Delivering bad news as a leader is an important part of leadership.
It’s important because it’s unavoidable and the way you deliver bad news can make or break a team. The words you use, the tone, the follow up and ownership all come together to either help or hurt the situation.
When you are delivering bad news, it’s important to remember empathy. Your team is hearing bad news for the first time and it’s coming from you. You might have had context or your haven’t, but as a leader you usually have a bit more awareness than the average employee.
If you lack empathy, you can impact the teams ability to trust you more than necessary. If you are delivering bad news, there is an element of trust that will be broken regardless. With that being said, depending on how you act and communicate, you can dig yourself and your leadership team a bigger hole to dig yourself out of.
The wrong words, being too dismissive or careless can tell the team you really don’t care. This is easy to avoid when your team or your department is impacted, but what about when partner orgs are affected? Your teams are all developing relationships cross functionally that you may or may not have awareness of…if you are flippant about bad news from another department, they could read that as careless, ignorant or heartless. All of those are bad when it comes to maintaining trust.
Most of the time bad news comes from sources beyond you, so it’s important to make sure you communicate it with the utmost integrity and empathy.
I hope this is helpful, thanks for being here! Reach out for questions or comments!
