Giving Bad News

Submitted by mauzenne on Fri, 05/25/2012 - 01:25.
in

How to give a status update when you know it’s bad news.

Things go wrong. It’s a fact of business life that sometimes actions get dropped, deadlines get missed, people lose their temper and projects just don’t work out.

Someone has to tell the boss. If that’s you, how do you do it, without breaking the Career Tools cardinal rule of not tearing down the team?


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Submitted by MarkMT on Mon, 06/04/2012 - 06:41.

This podcast really resonated with me

This podcast reminds me of one of my first meetings as a first time manager.  It was with my boss' boss so I was pretty nervous.    I was giving a list of reasons why a project hadn't progressed to where he wanted - and he just turned to me and said "When are you going to stop giving excuses?"

It was an "a-ha" moment for me because in my mind I wasn't giving excuses (the project was getting done, the deliverable was going to be met).  I thought I was giving him background information.   He obviously didn't see it that way.

Ever since then, when I'm asked about things I'm working on,  I've always answered with the status followed by the plan to move forward.   That makes most bosses happy (since most are high "D" where I work).  If they want more detail, then I can explain and it doesn't get interpreted as an excuse.

I wish I'd known it when I first started, but luckily I figured that one out pretty quickly.  No long term career damage!