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Be a Better Bearer of Bad News
The best way to say something no one wants to hear
We all have times when we have to tell someone something they don’t want to hear: I’m not going to make that deadline. We don’t have the budget for that. Sorry, I have plans that night. Being the bearer of bad news is an unfortunate but inevitable part of being a human, along with birth, death, and getting spinach stuck in your teeth.
And when you are the bearer of bad news, there’s a good chance the person on the receiving end will take it out on you, whether they grumble out loud or just quietly seethe to themselves. Recently, a new study out of Harvard Business School titled “Shooting the Messenger” confirmed what most of us already suspected: We have a tendency to, well, shoot the messenger, pinning our displeasure about bad news on whoever delivers it. It’s not just that we subconsciously like them less; according to the study, we also tend to believe — whether it makes sense or not — that the messenger is happy about what they’re saying.
“We tend to irrationally believe people can control chance events,” says Leslie John, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and a co-author of this new study, which was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. “If a meteorologist says the forecast is bad, our research says you’ll…
