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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

Thursday, 10am: Company All-Hands. Scheduled at short notice.

First 10 or 15 minutes is beating around the bush about how well things have been going, buuuuut....

Another 10 minutes of different leaders explaining how difficult the decision was, crocodile tears and all.

Everyone, meanwhile, is waiting for leadership to stop wasting time and get to the point. If it wasn't obvious at the start, it would be crystal clear now.

Another 5 minutes or so of hand-wringing about how amazing everyone is and how hard this was, to complete the bullshit sandwich.

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I had a similar experience where the entire marketing and BI teams (BI was part of marketing) were called into a meeting at short notice.

Everyone expecting layoffs or some such bad news. Turned out the guy heading up marketing was leaving, and ego being a thing, needed a platform to announce this.

This fricking act put unnecessary fear into folks with mortgages and kids, for absolutely no reason!

One piece of advice I read in some charisma book and repeat constantly at work is to always make the point of any email you send the very first sentence.

It is so tempting to waste a bunch of time "softening" the blow of whatever you're trying to say, but you're never doing the audience any favours, you're just trying to control how they're going to react. You need only think about the last time you got an important email (job interview follow up, redundancy announcement, pay review etc). You immediately scan through the document for the one line that says what you need to know, usually starting with "unfortunately, we..." Or "we're pleased to...". The rest of the document is just fluff getting in the way of what really matters. Anyway, I'm waffling, but it never ceases to amaze me the variant ways management screw up that one simple rule.

I never got to attend that all-hands meeting. The company scheduled two meetings at the same time - one all-hands, except for about 10 of us who were scheduled for the other one. It didn't take too much imagination to figure out what the second meeting was about. This was about 3 months after our company had been acquired.

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