remove that staff without fixing those things, and the next untouchable is only a few years away.
This is why the conversation about letting someone go often leads to a bigger one about how the business is structured. Traction Outsourcing Limited helps organisations across Nigeria restructure the way they are run: redrawing the organogram so reporting lines are real, defining roles and delegated authority, building performance management and disciplinary systems that apply to everyone, and supporting leaders through the hard people decisions that follow. If a staff in your business has grown bigger than your structure, book a call with our team and let us help you put the structure back in charge.
Further Reading: When the CEO Is the Weak Link, Accountability in Business: How to Hold Your Staff Accountable Without Losing Them, Organizational Design Model as a Tool for Effective Corporate Restructuring.
Is One Staff Bigger Than Your Structure?
Book a free 30-minute advisory call. We will look at how your business is structured, where reporting lines and authority may have quietly broken down, and what it will take to fix it.