No bad news!
If you remember the musical The Wiz, maybe you remember Evillene — originally played by the great Mabel King — who ran a subterranean sweatshop. The character is an analogue to The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz.
Evillene has a temperament to match her name, and her attitude is captured in her big singing number, “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News”:
When I wake up in the afternoon
Which it pleases me to do
Don’t nobody bring me no bad news
‘Cause I wake up already negative
And I’ve wired up my fuse
So don’t nobody bring me no bad news
. . .
Remind you of anyone you’ve ever worked with? Or even a whole organizational culture?
When the boss can’t handle the truth
Many years ago, I worked in an office where negative comments — even accurate, good-natured delivery of bad news — was treated as an indicator of an unhelpful attitude. With the benefit of hindsight, I trace this to the psychology of my department head, whose own insecurities dictated this sort of Pollyanna facade.
Fortunately, my direct supervisor was a realistic, brass-tacks type of manager who wanted to know all the news — good, bad, and in-between — so she could make better decisions. She was also an old hand at dealing with the department head, so she knew how to couch bad news in ways that would get through.
My department head wasn’t evil like Evillene, but she was blinkered by an overly narrow concept of having a “positive attitude.” She could have joined Evillene in the last lines of the song:
If you’re gonna bring me something
Bring me something I can use
But don’t you bring me no bad news
Good managers know that they can use bad news — and in fact they seek it out so they can avoid nasty surprises. Like Vito Corleone in The Godfather, they “insist on hearing bad news immediately.”
Real optimists can handle bad news
The best managers also express optimism, but not by denying painful truths. Instead, they look for the best, most fruitful ways of dealing with bad news. But that takes a level of maturity totally foreign to Evillene — and, unfortunately, often absent in my department head from all those years ago.
Here’s my question for you:
How do YOU handle bad news?
~
Related posts:
- The Happy Path . . . to Perdition.
- Being wrong.
- What’s the straight line?
- Confirmation bias: fight the Procrustean instinct.
- Welcoming criticism.
~
(Image via The Wiz Theatre Company, which apparently has done a good revival of the show. By the way, I was going to embed a video of the “No Bad News” song from YouTube, but I couldn’t find anything from that troupe, and all the choices I did find involved either bad singing, bad recording, or both. The singers I saw . . . well, they were all so very much not Mabel King.)
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Interesting post Tim. I’ve had a similar experience but instead of being pegged as a bad player the bad news was usually met with an attitude that everything we were doing was wrong and needed a course correction of 180 degrees.
That made us, in my department nervous about bringing bad news about a project we believed would work with a second chance.
The value of bad news is that it refines your focus by helping to cull away what doesn’t work. But it’s a process not an event.
(This comment was written in Dvorak)
I work for a non-profit business service – there is some sort of ‘difficult’ news to deal with almost daily. My personal approach is to sort it out into sections we can work on now & later, make the calls or write the letters, and just do it. Rip off the band-aid, so to speak. It gets it out of the way so no dark, anxiety driven clouds hover over the rest of the projects.
Although, I do prefer to hear when something went right than when something went wrong!