Leadership Communication Mastery: Key Strategies Revealed

So what are the most effective strategies for communicating difficult decisions to your team or organization? The instinct, unfortunately, is to keep everything bottled up for as long as possible, especially if it involves something like firing people, laying people off, shutting down offices, shutting down factories. These are understandably difficult decisions to make. And if you're not 100%, you don't want to scare people needlessly. But keeping things bottled up too long can cause a problem, creates an environment where rumors are swirling around. So the sooner you can be transparent with people, the better. Now, it's good to get advice from a lot of different places. Your communications team, your legal team, your HR team. But I do want to caution you, in too many organizations, the decisions about this are made by the legal team. Now, I don't want you to get into legal trouble. I don't want extra lawsuits. Those can be time consuming and wildly expensive. In some cases, they can destroy a company. But you should not let the legal team or the HR team necessarily call all the shots on how you communicate difficult decisions for your organization, because they're only looking at it through the lens of the legal side, the regulatory side. You really have to look at things. If you're the leader of an organization or the leader of a group, you have to look at it. The bigger picture of how does this determine the culture of our organization? How does this guide the mood of our employees? Is this going to destroy morale? You might avoid all lawsuits in the future, but if everyone is so depressed and they hate the organization and they hate you, and they're all off spending every second of the day polishing their resumes because they want a different job someplace else, you haven't accomplished anything simply by avoiding legal problems. Now, the legal team quite often wants you to communicate difficult decisions in writing. And I understand why. If it's a written document, you can look at it, you can proof it, you can edit it, you can have 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 lawyers look at it, make suggestions, say, eliminate that one word. Eliminate this comma. Traditionally, text has been the format for doing that, because you can refine it, process it, eliminate possible legal issues that could be headaches later on. So I understand completely why a lot of organizations like to communicate official bad news in a text format. But there's a problem. Your organization is made up of human beings. And if you're talking about a decision that has an impact on their life, they will get emotional. And text is the absolute worst medium for communicating emotion. Yeah, I understand great novelists can do it. But if you're writing A memo on firing people or downsizing or shutting down a factory. You're not going to convey the right emotions in text. So the most important thing you can do is to talk to people. If you can talk to people face to face, that is always going to be better because then empathy can be shown. It can come out in your face, it can come out in your voice, it can come out with your body language. It can come out by you listening to people and their concerns. So it's critically important for big decisions, important decisions, difficult decisions, for you to talk to people in the organization. If you all work in the same office, then call a town hall meeting and get everyone in the office and be candid, be transparent. Let them know your thought process. Don't just say, all right, I'm firing 10 people. Here are the names, and then walk off. That is going to create ill will. Not just with the 10 people who were fired, were laid off, but with everyone else thinking, well, I don't know why they were fired. I guess I'm next and no one's ever going to tell me why. Let me start looking for other places to work. That's not going to help you. So the more transparent you can be. Of course you can listen to your lawyers about what you can and can't say, but you need to speak to people. And no, I'm not suggesting you stand up in front of people and read the official document that your lawyers have prepared. I'm suggesting you look at people. You can have some notes and some talking points or some numbers, bullet points. But most of the time, if you had to make a difficult decision that had a big impact on your organization and the lives of the people there, you need to be looking at people. Now, let's say some or all of your employees are in different locations. You've got to do it virtually. Well, then I suggest you do what I'm doing right now. You talk to them on camera and share with them and let them know why this decision had to be made, what your thought process was. Acknowledge the fact that this is going to be tough for some people if it is a situation like shutting down certain offices, factories, or laying people off. Show some humanity and let people know that you understand how they feel. Doesn't mean everyone's going to be happy, especially if you're a highly paid executive and people who are not making much money have now lost their livelihoods. So I'm not suggesting you're going to make everyone feel good about everything. But all you can do is the best you can possibly do. And if you can let people know the facts as you saw them, your decision making process, show empathy along the way, then generally they're going to feel better about the result. Even if it personally isn't great for them. They're going to have less animosity toward you and your organization. The other thing is let people ask you questions, whether they're in the room, whether they are online. Now, your lawyers might not like that. But if you're concerned about building a long term culture of trust, of optimism, of positivity, then you need to give people an opportunity to, to ask questions. Now, you may think in your statement, your explanation, everything is perfectly clear. Well, it's clear to you. You've been thinking about it sometimes for days, weeks, months, maybe even years. It's been a tough decision you've had to make, like why I'm shutting down the business. But the people you're speaking to in your organization, this may be the first time they've ever heard of the topic and they're blindslighted. They may be in shock. So you said something that was bad news in the first 30 seconds, explained it in minute one, two and three, and now finally in minute four, they're like, what? They missed what you said. So give people an opportunity to ask you questions even though in your mind you've already answered it. Don't say, well, as I mentioned earlier, as I said in my statement, no, just answer them again like a real human being. You don't have to do it word for word the same way. In fact, mixing it up a little may be a different example. Different word order will make it come across as more of a genuine conversation. I would not recommend having a specific time limit if you have big news about an important decision that's had a huge impact on people and maybe a huge impact on their entire lives. Certainly if you're ending their job, don't say, well, that's all the time we have, and then march off. No, you want to give people an opportunity to ask you questions. Now, occasionally people could really vent. They could get angry, they could yell at you. I'm not suggesting that you have to suffer verbal abuse. If someone starts cursing at you or yelling or screaming, okay, you shouldn't have to put up with that. But if someone wants to express their displeasure, their genuine displeasure about a decision, it's going to be a lot better to let them express themselves now than in the future in terms of lawsuits or constantly complaining to co workers and other people when you aren't around. So keep in mind your default form of communication when talking about big decisions that have possible negative impact on your employees. Your organization could be speaking. The closer you can be to people, the better. If it's a big decision that affects one person, you need to be in the same room with them, two, three feet away. If it's people in the same office, same building, get them all there. If everyone's scattered, they need to be able to see you. And so no, don't just do an audio, don't just do a memo, don't just do an email. Let people hear your voice, your explanation. Make it live so they can communicate back. That's the problem with just sending out an email or a notice or a pink slip. It's you handing it out. Here's the way it is, and people have to just sit there and quietly take it. Nobody likes that. You want a live experience where there can be a real conversation, and then that is the most effective way you can communicate difficult decisions in your organization.