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Conveying bad news is a crucial and often delicate persuasive task. You generally want to deliver the news while still keeping your audience’s goodwill. A skilled communicator gives bad news in a way that persuades the audience to accept it without becoming overly defensive—not an easy feat. While delivering bad news is never pleasant, doing so is essential to business. To manage effectively, you must be able to say no, cut budgets, fire people, and deny requests. But you can learn to do these things calmly, with integrity and compassion. You can dampen its negative impact by using both head and heart approaches to support your message.
Mistakes Vs. Decisions
Some bad news results from an organization’s mistake: an oil spill, flight cancellations, a product recall, and so on. These bad news announcements usually require an apology and plans for restitution. Even when the event is beyond the organization’s control, the organization still may feel responsible for making amends.
Other bad news results from decisions that are for the long-term good of the organization but negatively affect some stakeholders: a plant is being closed, a product is discontinued, or a group of employees is laid off. Even when the business logic is sound, such bad-news decisions that create "winners and losers" trigger strong emotional reactions. In such cases, leaders shouldn’t apologize for the bad news but must still communicate empathy for those affected. Passive voice is sometimes appropriate: “the decision was made,” “the plant will be closed,” etc.
In either scenario, the worst communication is no communication. Edmondson (2020) writes, "Speaking up early and truthfully is a vital strategy in a fast-moving crisis. . . . Taking the reputational hit today from the release of bad news is likely to earn — for leaders, organizations, and nations alike — dividends in the form of future reputational gain."
While delivering bad news is never pleasant, doing so is an essential professional skill. You must be able to say no, cut budgets, fire people, and deny requests. But you can learn to do these things calmly, with integrity and compassion. You can dampen its negative impact by using both head and heart approaches to support your message.
Direct vs. Indirect Messages
Direct vs. Indirect Messages
Direct Approach
Because life is short and time is money, most messages do their reader a solid favor by taking the direct approach or frontloading the main point, which means getting right to the point and not wasting precious time. In college and professional situations, no one wants to read or write more than they have to when figuring out a message’s meaning, so everybody wins when you open with the main point or thesis and follow with details in the message body. If it takes you a while before you find your point in the writing process, leaving it at the end where you finally discovered your point, or burying it somewhere in the middle, will frustrate your reader by forcing them to look for it.
Leaving out the main point because it’s obvious to you—though it isn’t at all to the reader coming to the topic for the first time—is another common writing error. On the other hand, the writer who frontloads their message finds themselves in their readers’ good graces right away for making their meaning clear upfront, freeing readers to move quickly through the rest and on to other important tasks in their busy lives.
The choice of an indirect approach is a judgment call. If you anticipate your reader being interested in the message or their attitude to it being anywhere from neutral to positive, the direct approach is the only appropriate organizational pattern. Except in rare cases where your message delivers bad news, is on a sensitive topic, or when your goal is to be persuasive, all messages should take the direct approach. Since most business messages have a positive or neutral effect, all writers should frontload their messages as a matter of habit unless they have good reason to do otherwise.
Figure 5.1 Choosing an approach pattern. (Corr et al., 2022)
Case Example:
Let’s say, for instance, that you send an email to a client with e-transfer payment instructions so that you can be paid for work you did for them. Because you send this same message so often, the objective and context of this procedure are so well understood by you that you may fall into the trap of thinking that it goes without saying, so your version of “getting to the point” is just to open with the payment instructions. Perhaps you may have even said in a previous email that you’d be sending payment instructions in a later email, so you think that the reader knows what it’s about, or you may get around to saying that this is about paying for the job you did at the end of the email, effectively burying it under a pile of details. Either way, confusion abounds to the reader who opens the email to see a list of instructions for a procedure they’ve never done before without explaining why they need to do this and what it’s all for exactly. At best, the client will email you back asking for clarification; at worst, they will just ignore it, thinking that it was sent in error and was supposed to go to someone who would know what to do with it. You’ll have to follow up either way, but you have better things to do. If you properly anticipated your audience’s reaction and level of knowledge, you would know that opening with a main point like the following would put your client in the proper frame of mind for following the instructions and paying you on time:
Please follow the instructions below for how to send an e-transfer payment for the installation work completed at your residence on July 22.
In the above case, the opening’s main point or central idea is a polite request to follow instructions, but in other messages, it may be a thesis statement, which is a summary of the whole argument; in others, it may be a question or request for action. The main point of any message, no matter what type or how long, should be an idea that you can state clearly and concisely in one complete sentence if someone came up to you and asked you what it’s all about in a nutshell. Some people don’t know what their point is exactly when they start writing, in which case writing is an exploratory exercise through the evidence assembled in the research stage. As they move toward such a statement in their conclusion, however, it’s crucial that they copy, cut, and paste that main point so that it is among the first—if not the first—sentence the reader sees at the top of the document, despite being among the last written.
Indirect Approach
While the direct approach leads with the main point, the indirect approach strategically buries it deeper in the message when you expect your reader to resist, be displeased with it, upset or shocked by it, or even hostile towards it. In such cases, the direct approach would come off as overly blunt, tactless, and even cruel by hitting the reader over the head with it in the opening. The goal of indirect messages is not to deceive the reader nor make a game of finding the main point, but instead to use the opening and some of the message body to ease the reader towards an unwanted or upsetting message by framing it in such a way that the reader becomes interested enough to read the whole message and is in the proper mindset for following through on it. This organizational pattern is ideal for delivering bad news or addressing a sensitive subject. The typical organization of a bad-news message is:
Buffer offering some good news, positives, or any other reason to keep reading
Reasons for the bad news about to come
Bad news buried and quickly deflected towards further positives or alternatives
Action cue /Pleasant Closing
Delaying the bad news until the third part of the message manages to soften the blow by surrounding it with positive or agreeable information that keeps the audience reading so that they miss neither the bad news nor the rest of the information they need to understand. If a doctor opened by saying, “You’ve got cancer and probably have six months to live,” the patient would probably be reeling so much in hopelessness from the death-sentence blow that they wouldn’t be in the proper frame of mind to hear important follow-up information about life-extending treatment options. If an explanation of those options preceded the bad news, however, the patient would probably walk away with a more hopeful feeling of being able to beat the cancer and survive. Framing is everything when delivering bad news. Consider these two concise statements of the same information taking both the direct and indirect approach:
Direct Message: Global Media is cutting costs in its print division by shutting down several local newspapers.
Indirect Message: Global Media is seeking to improve its profitability across its various divisions. To this end, it is streamlining its local newspaper holdings by strengthening those in robust markets while redirecting resources away from those that have suffered in the economic downturn and trend towards fully online content.
Here we can see at first glance that the indirect message is longer because it takes more care to frame and justify the bad news, starting with an opening that attempts to win over the reader’s agreement by appealing to their sense of reason. In the direct approach, the bad news is delivered concisely in blunt words such as “cutting” and “shutting,” which get the point across economically but suggest cruel aggression with violent imagery. The indirect approach, however, makes the bad news sound quite good—at least to shareholders—with positive words like “improve,” “streamlining,” and “strengthening.” The good news that frames the bad news makes the action sound more like an angelic act of mercy than an aggressive attack. The combination of careful word choices and the order in which the message unfolds determines how well it is received, understood, and remembered. Delivering bad news is not easy for anybody involved, but doing so honestly, kindly, and clearly will make the task less onerous.
Discussion Questions:
Discussion Questions:
Have you ever had to make the conscious choice to approach or address someone directly vs. indirectly? What led you to this decision?
What if your employer is in the news negatively or because of a crisis? How do you handle this? Do you post on social media? Is your identity affected?
Attributions:
Content for the 'Mistakes vs. Decisions' section section was adapted from
Management Communication Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Thomas, Julie Haupt, and Andy Spackman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution -ShareAlike and made possible by Management Communications Group, Marriott School Of Business, Brigham Young University.
Content for the 'Direct vs. Indirect' section was modified (with an adapted image) from
4.1: Choosing an Organizational Pattern Copyright © 2022 by John Corr; Grant Coleman; Betti Sheldrick; and Scott Bunyan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
References:
Edmondson, A. C. (2021, February 1). Don’t hide bad news in times of crisis. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/03/dont-hide-bad-news-in-times-of-crisis
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