If you are in business, you will have to deliver hard news. You will need to replace one vendor with another, or one agency with another. And while those conversations may be difficult to have if you liked your account team, the hardest conversations will likely be when you have to let someone go.
Whether for financial reasons or performance issues, telling your employee or team member that they no longer have a job at the company is brutal. Even if both of you knew it was coming, it’s an awkward conversation that nobody wants to have.
Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at Harvard University and a New York Times bestselling author. In this Harvard Business Review video, “Deliver Hard News with Compassion,” Brooks stresses that empathy is not as helpful in these situations as compassion.
In fact, empathizing too much with the person can keep you stuck and stop you from taking quick action. Brooks says:
Now, one of the biggest problems that we have is misunderstanding empathy and compassion. They’re not the same thing. Empathy is to feel somebody else’s pain. And when you’re motivated entirely by empathy, it becomes a really hard thing to do, to do these difficult things, and you might even be handcuffed and unable to do them. And you’ll wait too long, when it gets even more damaging to other people.
It is generally better to deliver hard news quickly so all parties can move forward. Indecision is stressful for the person who needs to deliver the hard news, and for the business.
Here is how Brooks distinguishes compassion from empathy:
Compassion is different. The greatest leaders are compassionate. Compassion has four parts to it, understanding a problem, feeling enough of the pain, such that you can actually be in the place of the person affected, being able to be rational about what needs to be done, and then having the courage to do it. That’s what it comes down to. Being a truly compassionate leader is what people need. The greatest bosses are compassionate, not empathetic.
I love those components of compassion. They add up to sane and sound leadership to me.
Brooks recommends that people who need to deliver hard news prepare in advance. He believes they should consider the person who will be impacted (empathy), but not get overwhelmed with the feeling, because it is only one part of compassion. He also suggests practicing what you are going to say in advance.
I have been fired and I have been laid off multiple times. In fact, I was laid off three times in four years. That was rough! The last time was by a company that I had hoped to retire from, but instead went out of business. It was heartbreaking, but my boss delivered the hard news with compassion. I could see the conversation was incredibly difficult for him.
In an ideal situation, a manager would tell the employee what they appreciated about them and their work. They would offer to be a reference and offer to write a recommendation on LinkedIn. They would offer to connect them with anyone in their network who could be helpful. And the company would give the employee a decent severance package and outplacement assistance, if possible.
In short, they would be compassionate.
