Communicating Bad News

In recent days I have heard about a couple of situations where good employees have been turned off from their work because of poor communication of bad news on the part of their superiors. In both cases, it was the way the message was delivered that caused the problem as opposed to the message itself and in both cases the bad feelings were entirely preventable.

The first scenario involved the supervisor of a small and dedicated group of employees. The group was quite close knit and often shared information about their personal lives and socialized outside of work. The supervisor, Margaret, had decided to take a six month leave of absence for personal reasons and was dreading telling her employees.

Margaret decided that because it was such a social group that she could simply tell a couple of people with whom she was close and assume that the word would get around. Depending on the gossip mill however had some serious downsides. Instead of the information trickling down, most of the people she told kept their mouths shut entirely in deference to Margaret’s privacy and the employees who did hear from their peers were offended that Margaret had not told them herself.

In many ways, Margaret underestimated the respect her employees had for her. She is genuinely admired by the people who work for her and they wanted to hear about big changes from her.

The other scenario occurred in a slightly bigger group within a much bigger company. Linda and her colleagues had been working on a large project for close to two years. The company had put millions into the project and over recent weeks the team had been putting in 60+ hours a week trying to meet all the deadlines.

Then, without warning, on Monday morning Linda and her colleagues were told that the company had pulled the plug on the project and they should all stop working immediately. Nobody told them why the project had been killed, what was going to happen with all the work they had done over the past two years, or even what they would be working on next.

While companies make decisions all the time that they do not need to justify to every employee, there should be some recognition of the employees who are invested in certain aspects of the business. Companies need not justify their decisions but in order to maintain an engaged team, managers do need to shed a bit of light on those decisions that directly affect day-to-day operations for those people.

In both scenarios the bad news itself was somewhat unavoidable but it could have been communicated in such a way that employees still felt like they had a stake in the company. A certain amount of information will always need to remain confidential within a small group of higher-ups but, supervisors need to communicate bad news personally and with enough information that the decision does not appear to come entirely out of left field.

What in your experience is the best way to prepare to deliver bad news?

The Overextended Life

Burnout is one of many psychological connections with work. People develop connections with their worklife that resonate with their experiences within those environments. Although fraught with change, workplaces actually have many stable qualities. For most people, going to work tomorrow is a whole lot like going to work yesterday. The nature of the work, management practices, and encounters with coworkers, bosses, or customers establish consistent pattern. Walking through similar patterns and responding to similar challenges establish enduring patterns. People experience a similar range of emotions and thoughts over time. Their relationships with other people and their sense of identity become integrated with their day-to-day worklife.

Over the next few weeks, I will describe some distinct psychological relationships with work. Eventually I will describe how these distinct patterns fit together into an overall perspective on worklife.

The starting point today is the Overextended pattern. This connection with work differs from burnout in some important ways. But more on that later.

Overextended people put a lot of energy into their work. They often are motivated by their dedication to what they do. They believe in the value of their work. They are confident that they are adept at doing what they do. The problem is that they are running out of steam. They often feel tired during their work day and they are certainly feeling tired a lot more often than they used to. The relationship problems that can arise are that people at work can become overly dependent on that intense energy while those outside of work may resent having to make do with the little left at the end of the work day.

The relevant subjective experiences defining this connection with work are:

• energy,

• dedication, and

• confidence.

The relevant processes are:

• intense work activities coupled with

• weak recovery cycles.

These elements provide the initial elements of a framework for describing the universe of psychological connections with work. The next step will be using that framework to build action plans.