Give Bad News Quickly
Nobody enjoys being on the receiving end of bad news. That part is obvious. What's less obvious is how much worse bad news gets when the person delivering it optimizes for their own comfort instead of yours. There's a reason the idea of not delivering cold pizza resonates - how you deliver something matters as much as the thing itself, and bad news is no exception.
I got laid off during COVID. The way it happened is what stuck with me. There was an all-hands meeting where leadership announced that layoffs were coming, and then said that anyone affected would receive a calendar invite for a follow-up meeting afterward. That was it - go back to your day and wait to see if you get an email. Every person in that meeting immediately stopped paying attention to whatever came next. Nobody heard the rest of the discussion. Nobody cared about the roadmap slide or the Q&A. The only thing anyone was doing was refreshing their inbox.
The intention was probably to be organized and methodical about it. But the effect was that everyone sat in uncertainty for however long it took those invites to go out, and the people who didn't get one spent that time anxious for no reason. The bad news wasn't the layoff itself - that was going to happen regardless. What made it worse was sitting there waiting to find out if you were on the list.
There are better ways to handle this. The people being affected get their meeting invites before the company-wide announcement goes out. Those individual meetings can happen before or after the all-hands depending on HR availability - the timing is less important than the sequence. When the announcement comes, it should be straightforward: if you've received a meeting invite, you're part of this round of layoffs. Everyone else knows immediately that they're not affected. There's no limbo, no refreshing your inbox, no wondering whether you're next. The longer everyone sits in uncertainty, the more damage you do to the people who are staying - the ones you actually need to keep engaged and productive.
People delay bad news for a lot of reasons, and most of them are about the person delivering it. They want to find the right time. They want to soften it with context first. They want to sandwich it between good things so it doesn't feel as harsh. All of that is the deliverer managing their own discomfort, not the recipient's. The recipient just needs to know.
There's a difference between delivering bad news and having a plan for what comes next, and I think conflating the two is where most people go wrong. The news itself should be fast and direct. "We're doing layoffs and your position is affected." "The project is getting cancelled." "This isn't working out." That's the bad news, and it should come first, clearly, without a five-minute preamble about market conditions or strategic priorities. It's similar to learning to be direct in other workplace conversations - the longer you hedge, the worse it gets for everyone.
The plan is a separate conversation. What happens next, what the timeline looks like, what support is available - that all matters, but it comes after the person has had a chance to absorb what they've actually been told. Mixing the two together means the recipient is trying to process the news while simultaneously being asked to engage with logistics, and they can't do either well.
If the only thing you have to give someone is bad news, give it quickly. It's not comfortable for you, but it's more respectful to them. And in most cases, the thing people resent isn't the bad news itself - it's the feeling that someone sat on it, or dressed it up, or made them wait while they figured out how to say it.