Truth 58. Bad news is good news
We might have gone a little overboard in our efforts to create workplace cultures of empowered employees expected to solve all their problems by themselves. True—a dependent employee is not very productive to have around. Leaders don’t like to have their concentration fractured all day long by little shards of complaints and petty roadblocks that their employees can easily dissolve on their own. It’s one of the manager’s responsibilities to encourage employees to take on challenges independently. You grow your organization by growing your people. And that means often making them do more than they think they can.
But you also have to know what’s going on in your department. Making your employees solve all their problems independently can do serious damage to the company. You don’t find out what’s wrong before the problem gets too big to fix (or before it goes public). The solutions are limited only to those your employee can think of all by herself—that self-same employee who might have been the one to cause the bad news in the first place. You miss the chance to put the whole team behind a potential emergency.
Making your employees solve all their problems independently can do serious damage to the company.
The problem is that, as the manager, you’re the best one to distinguish between what’s essential and what’s insignificant. But you can’t make that judgment unless you know it all. So you must be willing to hear it all. And to that end, oddly enough, the more bad news you hear, the happier you should be about it. Management’s full of ironies, isn’t it?
Your behavior should never make people afraid to bring you bad news. Bad news is fearsome enough without your people shouldering the added burden of worrying about how you’re going to react to it. Are you inclined to yell? Make things bigger and more dreadful than they really are? Do you immediately look for someone to blame? Do you make a big, guilt-trippy show of blaming yourself? Do you punish the messenger? If you do, don’t expect to hear anything but the happy stuff.
So, your team has shared the dreaded news with you. And now you have it. Knowledge is power; now go do something with it. It doesn’t mean you have to own it all by yourself. You can still make the solution a learning experience—for your entire group, if not just for an individual employee. The experience of arriving at a solution as a team effort can be a bonding project in and of itself. No single employee may have the entire brilliant answer to the problem—particularly if it’s an especially complex one. But a group focus can bring up group brilliance without necessarily blaming and shaming the individual who has brought it to the table.
The more bad news you hear, the happier you should be about it.
The solution isn’t the only learning here. The even-tempered way in which you handle the bad news is a teachable moment in and of itself. It’s easy for your employees to trust their boss when everything is going swimmingly. But when someone has made a terrible mistake, all eyes will be on you to see how you react. This is your chance to teach your people that their trust is well placed with you, and that the way you are treating them is precisely the way you expect them to treat each other (and their own direct reports) should they be on the receiving end of bad news one of these days.
If you receive bad news on a regular basis (not a frequent basis, hopefully, but a relatively regular one), you can be pretty sure you’re getting the whole story—or one that’s close to it. This is your chance to demonstrate to your people that they can trust you with the trouble as much as they can with the celebrations. Keep your temper, resist the urge to blame (at least in front of the entire team), focus on the solutions, and walk your employees through the problem-solving experience.
You can still make the solution a learning experience.
Assuming that your company isn’t involved in a colossal, cross-functional, systemic scheme of fraud and malfeasance, there’s a solution to almost any problem that your team can bring you on an average daily basis. You don’t actually have to say “thanks” to them when they bring you breaking news that will throw your department into a momentary tailspin. But in the privacy of your own thoughts, you’ll be able to say to yourself, “Today was a good day.”