Open Mouth, Close Career?

Quick quiz: What's worse than getting bad news? Answer: being the person who has to deliver that news.

Sooner or later, it happens: You see a disaster in the making that everyone except you seems content to ignore. Maybe that make-or-break project is going to miss its deadline; maybe the new boss is in over her head; maybe those two dueling coworkers are poisoning the team's morale. Whatever the problem, it's big, it's ugly, and it's obvious, but nobody will speak up about it -- unless you do.

When you need to be the bearer of bad news, how do you deliver the message without getting killed for being the messenger?

That was the question that confronted Carol Roberts, 38, of Memphis-based International Paper. Soon after she was brought in as vice president of people development, in late 1997, Roberts realized that people weren't being developed. "We weren't giving our employees open, honest feedback," she says. "We had all kinds of processes in place to talk to our employees, but managers weren't following through. We weren't helping our people to progress, and we weren't progressing as a company."

But Roberts wasn't anxious to call attention to the problem. She was new to her job -- an unknown and untested quantity in a male-dominated industry. If she spoke up and questioned IP's fundamental practices, she might get slapped down. Could she really afford to be a messenger?

"People hesitate to speak up at work, because they're afraid," says Dan Oestreich, 48, coauthor with Kathleen Ryan of "The Courageous Messenger: How to Successfully Speak Up at Work" (Jossey-Bass, 1996) and "Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: Creating the High-Trust, High-Performance Organization" (Jossey-Bass, 1998). "But that fear -- of being labeled as a whiner, or as someone who isn't a team player -- prevents people from sharing criticisms and ideas that might ultimately benefit their companies."

We asked Oestreich to walk us through four steps toward being an effective messenger. The process starts, he says, when you decide to stop ignoring a problem and instead become part of its solution. "It takes courage to speak out effectively," he says. "Despite your good intentions, bringing up a touchy topic can blow up in your face."

That's the bad news. The good news is that you can deliver even the toughest message -- if you have a strategy for doing so.

1. Deliver your message -- to you.

You need to make clear that the problem is in the message, not with the messenger. So before you say anything to anybody, make sure that you've identified the problem clearly. "When I ask people what their true message is, they often realize that they have at least four or five of them," says Oestreich. "The real challenge is to hone in on the core problem: What's the message?"

IP's Carol Roberts wrestled with that question and soon realized that she had, in fact, three messages. First, International Paper wasn't walking its talk: Managers weren't giving effective feedback to the people on the front lines. Second, this was an important issue: IP's future depended on developing its people. And her third message? That her first two messages were unselfish: She wasn't criticizing people just to get ahead.

"To get the company to commit to a new effort to develop its people, I had to win our top managers' hearts and minds," she says. "That meant forcing our senior people to think outside their comfort zones. They needed to know that I was doing this for the good of the company."

When you deliver a harsh message, people get defensive. "The first thing people will do when you deliver bad news is question why you're speaking up," says Oestreich. "If you haven't clearly explained your motivation, people are likely to assign selfish reasons to your actions. So talk about your reasons for bringing up a problem. Give people a reason to care."

2. Face your fear -- and get over it.

To deliver her message, Carol Roberts decided to bring together 33 of IP's top managers for a two-day off-site in Memphis. "I couldn't just order our senior executives to pay more attention to their people," she says. "So I booked outside consultants to discuss the way these feedback processes should really work. Instead of simply telling people that we had a problem, I tried to get them to see it for themselves."

In fact, Roberts was doing more than identifying a problem. As she soon found out, she was putting herself on the line. Just days before the meeting, she got a message from John Dillon, IP's CEO. "He questioned my entire agenda," she recalls. "He said he couldn't see any reason for holding such a meeting, since we already had feedback processes in place. My heart sank. But then I decided to go ahead and hold the event anyway. The systems we had just weren't working, and it was important to put that information on the table. I knew it was the right thing to do."