The Art of Delivering Bad News
From time to time, you’ll find yourself in a situation where you have to deliver feedback that you know the recipient won’t be entirely happy about. Basically, you’re bringing this person bad news.
It will happen to you eventually, whatever your role is: suppose you’re a manager who needs to address an employee or team member, or an employee who needs to talk to a co-worker, or maybe you’re a member of a temporary project team that has run into a problem.
You know from experience that bad news tends to elicit powerful reactions. Those kinds of reactions are always, per definition, emotional ones. If you’re unfortunate, the emotions that are triggered will be so powerful that your actual message will never reach the recipient. And that’s not what you want, of course.
Emotions are often expressed through words, but they are also largely expressed through the wordless aspects of any conversation. Even when somebody who has received bad news doesn’t come out and say it, you can easily tell if they are upset, angry, and/or disappointed, just by paying attention to their tone of voice, facial expression, breathing, and posture. This goes both ways, however.
One way of limiting this emotional, negative response is to tone down your own wordless communication. You see, you communicate your own underlying meaning through your tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions.
These communicative aspects amplify the emotional content within your message. Without this “emotional amplification”, we’d have a hard time trusting that people meant what they say–in fact, we’d have a hard time understanding them at all. In many situations, therefore, this emotional reinforcement is a good thing. A necessary one, even.
When you’re about to deliver bad news or negative feedback, however, it can be a good idea to tone down your wordless communication instead. The recipient of your message will be extremely sensitive in this situation, and will your wordless signals will trigger unusually strong reactions.
This means that if you avoid adding emotional content to your message, e.g., by maintaining a neutral tone of voice and reigning your hand gestures in (and not furrowing your brow!), you’ll be making it easier for the other person to hear what you’re actually saying. And he or she won’t respond with more powerful emotions than the situation actually warrants.
You don’t need to turn into some kind of robot. But by eliminating, or at least limiting, the emotional dimensions of your message, you can make it more rational, which will in turn also make it easier to receive in a constructive manner. And that’s what you wanted from the beginning.