Firing members of your band is never a pleasant experience but I can tell you it is one of the things that you will face in your pursuits as a professional musician.

The ideal situation for a band would be of course to form a band with three other musicians and stay together with the same four people for years and years. The band then eventually gets signed and the same four members tour the world and sell muti platinum albums. The truth as you probably well know is that just keeping a band together is hard enough and staying with the same four members for years and years seems almost impossible. So it is my goal with this article to shed a little light on the subject and help you out with these situations.

Open Communication
The key to keeping any relationship strong is honest open communication. This is very, very important! You should be having weekly band meetings and talking about any problems that come up. Have an agreement with all of your band members to be totally honest and if things are bothering them they should bring them up. Using this approach often times can nip problems in the bud and doesn't allow bad feelings and attitudes to develop. Little problems should be addressed often so locked up hostility should not exits with any of your band members. If you are not having weekly band meetings I suggest that you start immediately.

Your Only As Strong As Your Weakest Link
So what happens when you have a member that doesn't do what he or she is supposed to do? You need to ask some questions which will tell you what action you should take. Identify if the reason that this person did not accomplish what they were supposed to do is can be attributed to an ability problem or an attitude problem.

Ability Problem
An ability problem means that the person wants to complete the task but doesn't know how to do it. An example might be if this person was assigned to layout a flyer for one of you up coming shows however he doesn't know how to operate a computer to do this. You can fix this problem by getting some type of training for this individual and the problem should be fixed.

Attitude Problem
An attitude problem on the other hand can be difficult to fix. Take the same scenario as above however this member was out getting drunk and chasing women instead of getting the layout done. Since this person knows how to operate a computer the problem lies in the attitude to get the job done, he rather be doing something else than doing his part to help the band. You need to sit down with a person like this and tell him that what he is doing is hurting the band and if it keeps up then you will have to let them go. Of course it is up to your disgression of when to actually say your fired, however , I would let him know every time a situation comes up when he screws up. Keep in mind that if you have one member that's dragging his or her feet it actually brings the whole band down and you must fix the situation if you want to move ahead with a career in the music biz.

I have had to fire many people in my years as a band leader and it can be real painful. Most of the time after I have talked to the member that was screwing up a few times previously as to what I will do if their actions continued they accepted it and moved on. One of the best advice that I ever got was from John Sutherland (at the time a Publisher with Zomba). He said the best thing you can do is surround yourself with top notch people. I believe these are words to live by.