The Company That Refuses To Fire People

What happens when you take firing off the table?

For most of us, firing is the escape hatch. Someone's not working out, you swap them out, and you never really have to figure out whether the problem was them or you.

Greg Kunkel, and his team at Next Jump welded that hatch shut. No firing.

And closing the exit did something sneaky: the only way through a struggling employee was to actually make them better. So the company got obsessed with the one skill most orgs quietly dodge: developing people.

They got so good at it that Harvard put Next Jump on a shortlist of the most deliberately people-developing companies on earth, right next to Ray Dalio's Bridgewater.

Skip this one and you miss the clearest case we've seen that firing is a crutch, and what your managers are forced to become the second you take it away.

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Most companies call their people their greatest asset, then treat actually developing those people like a nice-to-have they'll get around to later.

Greg bet his whole career on the opposite.

He's spent nearly three decades at Next Jump, plus a ton of time working with thousands of HR and benefits leaders through its Perks at Work business. He's watched, up close, what separates the teams that grow people from the ones that just burn through them.

His take is a little heretical: most leaders only know how to buy talent, when the real edge is learning to build it. And the quickest way to get good at building people? Stop giving yourself an easy out.

We pulled five moves from this conversation you can steal.

Most of us think there's one way to get great people: go hire them. Greg says that's only half the picture.

"You can hire somebody that's already pre-made and into a job description," he says, "or you can really develop them." Two levers. Buy, or build. And almost every company cranks on the first one while the second just sits there. Greg picked the idea up partly from working with military groups, who assume from day one that you develop people, you don't just acquire them fully formed.

"It's incredibly empowering," he says, "to think of two levers versus one."

Next Jump's no-firing experiment was how they forced themselves to finally pull that second lever. The deal with employees was simple: "we're gonna develop you. We're gonna coach you. You can leave whenever you want." They just wouldn't push anyone out. When the option to fire people disappeared, responsibility shifted to leaders: "When you get really frustrated with somebody but yet can't fire them, then you learn to be creative on what are other ways to coach, train, motivate."

There's a flip side Greg is quick to name, too. When you can't fire people, you get a lot more careful about who you let in the door in the first place. Every hire is suddenly someone you're committing to grow, not someone you can quietly exit in six months. The bar to get in goes up precisely because the escape hatch is gone.

The strategic logic: The "buy" lever is a red ocean. Everyone's fishing for the same pre-made people and bidding the price up. The "build" lever is wide open, and the people you grow tend to be more loyal, more adaptable, and cheaper than the ones you poach. Killing the easy exit is what turns "we should develop people" from a slogan into a daily habit, because now your managers have no other option.

Early on, Greg did what most conscientious managers do: he poured his time into his weakest people. He was actually known for being really good at squeezing more out of his C players.

Now? He's "180 degrees" on that. He spends his energy on his strongest people, "finding ways to help them grow, help them teach, put them in position where they're actually challenged again."

His reasoning is a bit of human nature we all recognize. "We get a challenge, we're successful with it, and it's human nature to want now that to be the new norm." Translation: your best people crush a hard thing, then quietly settle into it as their comfort zone. Greg's whole job is getting them back on "the next new bicycle" before they start coasting.

The strategic logic: Your A players create outsized value, and they're also your quietest flight risk. A bored top performer usually doesn't complain. They just start taking the recruiter's call. Re-challenging them grows their skills and your retention at the same time, and it raises the ceiling on what your whole team can pull off.

Everybody says they want a transparent culture. Greg thinks transparency is a shockingly low bar.

One of Next Jump's co-CEOs, Meghan Messenger, coined a better one: no lying, no hiding, no faking. And the gap between those really matters. "Transparency, I could just not say anything," Greg points out. "It's a higher bar than just being kinda transparent." You can be technically transparent and still sit on the doubt, the disagreement, the thing nobody wants to bring up.

Part of what the bar asks for is admitting where you actually are, which is usually messier than anyone wants to cop to. Like Greg says, it's important to keep chipping away at where you want to go, "but it's maybe even more important to understand the truth of where you're at now, and that truth can be messy."

The strategic logic: You can't develop people, or fix anything, around silence. A higher honesty bar surfaces problems while they're still small and cheap to solve, instead of letting them harden into turnover and rework. It's the thing that makes every other move on this list even possible. Development is really just honest feedback plus time.

Next Jump had a peer-recognition program called Top 10, a monthly thumbs up for people who helped others out or did great work. Then somebody floated an experiment: add a thumbs down. Public, honest, critical feedback, sitting right next to all the praise.

Their most senior HR leader, Greg says, was "almost on his knees begging" not to do it. "People can't publicly get critical feedback, and people would leave. It would ruin our culture."

They ran it anyway, for three months. What it surfaced were the "eggshells," all the tensions everybody felt but nobody would say out loud. Did it hurt some feelings? Yep. Did it also pull the org closer? Also yep. And it taught Greg a lesson he keeps circling back to: "how much fear we bring into our predictions." That senior leader's confident forecast of disaster turned out to be mostly fear wearing a certainty costume.

The strategic logic: Recognition isn't the enemy of candor, it's what makes candor survivable. When 83.6% of employees say recognition affects their motivation to succeed, you're quietly building a trust account most leaders never think to open. And a full account is exactly what lets people take the hard feedback without heading for the door. Praise and honesty aren't a tradeoff. One pays for the other.

Notice the pattern in that thumbs-down story: they didn't debate it to death, and they didn't bet the whole company on it either. They ran it three times.

That's a rule Greg uses on basically everything. "When you experiment, try it three times," he says. "Once, oftentimes if it's new, you're not very good at it, you're still learning." Three tries isn't a huge commitment, but it's enough to tell you something. "If you don't have traction after three times, then you can reevaluate."

The strategic logic: Most good ideas don't die from bad merit. They die from impatience, or from getting studied to death before anyone tries them. A "three tries" rule kills both. It's small enough that fear can't veto it upfront, and structured enough that you're deciding on evidence instead of one clumsy first attempt. And right now, with AI dropping new tools on your team every week, a cheap, repeatable way to experiment is a real edge.

Greg is the rare leader who treats developing people as the actual work, not the soft stuff you get to once the "real" work is done. And he's got the receipts: a culture Harvard put on a shortlist next to Bridgewater, built by someone who's clearly thought harder about this than almost anyone.

For the HR leader who's spent years arguing that development is a business strategy, this episode is a field-tested playbook, plus the CEO-ready language to put each piece to work this week.

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We turned Greg's playbook into a Toolkit for YOU!

The bonus toolkit for this episode includes:

Everything you need to bring Greg's system to your own team, available on the SHRM website this weekend.

Companies that consistently recognize and reinforce the right behaviors and values build cultures where people stay longer, perform better, and pull in the same direction.

Nectar helps HR teams and leaders make those moments consistent with a culture platform that's easy to adopt and actually gets used.

→ Recognition that doesn't feel forced
→ Engagement and listening you can act on
→ Communication that reaches people where they are

See Nectar in action:

Most of those walls are self-installed:

Greg's whole career is basically a case study in what happens when you stop taking those limits at face value and just try the thing.

We ask every guest about their "Culture Crush" — a person or organization they admire for the culture they've built.

Greg's is Danielle Morse, who runs a nonprofit called Shared Living Collaborative working with highly autistic kids. (She figured out they respond powerfully to horses, and she's been at it for over two decades, even landing a feature in Rolling Stone.)

With almost no money and barely any resources, she's built a fiercely committed community.

Greg's takeaway: culture is built with heart, time, and patience, not budget. So whenever a leader tells him they can't afford to invest in culture, she's the first person he thinks of.