By LISA BELKIN

The woman was all but led out the door in handcuffs. A security guard by her side, she was told to leave the building immediately. Her offense- She lost her job, laid off in the wave of dismissals on Wall Street.
“There are some very wrong ways to fire people,” said Rachelle Canter, who has spent 20 years in executive outplacement as president of RJC Associates in San Francisco, working with people who have been fired, and companies that are firing. Treating a downsizing victim like a criminal, she said, is one of those ways.
If you find yourself being fired, the most important thing to remember (besides that it’s actually O.K. to cry) is that you’ll be in shock, and you won’t be thinking straight, so don’t feel the need to ask every question then and there.
You should make sure to leave the room knowing how to contact someone who can answer your questions later on, when you have a chance to calm down. Try not to become defensive or argumentative; if there are issues to be disputed, you can do that later.
The same general advice applies to those charged with doing the firings, namely, keep things short and calm.
“The goal is to do it in a way that you don’t feel awful about yourself, you treated someone with respect,” said Donna Flagg, who has fired more than two dozen people during her decade in retail sales, and is now president of the Krysalis Group, a business and management consulting firm. “I don’t think anyone is actually good at it,” she said.
There are two kinds of exit conversations, those that are personal (an employee has done something to warrant dismissal) and those that are not (the company is foundering or merging and someone has to go).
Of the two, the first is far more complicated. The dismissal is in fact a direct attack on a worker’s worth. There is no ego-shielding veil, like the economy, to hide behind.
Dr. Canter said that those handling such dismissals should make it a goal “to treat the employee like a person, not like an item you can just delete from your screen.” Every dismissal has an audience, she pointed out, consisting of employees who remain. People talk. And if you march a staff member out of the office sobbing, people watch.
“The best of your staff can always get good jobs elsewhere, even in the worst economy,” she said. “And they will if you make it clear that you are willing to mistreat others.”
Another rule on the list of don’ts, veterans say, is to never use the Internet as a way to fire people. Radio Shack, an electronics retailer, made headlines when it did that in 2006, sending an e-mail message to 400 employees that read: “The work-force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.”