Tell someone about being Fired
"Ps-s-s-s-s-st!, Didja hear the latest about Bob? He's gonna get canned on Friday." How many of us have been a position where we find out about another person's misfortune before they do? A better question is, what does one do when this happens? My experience is it depends on you and the co-worker you heard about the situation.
Figuring out what one would do, depends on two things. First, do you want to get involved or not. Second, how well do you like or dislike your soon-to-be-former-co-worker. If you want to get involved and like your co-worker, you will probably tell them what you heard about them getting fired. If you don't want to get involve and don't like your co-worker, the odds are you won't say a thing. The iffy situations are where you want to get involved and you don't like your co-worker or you don't want to get involved but do like your co-worker. Why is this so? Let's think about this for a bit.
As a general rule folks like to be helpful and getting word that you will be terminated allows some time to mentally prepare yourself for the experience or launch a campaign to prevent you from getting terminated. So on one hand, you could be doing a favor to your co-worker by sharing this information early. But the problem with doing this is now you've crossed the line with management by divulging information that is not only suppose to be limited to only the person being terminated but their management. In many companies, this is type of behavior is not tolerated. Not to mention, if your co-worker is asked how did they find out they were scheduled to be fired, guess who will be identified as the source of the information?
Worse yet, what if your information is wrong and nothing is suppose to happen to your co-worker? Then what? Who do you think they'll blame for making them look stupid with management? Is it really worth all this pain?
On the other hand, keeping silent is a good idea, right? Not necessarily. How does one sleep at nights knowing that they missed a chance to help their co-worker get a jump on finding that next job by alerting them that of their impending termination? Isn't it better to spare your co-worker the trauma of being fired? Wouldn't be good to help your soon-to-be-former-co-worker by being a shoulder to cry on? Possibly.
The bottom line is that everyone needs to decide for himself or herself what they're going to do every time this situation pops up. There is no one right or wrong answer. Besides in these bad economic times, you could end up being the co-worker who ill be fired.
