Tim McLean featured on www.SmartCompany.com.au

In a recent article The Best way to deliver bad news by Leon Gettler featured on www.SmartCompany.com.au. Tim Mclean has commented from his 16 years of manufacturing leadership experience as well as the last seven years of managing major manufacturing change projects with TXM clients. Tim has drawn out the key strategies for delivering bad news within an organisation.  Below is a short extract.

“First of all, you need to do a communications plan,” McLean says. “You need to take some time before the announcement and get all the key stakeholders together.

“The first thing in the plan is working out who is going to be communicated to, what the message needs to be and when it needs to be communicated.”

“Then when you make the announcement, it’s important you get the message across clearly. You plan one-on-one conversations with the individuals affected as soon as possible after the announcement.”

Managers are part of that communication plan, and they have to stick to it.

“Every manager should be talking to every person, which means you have to make sure all the managers are giving a consistent message. That means in the communication plan before the announcement, you need to sit down with all the managers and talk to them about what’s happening and the message they need to give,” he says.

Besides lots of face-to-face, McLean suggests having Frequently Asked Questions distributed to staff, either by intranet or in hard copy. Sometimes, these might have to be updated daily.

He says being absolutely up front and honest is vital. It is also important to be thorough. “Going in under-prepared is a licence for disaster,” McLean says.

“It’s very important that the communications are open and honest and consistent. If you sit on information, then it will leak out and you will be seen as dishonest.”

This is not a time to be vague or speak in generalities. People want to get down to tin-tacks.

“People’s bullshit detectors will be turned up to the maximum,” McLean says. “Once they hear the announcement, people shut off and then there is a communications vacuum that will be filled by gossip and by the trade union if they want to be disruptive.”

“You have to get in and fill that vacuum and bring it down to the individual level because once people have heard something like this, they are only interested in their own personal situation.

“They’re not interested in why the company is doing it and the vision of the company, they are only interested in the fact that ‘I have lost my job, I have a mortgage, I need another job, what am I going to do, what kind of package am I going to get?’”

Doing it right is important for the business. “You are not doing it for the employees who are leaving, you are doing it for the ones who are staying. You’re doing it for your brand and reputation, and that’s of incalculable value,” he says.