Hard conversations are a given for any leader at work. But in a tumultuous time with potential layoffs looming and a recession on the horizon, they feel more urgent.
Often, when you don’t have good news to share, you may shy away from sharing anything at all. However, that’s where leaders make a massive misstep, Becky Kennedy, clinical psychologist, founder and CEO of Good Inside, a parenting coaching company, said at a BetterUp leadership summit last week.
If a company is going through change, not addressing the elephant in the room or delivering a scripted speech will not reassure employees in a season of uncertainty. It’s similar to parents not acknowledging an illness in the family. In both cases, it’s obvious that something in the environment is wrong or different, but it doesn’t feel like the people you look up to are offering an explanation or guidance.
“The sturdiest leaders, at home whether there’s illness in the family, at work whether there’s layoffs, they don’t tend to know before they communicate,” Kennedy tells Fortune well editor Jennifer Fields.
In fact, sharing uncertainty can be more comforting. “We all like to hear hard truths from people we’re connected to. It actually feels grounding,” she says. “It’s the avoidance that gives us problems, not the events.”
Kennedy shares a strategy she uses as CEO and as a parent. If her company went through layoffs, for example, she would begin by sharing what she knows and what she doesn’t know transparently.
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“Here’s what I know. And here’s what I don’t know … Our company is going through layoffs,” she said as an example. “Here’s something else I know. We will be announcing them on Friday … I’m not going to pretend it’s anything else. Here’s what I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen to this department … One last thing I’ll end with that I know is that you are a person who is extremely capable. You’ve gotten through hard things before. You’ll get through them again. That has no indication of what’s going to happen.’”
Ending on something you know, on a hopeful note that recognizes the power of connection and resilience, for example, can feel calming and empowering to those you manage or parent.
“In hard moments, you rarely get certainty,” she says. “There’s something about putting the things you don’t know in the bucket of things I don’t know that allows our mind to classify them, and then instead of free floating, which is the worst feeling, they have a location.”
