When a Mom sees her teenage son standing before her, pawing the ground with the bottoms of his shoes and staring intently at their tops, she knows something is up, right?
Similarly, when a cable customer reads a letter that begins, “At Time Warner Cable, we strive to bring you the best products and services available,” the hairs on the back of the neck immediately rise. You know that by the end of this letter you’re going to be paying more for cable. When you get to, “We’re making adjustments effective with your next billing statement,” they don’t even have to say the prices are going up. And, in fact, this Time Warner letter never does.
Beyond an insistence on telling the truth, if we have a No. 1 rule of how to communicate serious messages, it’s probably, “Don’t insult your audience’s intelligence.”
We propose the following maxim to any company that must tell its customers or others news they’re not going to want to hear:
• If you give someone necessary bad news, they won’t like it but they’ll get over it.
• If you give someone necessary bad news in a way that treats them like they’re stupid, your relationship will never be the same.
One week after buying a Baton Rouge company called Lewis Computer Services and telling the staff it had no plans for layoffs, Missouri-based HealthcareFirst laid off one-third of the Lewis employees. “We realized we did have some overlap in employees and we made adjustments,” said the HealthcareFirst CEO.
There are only two ways to interpret that statement: (1) Our pre-acquisition due diligence was so shoddy, we didn’t know we had duplication, or (2) we lied.
Mergers and acquisitions inevitably cause anxiety among the staffs of both the acquiring and acquired sides, and that’s unfortunate. But losing the trust of the employees is worse.
And then there is United Airlines, whose United Express left a woman sleeping on a plane for four hours after landing. United usually wants its United Express passengers to think they’re flying its Friendly Skies and not those of some contractor. But when something goes wrong it’s suddenly, “We are working closely with our partner Trans States Airlines to investigate the cause and remedy the situation...” Apparently United neither maintains the standards for United Express nor stands behind its service.
Thinking back to our guilty teenager, it’s likely his parents would begin a conversation by saying, “Whatever you’ve done, just tell us. It’ll go a lot better for everyone if you just come clean and don’t treat us like fools.”
That’s intuitive with parents. Why is it such a hard lesson for companies?
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