First of all, you have ZERO way of knowing if this is your only gay employee or not. That is just the most STUPID thing I have heard in a long time. He may be your only OPENLY gay employe...
Anyways, as a manger your job is to represent the interests of the company, not your friends. If this employee does his job adequately and doesn't break rules, then you don''t fire him. PERIOD. If he has specific behaviors that need to be changed, you can work with him on those specific things. "Gay" is about identity so you just CANNOT GO THERE.
I had a male employee who was pretty awesome except he really did creep everyone out because he was so "touchy." Meaning he literally touched people a lot - males and females. It was totally innocent, but I did have to make him aware that his concept of "personal space" was a bit more liberal than it should be for the workplace. And he was straight...not that it matters. But you see where I'm going with this?
If the "creep factor" is just that he's gay, tell your friends to suck it. If there is a specific behavior that needs to be changed, welcome to management. Whether it's body odor, swearing, touching, inappropriate jokes...everyone in management has to deal with these things.
If it's simply that they don't like him for some arbitrary reason, welcome to adulthood. In the workplace it doesn't matter who likes who. We are here to work. THE END.
So if you want to be a good leader, you need to dig a little bit deeper and figure out what the best path is for the COMPANY and then follow it.
Dismissing a employee because he/she "creeps you out" is hardly a valid reason. You indicate the employee is doing a acceptable job, wake up this is 2014 ! Attempting to coerce an employee to break the job rules is immoral and quite possibly illegal. We live in an era where doing the right thing is ridiculed. You have no grounds to fire this employee.
What you can do is quit letting your friends tell you how to run your department. If the man performs acceptably well, that is that. The epitome of poor leadership and lack of backbone would be to fire a dedicated employee because he "creeps out" other employees because he is homosexual. Leadership demands that you tell your homophobic employees to come to terms with this individual and get over it.
1. The ability to get along with others is an important attribute for employees in any professionally run business. But your "better employees" (who are also your friends from college?) want you to get rid of this one person b/c he is different. You are clearly unprofessional and incompetent as a manager, not to mention spineless.
2. Firing someone based on sexual orientation is illegal in some places. Do you really want to drag your company into a lawsuit?
You are talking about descrimination here. You can't just fire someone or set them up because of their personal beliefs. The only way you can fire people is when they mess up their job responsibilities you write them up and give them a warning, then if they mess up again one more warning, on the third mess up, you can fire them legally for poor job performance.
If you really are a good leader, you will tell your other employees to grow up and accept people for who they are. A good leader doesn't take orders from his people to do illegal things to other employees.
Do not fire him because he creeps other employees out give him a chance
I have a better idea. Fire your dumb *** ignorant friends, quit your job, and leave the real work to the real worker. You have no right to be in a position of authority until you can treat all people equally. You're a dumb ***.
Sounds like you're setting yourself up for a lawsuit.
That's incredibly wrong, you don't deserve the position you are in if you discriminate due to ones sexuality.
Grow a backbone, dude.
