Tell, Don’t Sell in Change Mgmt

Last week I received an email from one of our personal health providers. The subject line foreshadowed ‘Exciting Updates at (Name of Clinic)’. In what I am about to share, I’m not intending to be critical of the change management and client communication skills of a small health clinic. Communication is not their business. I would, however, be critical of a similar communication from HR professionals or senior leaders in a large organisation where change management and staff communication are core skills.?

In opening the email from the clinic, my warning radar twitched even at the subject line: Exciting Updates. How ‘exciting’ can be the events at a health clinic? The first section of the email announced the name and special skills of a new professional who joined the clinic recently. Then came the meat of the announcement – the transition to retirement of the long-standing, highly-regarded owner of the clinic who clients will have been seeing for years. Most readers will be pleased for the owner but disappointed to be losing their clinician. The ‘exciting updates’ label was an attempt to soften the blow.

In terms of human nature, what’s happening here? The first implication is the way that the reader processes what they read (or hear). The second aspect, given human nature, is adopting a better way to make an announcement that involves potentially negative news.

People process information and experiences into binary alternatives on a variation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’; it's the way we quickly make sense of our experiences. Most receivers of the clinic’s email will view this announcement as bad – bad for them to lose their trusted practitioner. Anticipating this disappointment, the writer of the email works hard to sell the message, seeking to dress it up as good news. The reader’s radar warns them to be on-guard that what might be coming is not good news at all. And then sure enough, when the real news comes, we feel we were being softened up for the negative news.

What’s the better way? The guiding rule is to Tell, Don’t Sell; don’t try to force the way in which people will classify or interpret the news. In change management, if people feel that they have been buttered up with an attempt to dress-up bad news as good news, they lose trust in the communicator of the message. People don’t appreciate ‘spin’.??

In this present example, the clinic could have communicated that after many years of dedicated service to so many people, Harry (not his real name) has decided to head towards retirement. After sharing Harry’s plans and the timing of his retirement, and probably his mixed feelings about retiring, the details of his replacement could then be given in that context. In this way, the news is shared, not dressed up, and not ‘sold’. Tell, don’t sell.