Having directly participated in 100’s of for cause terminations and been involved after the fact on 100’s more, it is very very common for the behind closed doors reality to be the fired employee is the worst human ever and the public message to be “Joe has decided to resign to pursue other interests and we wish him the best and thank him for his service.” And the higher up the org chart the terminated employee is, the more likely they get the option to resign in lieu of getting frog marched out the front door.
Look at today’s news. The CEO of NBC got termed over the weekend for sexual harassment and the company got him to issue a public apology and admit he was wrong. Go back to Friday’s business news and read about the Bud Light boycott causing marketing person who is “taking a leave of absence.” That’s what severance pay is for - get a release of claims and get the PR issue taken care of. Firing someone like Chad and going on YouTube to say it was not voluntary is amateur hour.
Totally and that is what should be expect, however what you say to the public, if you are going say anything, should only positive, and would (may) have stopped a lot of this thread, PR and HR are not linked
I’ve resisted posting so far, but the more I think about the announcement the more dissapointed I am.
No doubt about it Chad helped create TR what it is now, I genuinely cannot think of a reason why he wouldn’t be allowed to quietly resign with a “Thanks Chad for everything” from TR.
From the outside it seems very poor (and vindictive) from TR
There is a lot of posts here and I didn’t scan the entire thread, but I think that people are speculating wildly on chad being fired as an employee and not as a founder. It’s probably more likely that instead of wild misconduct, this is a purely business/intellectual property dispute. Chad was a co-founder and likely had significant ownership stake in trainer road. Nate has additional power as the ceo, and seems very driven by the tech nature of trainer road. I could definitely see a situation where Nate wants trainer road to be acquired by a larger company. If Chad doesn’t agree with that decision, it’s possible he has enough ownership stake to complicate that. Additionally, since he is the creator of trainer roads workout catalog, he may have a legitimate intellectual property claim to their entire database if the company was not properly structured to specifically prevent that. IE, Chad might legally be wearing the pants and TR the entity is basically a podcast and forum.
Maybe a cultural thing. Where I work that is usually only reserved for the upper ranks of management in private or public organizations. For regular employees it’s getting shown the door. But I am not really aware whether Chad was co-owner, manager or just an employee.
There is 0 chance Chad left in good to mild terms. This was a termination. I am not sure what he did or said. But everyone else who has left to do something else have had the chance of a goodbye and their names have not been scrubbed of the website.
We don’t know the all information and me personally wouldn’t put blame on TR. If we do find out what happened only then we can fully understand why they did what they did.
Example:
If my favorite barista got canned from my favorite coffee shop. I’d still go there for coffee because I need the coffee place more than I needed employee. Maybe that’s a terrible example.
Speaking of fun sounding, hyphenated psychological concepts, this entire thread is Dunning-Kruger personified.
We apparently have experts in labor law, corporate communications, business strategy, m&a, corporate structure, macroeconomics and globalization (for some reason here). And yet somehow they all disagree on every single topic.
Regardless of whether he was technically or legally “just an employee”, he was one of the faces of the company and integral to the brand message. So, his technical employment status somewhat misses the point, the messaging to the customer base was terrible.
My guess is that they had directional differences which resulted in Chad essentially filing or threatening to file some kind of intellectual property law suit which would essentially give him ownership of the majority of trainer roads assets and they are scrubbing him from the website to avoid some type of additional libel lawsuit.
