10/16/2017

If You Need to Deliver Bad News to Employees, Science Says Do This

A new study shows the best approach for sharing bad news

It's every leader's or manager's least favorite task: delivering bad news. Maybe your company is closing a facility. Or letting people go. Or you have an employee who isn't getting that coveted promotion, or has been denied an overseas posting, or can't take an expensive training course.

In any case, your impulse is to soften the blow. After all, you're a caring person, and you'd like to make a difficult situation easier. So you start the conversation by talking about something else. And when it's time to deliver the news, you try to sugarcoat it. 

That's the wrong approach, according to new research by professors at Brigham Young University and the University of South Alabama. In fact, the worst way to deliver bad news is to beat around the bush.

Please click here to read the complete article from Inc.