Even though I was frustrated at the amount of attention Marco required, it was tough for me to fire him. I could see how dispirited he was. While being fired from a paid job has a bigger impact on your finances, being fired from a volunteer position carries a special kind of humiliation: it’s embarrassing to be told that your help isn’t wanted, even for free. Knowing how it makes the intern feel is what makes it so unpleasant for me.
“You can’t fire an intern.” Daniel, a friend of mine, told me. “They’re working for free!” He wasn’t joking. This is an attitude I’ve heard more than once, but I didn’t expect to hear it from Daniel, who manages employees in his job. It usually comes from people who don’t have experience managing, and who seem to view internships as a form of charity. I believe differently. The strength of our internship program is that we treat interns like employees. We give them real responsibility, allow them to work on real projects, and expect real work from them. We never ask them to make coffee or put quarters in parking meters. That means we need to fire interns who aren’t doing well in our office. But that doesn’t make it easy.
Steve and I spent hours training Marco. As a manager, my primary duty is to empower the interns to do meaningful, useful work for our office, and it’s hard for me to reverse direction on an intern. Up to the moment I fired Marco, I was trying to help him. Once I fire him, I’m shunting him out of our office. I don’t agree with my friend Daniel, but I completely understand the emotions that drive that belief.
I reason with myself that I can only do so much for an intern – Marco needs to reach a certain threshold of performance, or our internship program isn’t sustainable. I’m willing to invest time and effort in an intern, but the investment has to pay off at some point. With Marco, it didn’t.
* All names changed.