Announce bad news without lying to your team
deliverydoubled.com
deliverydoubled.com
I think it's better to announce the bad news on the horizon before it arrives - if possible. People are more likely to find solutions to problems when the problem are laid out. If the CEO comes out and says, "Our Q1 numbers really plummeted in 2020, and we need to innovate if we want to make it past Q3 intact", then sure it will get reactions of "I should update my CV", but it also gets people in the problem-solving mindset and willing to put in effort if they have a stake in the outcome.
As opposed to delivering the bad news when nothing left can be done, at which point it seems like all the recent work was in vain, and people are 'slapped in the face' with the news. Saying "This ship's sailing great! ... as long as we throw half the crew overboard" isn't the most motivating speech.
- On an aside: This also relates to the "announcer's" personal skills as a leader/manager. Some people hate giving bad news because they think it means they will be negatively received, and some leaders/managers are just very bad at taking criticism. It's a tough job, but it comes with the territory, and denying bad news is a reality is just "blissful ignorance".
If I had a dollar for every time I got flak for telling people exactly what issues are, I'd have a decent sized home in the midwest.
I'd be surprised if you could quantify that as being an American thing, any more so than anywhere else.
In the UK there is this "pessimistic honesty" whereas in the US everyone tries to maintain a positive veneer, even when things are going south and letting more people in could help.
I find the "looks over substance" thing makes management in the US categorically worse from both ends, but obviously a pessimistic outlook has its limitations/problems too (particularly when things are going well).
But the older I get, the more I see that most management decisions aren't based on facts/logic/reason, and instead most people just shoot from the hip and then figure out facts/logic/reason that fit whatever decision they were going to make anyway (or "Confirmation Bias" as they call it).
For example late last year the CEO decided Telecommuting was banned. Why? They themselves don't know and or cannot articulate it. Something about productivity/communications? They read an article? Then COVID happened, and they had to re-spin which made similarly as little sense. Now they're re-spinning again to get everyone back in the office/re-ban telecommuting, all with little justification or explanation.
The US still has a very individualistic culture and I don't think people put as much emphasis on reputation as more collectivist folks, but I think Americans glamorize success (or the appearance thereof) in and of itself more than other cultures.
Essentially, as long as you LOOK successful, you ARE successful, because that's all that people care about!
Again, not 100% on this analysis, but that's the overall impression I get as an American
I suppose there's a reason he was chosen as a representative of America, and why so many Americans were uncomfortable with the implications.
My experience with bad news especially is that too many managers have linked their self worth to their company's success and so bad news equates to them being bad and thus avoided.
I was remarkably fortunate to take a job at Intel as my first job out of college during the Andy Grove years. While there are arguments to made on the pluses and minuses of "constructive criticism", the leadership culture under Andy was that problems were there to provide something for the rest of us to work on. When they came up they got pounced on as they were often how people were measured in their reviews.
I did not realize at the time this was different than other companies in the valley. Intel focused on the people who saw the problems, came up with solutions or workarounds, and kept moving. As opposed to the people who "simply" delivered their milestones on time.
It was much later in my career when I found myself in a company that was actively ignoring problems. That struck me as so foreign I had a hard time dealing with it.
Now whenever I hear phrases like "we have to use the manual override most of the time" or "this alarm goes off all the time, it doesn't mean anything is broken", I am happy that the worst I can do is break a deployment, not explode an entire block.
On the field work side there were a couple of rounds of layoffs as automation started to kick in. Most in the field were contractors so their employer moved them around companies as needed. But for one person to see 30 rounds of layoffs I'd say it's still quite a bit of bad luck.
But having been a roughneck after high school, no one higher than the rig manager would hold a speech in that industry. He'd get a call as we were finishing the hole and convey the news when everyone came in for lunch.
The first is seasonal. Every fall, due to the nature of the products they make, everyone but cleaning and maintenance staff are laid off for 2 months. Everyone knows it's coming, everyone prepares for it.
The second is the unpredictable one. They all, even maintenance and janitorial, got laid off in stages starting about two weeks ago. No one was ready for that. No one was prepared. It's a much different beast and has a MUCH larger impact on the surrounding community.
If you keep hearing concrete news about how great things are going, things are likely fine.
If you hear no news for a while, that is Bad News!
To quote Denzel Washington's character in Inside Man:
"I've got him right where I want him"
"Where's that?"
"Behind me with my pants around my ankles."
Delivering bad news is hard, and it's to try easy and avoid it. It's like firing people. A number of managers would rather wait until its someone else problem rather than doing what needs to be done. It causes everyone problems in avoiding it, but doing what needs to be done appears to be a far worse course of action to many.
Most of the time the fear was unfounded or at best, a better outcome that what happens when employees lose trust in leadership.
Conversly, it's really easy to sound as if you don't care enough, or be openly frustrated and deflecting responsibility to someone else (especially if that's justified). This way you end up with people angry at individuals, and not thinking about the next steps (whether getting their own career in order, or continuing the project in a different setup).
Lying, or being wishy-washy is the path of least resistance. I think managers are getting paid to do uncomfortable things and with time might become awesome even in these hard situations, but YRMV.
> My personal experience has been when you let people know the facts and act on them, it is amazing what happens.
It is common for management in the US to become a middleman that effectively acts as a low-value-add component between leadership above them, and the IC's below them. To be a high-value-add it's a complex game of social skills, making people happy, compromise, individual attention/listening, domain knowledge/experience, etc etc. I'll be the first to admit - every time I've had to be a leader it's been incredibly difficult. Although it's common sense, I'm reminded every time that it's very hard to manage problems outside of your own headspace - and that's a hard pill to swallow as a SWE!
Back to the low-value-add manager though... there's a lot of them out there. And for ego, or self-preservation at the company, etc they want to be the end-all/be-all for solutions/innovation that's happening in their team. Ie: if it didn't originate from them they don't want to hear about it, and when presenting to their leadership all of their team's accomplishments are because of them. Often they keep their employees stuck in-place with fear of termination, push-out the high-achievers who will challenge status-quo, and self-market like crazy to increase their standing in the org.
> Why do leaders think lying, or obfuscating works so well?
Because they're playing a different game than you are as an actual leader. Many managers will lie, obfuscate, and generally be assholes because it's how lazy/unsophisticated people get what they want - regardless if it's layoffs or just the normal day-to-day. I know the question is rhetorical but when I read it I blurted out loud "because people suck!" drinking my morning coffee =)
In their mind, it's easier to just lay them off, and rehire when the condition gets better. Input from lower staffs will be seen negative and obfuscating. They are lying to shift the blame to lower staffs and save face, it'll be useful when rehiring process come.
If they honestly said layoff to cut cost because of low budget, the news can spread and future new hires may be concerned with it. But if you said it's because the staffs performance and / or they don't need their specialization now, future new hires won't concerned much with it.
because it got them where they are today ?
That's why we hear so many stories of startups suddenly going bankrupt, leaving the grunt employees going, "huh"? They want to keep everyone on-board, working 100% efficiency, so that the elites at the top can reap everything before things go to crap.
That's pretty much it. All other reasons don't make sense when you include the entire hierarchy of a corporate structure and the goal of any company (it's money).
That's why telling the truth is so hard, because it affects the company's bottom line, whereas your life being inconvenienced doesn't. So companies just lie, or stay quiet until they have to tell the truth last minute.
I'm always amazed when managers feel the need to keep upbeat and "dispel the rumors" to the exact people who started the "rumors." Even as a developer, I have excellent insight into customers. I remember working for a company whose product usage fell off of a cliff. I certainly noticed how loads on our servers fell long before the sales team got additional training to combat the falling renewal rates or before the layoffs hit.
I've found that directness is the best approach. Leave no ambiguity and waste no time. If there are going to be layoffs, then say so. I'd rather have people freak out based on what I say than from what they hear from other people. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Expose the issues and talk about them as quickly as possible and move on to planning how to handle it.
Flip the scenario. What would it mean if suddenly an employee had absolutely terrible status that they were _finally_ forced to share. As a manager, wouldn't you wonder why it wasn't disclosed earlier? Why the employee was probably lying to your face for some time?
Sadly most leaders today (and it gets worse the larger the organization) are neither direct or completely candid when announcing bad news.
Most employees can smell the bullshit from a mile away and at least for me, I lose any and all respect for the leader(s) delivering the message.
Oh we wont be getting bonuses this year? Well be glad you have a job!
Oh you wont be getting that raise you promised? Well we're adding a drink dispenser to the break room
As you get higher up it only gets worse - the yes men reporting to the executive are all reporting the good points and underselling the bad points. Have a project that's failing? Well better report that there are some aspects going well! Have a team that's not cutting it? Well report on the ones that are!
Until promotions are determined by actual objective measures and not by subjective anecdotal feelings this will continue to be the case.
When the all-hands meeting was done, and we returned to our desk, and there was an email waiting for us saying that we were going to have layoffs. He subsequently defended himself, saying that he wasn't allowed to say anything about the layoffs. There were so many ways he could have answered the question, like "We are exploring all avenues at this point" without lying straight to our faces and looking like an idiot, but he chose the exact worst way to answer it.
Obviously, his trust was completely lost by everyone in the org, and his reputation was completely ruined by this. No one trusted or believed him after that. He was an asshole anyway and was fired a year or so afterwards because of how ineffective he had become as a leader.
That's a hard position to be in when you've been specifically told not to share news.
Announcements typically mean change. And people, in general, dislike change. No matter what you announce, it will evoke an emotional response of some kind. And that response will drive morale for that person/team/company for the short-term future.
Always prepare announcements with care.
I present to all kinds of audiences all the time. Yesterday it was SVPs, tomorrow it’s the engineers on my team.
I know firsthand how easy it can be to get wrapped up in the formalism of presentation — does the internal logic of my argument make sense, is this a nice theoretical framework, is the framing pithy and memorable enough? But it can all go to shit if you don’t design your presentation for your audience. You need to be thinking from One about the kinds of language your audience is accustomed to, about potential baggage associated with particular concepts or even specific words, about the kinds of information they’re used to consuming (and the mechanisms by which they consume it), and first and foremost: what is my audience motivated or incentivized by? How can I make sure that the message I present is aligned with their goals and their values? Alternatively, if I’m delivering a message that I know to be counter to their existing worldview, how do I empathetically demonstrate that I actually understand their worldview, that I’ve considered it deeply, and that new data or a larger shift have necessitated a change in thinking?
I’ve seen so many presentations (as recently as yesterday) in the other direction (to high-level executives) that fall into essentially the same trap: they have a really important message to deliver, but the message falls on its face because the presenter frames the conversation from their perspective, ignoring that their audience comes to the table with potentially very different wants/needs and a substantially different contextual lens.
It's really easy to tell the truth if you've established a culture in which everyone is on the same side: us versus problem, instead of a company where everyone is working for themselves.
The problem is, in most companies, everyone is working for themselves. Most companies don't care about their workers beyond those workers' ability to make them money. Workers know that if something happens and they can't hold up their end of the bargain, you'll drop them, so why, if you might not be able to hold up your end of the bargain, should your workers not just drop you?
There isn't a way to tell your workers that the company isn't doing well AND get them to help you, if you haven't established a culture where your workers can come to you and tell you they aren't doing well, and receive help.
I once signed a 12 month contract extension and 7 days later (5 days before christmas) there was a big meeting and I and 50+ other people were escorted off the office by security as the whole project cancelled.
I'm pretty sure the manager know the project was going to be cancelled but he had to issue new contracts anyway he know would be torn up as they were not ready to officially announce yet...
Revenue is seriously down. If this trend continues for another quarter or so, we'll have to start layoffs of ~10% of the engineers.
Do you share the full news now, with no idea of whether there will be layoffs? Do you "lie by omission" by sharing that revenue is down, but not mention the potential consequences?
The CEO typically is hoping for one more deal to close, to turnaround the company and not have to go through the layoffs. Why scare people if it's not needed?
I probably respect my current boss more because he told us a large client was leaving before the client emailed us to cancel.
If people distrust leadership then when they do finally acknowledge something negative (eg. we're having 10% layoffs) then employees rationally assume things are actually far worse than that (eg. we're having multiple rounds of layoffs) and will behave accordingly (eg. leave even if not laid off).
On the other hand if leaders build trust by acknowledging reality then when they announce that things are bad people are more likely to behave proportionately and trust that things are only as bad as announced rather than 'reading between the lines' and assuming they are 10x worse.
As a result, there's a strong incentive to keep your mouth shut about anything remotely negative until it's too late for it to affect anything significant, and then to release it in as positive-spin a manner as possible to minimize the effects. Hence, layoffs are spun as "restructuring to make the company leaner and focus our efforts". It's not that I think you can't be honest in presenting information like this to employees, but I do think we need to temper our expectations about the messaging from C-level execs, because Wall Street definitely does not reward radical honesty. (Maybe it should, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.)
It's also very important to let the message go through the right/intended channel. That in my experience happens more often.
Decision making and communication is often slow, and less experienced leads and managers start proactively to leak and share some part of the story, or even wrong information, without passing enough context or using the right language. And they just don't understand the consequences.
Part of the reason is the trust that has already been built and part of the reason is that they can give a clear path forward and actually get people onboard (or at least make the justification believable).
People talk to each other and terminating someone does not prevent that from happening.
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You are doing an employee a great disservice if you aren't honest and upfront about their under performance. Because when they are let go they will be completely blindsided by it and will never have been given a chance to remedy any of the underlying issues.
Deliver bad news. Straight and emotionless. We are professionals. After 5 years we've seen most things after 10 years.. you've seen just about anything. Folks need bad news in order to properly prepare for their future.
Only the 3rd one is lying. You can still leave a completely misleading impression by telling partial truths.