Who delivers the bad news

In most organisations, who gets to announce good news is a long conversation.
Should it come from the CEO? At which meeting? Do we need slides?

Bad news gets no such debate.
It just travels down.

No pay rise.
The team is shrinking.
No bonus this year.

The decision is made at the top. The person who stands up to announce it often wasn’t even at the table when it was taken. The questions come to them. They don’t have the answers. And they won’t be getting a pay rise either.

The reasoning always sounds sensible: let the person who knows the team best tell them, it’ll be gentler coming from them. It sounds humane.
What it really does is pass the weight down.

When we prepared announcements like these, what we argued about was rarely the content. It was who would say it. Until that was settled, the text itself counted for nothing.

Because in time, people come to terms with the news.
Who told them, they remember for years.
And who was nowhere to be seen.

For communications, it comes down to this: getting the sentence right isn’t enough. Said by the wrong person, the right sentence goes sour, and takes its content with it.

Trust depends less on what is said than on whether the person saying it can stand behind it.

The person who delivers bad news should be the one who can answer the questions it raises.

Bad news is forgotten.
Who delivered it is not.