Writing Bad News Messages

USING THE THREE-STEP PROCESS FOR WRITING BAD NEWS MESSAGES 

Communicating negative news is a fact of life for all business professionals, from rejecting job applicants to telling customers that shipments will be late to turning down speaking invitations. Bad news messages are challenging to write because we know our readers will not be happy to receive the news. These messages say "no" to the reader:

No, you will not get your loan 
No, you aren't being hired 
No, you didn't get the scholarship
No, you aren't accepted into the college of business 
No, I can't give a donation
No, I can't help you

Bad news means the reader will not be able to accomplish his/her goals. For example, without a loan, a student may have to postpone plans to graduate on time because now the person has to go to work to raise the money. The homeless shelter that doesn't get your donation now has to worry about how it's going to feed its clients. 
But news can't always be good. In life, we do have to reject less-qualified applicants, we don't have unlimited funds to give money to every deserving charity, and we can't always fill a customer's request on time. 
When we need to say "no" to our readers, we usually mean "not under these circumstances." "No" now isn't necessarily "no" forever. If the student were to get a co-signer, he/she might be able to get the loan after all. Perhaps we'll be able to send a donation to the homeless shelter next month, after we've paid our own bills first. 
So how do we give bad news without destroying our business relationship? You can see in list at the top of this page that stating bad news directly can often be very damaging and unnecessarily hurtful. When you need to deliver bad news, you have five goals:

1. to convey the bad news
2. to gain acceptance for it
3. to maintain as much goodwill a possible with your audience
4. to maintain a good image for our organization
5. if appropriate, to reduce or eliminate the need for future correspondence on the matter.

Five goals are clearly a lot to accomplish in one message. However, by learning some simple techniques, you can develop negative messages that reduce the stress for everyone involved and improve the effectiveness of your communication efforts.

Step 1: Plan Your Message 

When planning your message, you can't avoid the fact that your audience does not want to hear what you have to say. To minimize the damage to business relationships and to encourage the acceptance of your message, analyze the situation carefully to better understand the context in which the recipient will process your message. 

Be sure to consider your purpose thoroughly – whether it's straightforward (such as rejecting a job application) of more complicated (such as creating a negative performance review, in which you not only give the employee feedback on past performance but also help the person develop a plan to improve future performance.) Similarly, your audience profile can be simple and obvious in some situations (such as rejecting a credit request) and far more complex in others (such as telling a business partner that you've decided to terminate the partnership.) 

With a clear purpose and your audience's needs in mind, identify and gather the information your audience will need in order to understand and accept your message. Negative messages can be intensely personal to the recipient, and in many cases recipients have a right to expect a thorough explanation of your answer. Empty clichés such as "Due to circumstances beyond our control" are vague because they don't tell the reader anything of substance. 

Selecting the right medium is critical when delivering negative messages. For example, you might badly damage a business relationship if you use voice mail to reject a long-time employee's request for a promotion. Since the employee would surely have some important questions to ask, and you would certainly want to soothe hurt feelings, a face-to-face meeting would be the best choice for this situation. However, if your company received 10,000 credit applications a month, you can't afford to engage every rejected applicant in a one-on-one conversation. A well written form letter that limits response options from your readers – so that you don't have to explain the reasons for your decision already covered in your letter – is a better choice.

Step 2: Write Your Message

When adapting a negative message to your audience, every aspect of effective, diplomatic writing is amplified; after all, our audience does not want to hear a negative message and might disagree strongly with you. Be sure to maintain the you-attitude, and strive for polite language that emphasizes the positive whenever appropriate.
 
If your credibility hasn't already been established with an audience, lay out your qualifications for making the decision in question. Recipients of negative messages who don't think you are credible are more likely to challenge your decision. That's why, for example, messages related to late payments are often signed by a higher executive. And as always, projecting and protecting your company's image is a prime concern. If you're not careful, a negative answer could spin out of control into negative feelings about your company. 

When you use language that conveys respect and avoids an accusing tone, you protect your audience's pride. In addition, you can ease the sense of disappointment by using positive words rather than negative, counterproductive ones (see Fig. 1 below.) 

Chances are you'll spend more time on word, sentence, and paragraph choices for negative messages than for any other type of business writing. People who receive bad news often look for subtle shares of meaning, seeking flaws in your reasoning or other ways to challenge the decision. By writing clearly and sensitively, you can take some of the sting out of bad news and help your reader to accept your decision and to move on.

Step 3: Complete Your Message 

Your need for careful attention to detail continues as you complete your message. Revise your content to make sure everything is clear, complete, and concise – bearing in mind that even small flaws are magnified as readers react to your negative news. Produce clear, professional documents, and proofread carefully to eliminate mistakes. Finally, be especially sure that your negative messages are delivered promptly and successfully. Waiting for bad news is hard enough without wondering whether a message was lost.