People tend to shoot the messenger. As manager I’m often the one who stands in front of that rifle. Today I’d like to go thru some of the practices that I’ve worked thru to make that process at least a bit easier.

Funny thing is that we never feel like we intentionally want to shoot te messenger - but most of us do it anyway. Or at least we often associate negative feelings with people who came to us to tell us bad news. As a managers and coworkers our relation with people around is crucial, including emotional ground. That is especially tricky for a cases that no-one did anything bad. You lost a bid, customer changed his mind, security audit rejected your idea or that you must change teams to support another project.

It’s easy to make a big deal of it and sit all together, get angry and complain. But how to do it differently?

Avoid negative language

One may think it’s all about the message, but delivery matters a lot. If you reach out to people with a lot of negativity, you’ll incept same reaction in them. Unfortunately, sadly, . If I see my manager especially sad about something, I sense that it with his more broad perspective he’s worried - I should be worried too. Worst that can happen here is audience to catastrphize. You wanted to underline that you profit margin is slightly too slim & people taking that as company going bankrupt - this type of situation.

Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman in Words Can Change Your Brain pointed out that:

“Angry words send alarm messages through the brain, and they partially shut down the logic-and-reasoning centres located in the frontal lobes.”

And I can’t agree more. You may think it’s logical cuz you have already processed the information. Account for the fact that your audience did not.

Over explaining makes it worse

It’s a human thing to be tempted into explaining the situation to greatest details. It’s a sign of popular coping mechanism. We hope that after providing all the context, other side will understand and won’t see us as guilty ones. It’s also terrible way to deal with such situations. Why?

First, it’s selfish: you’re only doing it to make yourself feel better. You don’t want to feel guilty. You don’t want to be seen as a problem. You.

Second, it complicates the actual message. The more you over explain, the harder you’re doing it for reception to absorb the actually message. More over it’s getting tricky to understand what are the facts, and what are your opinions.

Respect your audience. Get straight to your point. Focus on recipient understanding a message. If they will need more info - let them ask for that first. Do dialogue, not monologue. Don’t overwhelm.

To the point

Even without over explaining, try to get to your point quickly. Be concise. Like ripping a bandage, the quicker the easier. Most often people have rather god gut feel that something is coming. But the longer you delay the actually message, the more you allow them to mentally escalate the scenario causing unnecessary strain.

Tell us bad news immediately—because good news takes care of itself. We can take bad news, but we don't like it late.

Warren Buffet

Address involvement

Negative news often are a starting point to any form of dualities between peers. Us versus them, my team vs management, me vs rest all the world. This is particularly crucial, covered my numerous titles and paper. Reminding people of their agency can be useful here. Research shows that when people remember they have the freedom to choose what to do, it encourages them to behave more generously, with a bit of distance.

Simply speaking underline that:

You both knew the result might not work.
Not a first time someone has different opinions, not last.
You’re on the same team and working toward the same goal.
You want to figure out together what to do going forward.

I would recommend a beat of feedback game to make sure that is not received as a sarcasm, or even worse as attempt to put blame on receiver.

❌ I told you this might not work. Just move on, they had much better arguments, no way we can go around that.

✅ I remember when we considered this tool we discussed that others may have a different take, seems we were right. With no budget for that license this month we can choose to think thru how to make out points more appealing - for example small POC? Alternatively maybe we can sync later in the week if that’t not a good moment to abandon that idea?

One of my favourite analogies would be Rey immelman tribal analogies from Great Boss Dead Boss. Any tribe (team) needs and seeks an enemy. That’s natural and our role as managers is to make sure that teams do not start to conflict with each other, but instead develop healthy competitiveness.

Take the bullet (smartly)

There are two camps of managers here. First one believes that as messenger you should never accept blame if you feel that’s not on you. Arguments are that you’re inviting people to project onto you. This erodes trust in your working relationships and tarnishes your credibility. If it happens too many times, it could stall your career because you’ll start to be associated with failures.

I’m in a different camp. As a leader as some point an empire-building strategy is to develop a gut feel on which battles are worth fighting. Let me elaborate:

Some negative news are just not worth making a big deal. If responsibility is “shared”, but the impact is low - just swallow it and move on. Don’t encourage big investigations and building complex schemes in colleagues mids.
Some guilts are worth taking. Especially when reporting above. That gives you a chance to connect that “guilt”, with for example lack of resources, authority or process inconvenience. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
You can build your persona around person who brings end to issues. Instead of passing that up and down organisation, you have the power to end it.

Sharing Bad News Without Guilt