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You Can’t Handle the Truth

Do you remember this line from the movie “A Few Good Men?” Jack Nicholsonwas telling Tom Cruisethat average folk couldn’t deal with the harsher facts of life. As a result, higher ups would tell them what they wanted to hear. They would offer excuses, verbal hedges that sidestepped reality and offered the illusion of comfort.

Today we remain stuck in the mire of a severe economic malaise, a situation that is causing enormous employment anxiety, deep concern for the future and perhaps more than a few sleepless nights. As organizations ponder the question of whether employees can handle the true state of affairs (health and future prospects) they can choose to deal from either the top or the bottom of the deck with their internal communications.

The troubling issues raised could be pending layoffs, reduced or frozen pay increases, hiring freezes, reorganizations or other such “bad news.”

Management messaging can either be straightforward regarding current events – addressing the cause of problem and how economic circumstances would likely affect employees – or they could toss out a series of artful communication hedges (i.e. excuses). In other words, employees could be fed corporate-speak.

Corporate Speak

By this I mean a headquarters-generated sleight-of-hand communications effort, typically prepared by smooth-tongued professional writers instead of subject matter experts. The prose, approved by corporate legal to insure that no liability is stated or implied, minimizes the negative and accentuates the positive. The intent is to say little of substance, while at the same time making a self-congratulatory production of their communication efforts.

Content in these communications is usually a combination of feel-good phraseology intended to instill a sense of confidence. The target of the communications is expected to walk away feeling that, whatever the problem, management is a) doing the best they can, b) not at fault, c) continues to have the interests of the employees firmly in mind and d) will be providing more details soon.

When these officious corporate pronouncements inevitably provide little in the way of satisfactory answers, most employees turn to their direct managers in an effort to obtain straight information. However, when the going gets rough (challenging, complex, contentious), many managers will waffle, dribble their thoughts, obfuscate and start to make their own excuses. They may even point a finger in the direction of Human Resources. Poorly prepared managers have difficulty facing issues important to employees without trying to pass the buck. Employees want to know the why, the what next and what about me?, but managers are rarely equipped to offer an effective response.

So when the straight story is not forthcoming, employees will tend to read between the lines and form their own perceptions of the company message, and that perception is less reliable than the grapevine for spreading accurate information. It is also more skeptical.

What employees “hear” can usually be generalized by the following attitudes:

  • “Where are they going to go?”: Employees are trapped in their jobs and have little choice but to remain, because other jobs will be hard to find. Management has implied, “We don’t need to do anything for them.”
  • “Everyone else is cutting back, so we have to as well”: This trite phrase only gets dragged out when the circumstances being described save the company money. Has the “everyone else” phrase ever been used to support giving something to employees?
  • “In anticipation of difficult economic times ahead we are forced to / reluctantly / have no choice but “: This is a pre-emptive strike while the sun is still shining. It’s a particularly onerous practice if rewards for past performance are cut, and is often viewed by those on the receiving end as a breach of trust.
  • “We employ average workers, so they should be satisfied ”: Perhaps an after-the-fact rationalization, but sometimes your senior leadership feels that most employees can easily be replaced, like a commodity.

Not surprising, the reaction to such doomsday communication efforts is always negative, planting seeds in your workforce for a bitter harvest of lowered morale and increasing disengagement.

  • The ineffective message lacks credibility with an increasingly skeptical audience, as does the messenger and the organization behind it.
  • As insincerity is recognized, employee listening and attention stops – like shutting off the TV – so the communication effort is wasted.
  • Engagement and performance levels drop as trust, confidence and loyalty erode and employees start to ask themselves, “why bother?
  • The supposition gains traction that the company is lying, holding back or not telling the whole story. It is hard to see the glass as half-full when attitudes have soured.

On the other hand, when the message is honest, straightforward and without guile the opposite reaction tends to occur:

  • Organizational credibility is strengthened
  • Company loyalty is fostered
  • Engagement levels and management support are strengthened.

The implication is clear:  employees can handle the truth, should rightly expect it from their employer and will not take kindly to bland corporate-speak. So dont get caught making excuses; it didn’t work when you tried it with your mother, and it won’t work with your employees either.

Chuck Csizmar is the Founder & Principal of CMC Compensation Group,an independent global compensation consulting firm whose expertise lies in helping companies manage the effective and efficient utilization of financial rewards for their employees. He also maintains a popular blog on compensation at his website .

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