Summary on Culture Transformation
This episode of Coffee with Digital Trailblazers focuses on how to communicate bad news to executives in ways that are calm, constructive, and aligned with organizational culture.
Host Isaac Sacolick frames the discussion around recent outages and crises, asking when issues should be escalated, how to avoid over-escalation, and what executives actually need to hear. Guest expert and former global CHRO/board advisor emphasizes knowing your executive’s preferences, sharing updates early and often, being transparent about what is known and unknown, and always focusing communications on solutions, next steps, and long-term impact rather than drama. She and others stress managing personal anxiety, “playing cool jazz in the background,” and avoiding “Chicken Little syndrome” by classifying issues (true crises vs. bad news vs. everyday incidents), so not everything becomes a fire drill.
Additional panelists expand on practical guidelines: define clear escalation criteria (e.g., brand damage and lawsuits), decide whether you’re informing, asking for help, or seeking a decision, and never let executives hear bad news from outside your team first. They also highlight security-specific nuances, the need to lead with facts while acknowledging uncertainty, and the importance of finding the “upside” or learning opportunity in crises so organizations improve rather than just react. The episode closes with reminders to thank messengers of bad news instead of “shooting” them, and to respect that seasoned executives have heard bad news many times before and can handle it when given clear context and options
Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Bad news to executives. And we’re just going to give a few more minutes for everybody to join. I see some old friends here.
Hello Kristen. Hello Dave.
Hi Ronan. Hi Jay. Let’s see some new folks. Oh hi Roman. Roman, my wife and daughter are in your area today and tomorrow they’ve been visiting colleges up in the Chicago area.
I think they’ve been by your university, Roman.
They told me they were going by. I don’t know if that’s her, one of her top choices, but they’re out in the area looking at universities. It’s been an interesting week. They’ve been out there. I was in Las Vegas earlier this week at the workday conference.
I should have a blog post around that on Monday.
Just some of the learnings and findings I’ve had out there.
Very interesting conference and I did do a couple of posts on LinkedIn around it. So if you want like my day one and day two learnings, I did do some photos and posting around that.
But I will have a recap blog post on Monday around it.
For those of you who joined us last week we announced that the beta launch of the Star CIO Digital Trailblazer community.
A good number of you did use the coupon code and joined.
If you have not done so yet, I’m leaving that coupon code available for at least the next couple of weeks and it is a free access to the community.
So please do take advantage of it in the comments for today. If you click on the URL for this event, you can get there by going to starcio.comcoffee/next-event do click on the comments tab, scroll down, you’ll see the link which is drive.starcio.com and you will see that coupon code to join for one year free. The Star CIO Digital Trailblazer community.
In the last week I’ve got a couple of new experts who have joined me.
I don’t see Liz Martinez here. I don’t know if she’s joining yet, but she has joined us as one of our program and portfolio management and governance experts. We are getting a Advisory Connect program up for her shortly. I just finished reviewing it today so it should be up soon.
And I want to welcome Jennifer Krevitt who has listened here a number of times. This is her first time on stage. She’s going to be here for about half of the session today.
She is one of our Star CIO Digital Trailblazer experts. She has a long career of being a global chro at financial services companies like Invesco and Goldman Sachs. She’s a board advisor and board member. She does executive coaching.
She’s also a good friend of mine. Jennifer, welcome to the stage today. And today we’re talking about community communicating bad news to executives. And just to set the preface of how this got on our agenda, I added a number of sessions after the crowdstrike outage. We talked about being ready for outages. We talked about DevOps and some of the things that you should have in place to make sure that you’re defensible against outages. And I thought this one was going to be an interesting one because this, it’s all kinds of different crises, right? It’s not just a security or technology outage. Anytime there’s something that’s happening in the organization that falls into the category of bad news.
And now you have to decide as a, as an executive, as a digital trailblazer, is this worth sharing? Is this something that we need to talk about? Do I need to call up the CEO at 4 in the morning to tell them this? Does this need to be on the agenda for our next SLT meeting?
And I find different organizations and different leaders have different perceptions of how much to escalate, how much to communicate, how to go about communicating it. It’s probably the more important question. And so, Jennifer, we’re going to start with you. I want to ask the question, you know, what really constitutes bad news?
What should be escalated? What really should be at a lower priority? And maybe answer this. As a board leader, right, you’re usually one of the people, as a CDC chro, one of the confidence of the board and one of the confidence of this, of the CEO. You know, what constitutes something that really needs to be escalated because it’s important.
And what are some things that can be managed outside of, you know, a call on the bat phone and escalating to your executive?
You’ll need to go off, on, off, mute. It’s that button on the. There you go. Jennifer, welcome to the stage.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: Thank you so much. It’s so nice to be here.
So thank you very much for the question. And this is obviously something we all think about. No matter where you are in the organization, how do you tell more senior people what’s going on and keeping them in the loop and really ensuring that you are able to meet the needs of the organization as well as the needs of your teams and leadership.
The most important thing I think here is to know your executive, to know you’re bored. And so some of us have different appetites for where we want to be brought in. And I think always that each of us has particular preferences and each of us prefers to ingest information differently.
Some like to know the data and analysis perspective of it, some are very task oriented the how of it and others just want to know the big picture and assume you are progressing along as you should be with respect to bad news or I would say unexpected news. I as a leader and find as a person who reports to leaders that more postings are more important than less. And so that is a difficult balance of managing timeliness versus having everything buttoned up.
But if you really do understand your role in the organization, your team’s role in the organization, management’s role and leadership, it’s much more helpful.
And so I think when we think about digital trailblazers, these are folks who are really charged with much more than just the deliverable on the particular tech project or any other kind of project. They’re people who are trying to move the organization and help the organization shift. And so my bias is more information is better than less. And I never like to be the only person that knows anything. I see an old colleague of mine on the call today and I am certain he’s heard me say that before, which is never be the only one that knows anything. And so when I think about bad news or missing milestones or things not progressing the way you would expect them to do, I think about the importance of assessing the situation to really determine the urgency.
Always be prepared when you post, indicate that this is just an update to let you know what we’re working on, but really try to keep people involved.
Consider the stakeholders perspectives, know your executive, know your leader and know what is going to drive them.
Be transparent and have direct straightforward communications and always be purpose driven. Focus on solutions and focus on steps to mitigate.
The issue of timeliness is one that I spend a lot of time on because I as a person, as a manager, as a leader, as a worker and someone that likes to be brought in early and often but not, not everybody is like that. And so know your executive and manage the importance of the long term impact on the project. How commercial is the project, how commercial is the missed milestone and really take it from there with respect to using your judgment, knowing the organization, knowing how important it is to your team, management and leaders and proceed from there. And always see yourself as someone who is committed to the organization and working through all of the organizational shifts and the cultural shifts and trying to model all that behavior as you proceed in situations such as this. So we Call it bad news, but it is really just the day to day of organizations missed milestones, unforeseen errors, and so that there are no surprises at the end of the day. So you are minimizing risks which always exist and you are continuing to discuss and evaluate as you proceed.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: Jennifer, I have a couple of follow ups. I know you’re only here with us for the first 20 or so minutes, so want to get as much wisdom out of you. You’ve been on so many big companies, ones that are very risk driven and I think you have a lot to share. So I have two questions for you that are follow ups.
First, you know, how formalized in the, you know, executive groups that you’ve been in the boards, how formalized around what should be escalated?
Is there a policy, is there something that’s been communicated? I unfortunately, many of the companies I’ve worked with and I’m going to ask Joe the same question when we ask him to speak. Many of the companies I work with tend to want to know too much, want to get too much escalated. Every little thing that can impact particular customers or operations, they want that escalated. And it sort of turns into a culture of firefighting when almost everything gets escalated into. The first thing that you’re talking about is all the things that are going wrong and what people are doing about it. So I’m wondering, number one, is it formalized in these companies that you’ve worked with, have they been more leaning toward only tell us the most important things are more leaning toward, you know, give us a real status update of all the major risks. And the second thing is like, what do you advise, you know, leaders who are not generally at the leadership team, but maybe managing a very big program or a very important operation? What are you advising them to come with when they’re escalating? What’s the message so that they don’t create undue panic? They provide facts.
What are some of the things you’re looking for as somebody sitting on that committee saying, look, something is wrong here and you’re getting the information that you need as an executive.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: Excellent. Two very important questions. So first, I think different cultures, different organizations have different cultures. And I think it is very important to know your culture.
One of the organizations I’ve worked with was a very risk oriented organization. It was in the blood of everyone. And so not to fight the hypo, Isaac, but the notion that risk is only bad news is one way of seeing risk, which is I know I’m a lawyer by training and so everything I Do and see and say is through the framing of risk.
And so I choose not to think of risk as negative. I choose to think of risk and driving the strategies as intertwined and really important as you move forward.
So all of us are at different levels in our career and at different levels in the organization, yet all of us are really important to, to the job that we are actually doing.
And so people are more junior to us and we are their senior leader. And then of course we are others workers in service to the broader organization and the most senior leaders. And the way I think about balancing is that no discussion should happen one day knock on the door and just blurted out with no context and no prior conversations. And so, for example, if there is a real issue with something, a missed milestone, there is a hierarchy that goes up. And hopefully everyone in the organization, as we try to transform organizations, has had open conversations and dialogue about how to move in an agile and effective transformational culture. And what that does is it leads to continual discussions and evaluation of where we are, where we think we’ll be next week, and how we think about managing, as I say, the risks and the drive to move forward. So on that I think it is really important to know the culture, to never give up on managing risk and communications and to know your executive.
Some folks really do not want to be part of the details and some folks do. And I think it is incumbent upon each of us to have that inner compass to make sure that we are doing what we think is the right thing to do for the organization, not, not just what you think may annoy someone who’s more senior than you.
And you could say that about the board as well. So on that, that’s the first question.
And then when we think about leaders, different folks have different appetites for what kind of data and information they want. And so when you speak to a leader, and again, a leader can be at every level in the organization and if we’re talking about the most senior leaders, they’re going to really want to know context and where it fits in to the broader organizational priorities. And so the way I always prepare for those conversations and expect people to prepare for conversations with me is to really have an assessment of the situation, to really determine the urgency of what is going on and to really understand where I am in the cycle of the quote, bad news? Is this an early post, a middle post, a follow up post, to really understand that and to really understand if it significantly impacts the priorities of the organization, priorities of time, you know, time, deadlines and Milestones that are broader than the organization. So, so first, assess the situation.
Second, always come prepared. Collect data and insights to understand the full context and communicate clearly and confidently. It’s so obvious. But so many of us, even if you’re posting on something you found out a half an hour ago, spend the 15 minutes to ask yourself, what questions would you ask if you were the one getting this information?
And almost always those are the questions that are asked. And so often I used to tell people I move desks or I stand up or I sit somewhere else to figure out what I would ask if I were hearing this information.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: I think that’s really great advice, Jennifer. I mean, I think that’s, you know, that’s an easy sort of takeaway for folks listening, is to put yourself in the, in the shoes of the, the people who are executives. They need to know, do I need to do something different today, this week, this month, based on the information that you’re, you’re giving us? And you’re exactly right, you know, providing some context about what’s a material risk versus what’s, what’s an actual impact, you know, revenue brand are the two that come to my mind that we need to be able to give some specificity around.
And that’s really good advice for people who are listening. I want to, before you sign off, I want to give the mic over to Joe and then maybe Joanne to see if they have any questions for you before you drop off. Joe, we’re going to all comment on this, but if you have a question for Jennifer, go for it.
[00:17:12] Speaker C: I think we sometimes when I say we organizations suffer from severe cls, Chicken Little syndrome.
You know, the sky is falling when something goes awry.
And I wonder, Jennifer, how do you dampen down the. This sort of, you know, it’s the end of the world message that comes either from people that report to you or conversely, a reaction when something is reported to senior management.
You know, I often cite my rule here of remain calm at all times, rcat and I live by that, but others don’t. So how do you deal with that?
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Yeah, it’s funny because my husband happens to be on this call and he knows that at home I’m a lunatic at work. Many, many, many years ago, I made the decision that I was going to. The more anxious I got inside, the calmer and the slow, slower I was going to walk at work because otherwise I wouldn’t make it through a career. And so the reality is, if you’re all rowing in the same direction and you Assume best intentions and you trust is given that leads to a very, very, I think a fe effective organization focused on impact, excellence and accountability.
And so there are always times that people get very anxious about coming in.
I think most people have never been afraid to tell me bad news, but they themselves may be anxious. And if you just say that we’re going to figure it out, we all know that this is, you know, the mantra of this isn’t heart surgery type thing, which is we can figure it out. We can focus very clearly on what the next steps are. As Isaac said, what are we going to do today, what are we going to do tomorrow and what are we going to do next month?
It’s a much more productive way of living your life. And the truth is that has to be embedded deeply in cultures. And so some cultures not only want to know what the problems are, but they really expect all workers to be anticipating what’s around the corner. And so the sky is falling is never helpful. And if you walk into someone with the sky is falling perspective, they are going to think you are a lunatic and don’t have things under control.
And so as I’ve always said, never let them see a sweet and let’s play cool jazz in the background. And it doesn’t mean you don’t feel anxious and crazy inside. It just permits you and your team to be collaborative, to be focused on what’s next and to really continue to support an organization that Isaac discusses very importantly and calls the people like those of us who try to focus on this digital trailblazers.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: Thank you, Joe and Jennifer. Joe, I’m going to try to give the mic over to Joanne, see if she has a quick question for Jennifer before she has to drop off. Hi, Joanne.
[00:20:38] Speaker C: Good morning.
[00:20:39] Speaker D: I do have a question and my question is what I didn’t hear in a lot of what you were saying, which is very good advice by the way, is to present some form of an upside.
Because regardless of what the crisis is, there is always a bit of an upside. And I found from being on boards, talking to executives on a daily basis that if you can find any kind of an upside to the bad news, like it gives us an opportunity to do X at the same time that they begin, the calmness tends to return, the ire tends to deplete and the wisdom starts to come out. And I’m wondering if you agree with that.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think that’s very good advice. The way I would frame that in my own head is really to focus on the solutions. The next steps the where we are and focus on the forward. And then as you proceed, you follow up on the meeting with a summary, you include next steps, you reinforce the accountability and you keep the focus on moving forward. And that is what essentially the upside is. I’m a rather cynical person, so if someone comes in and says, you know, the sky is falling, but the good news is we can paint it purple, not blue. Now I, you know, my, as I described before, my preference for ingesting information is not generally that, but I think your, the advice or the suggestion you’re giving is a really important one, which is to focus on the forward and the opportunity we have in front of us. And that’s really important. And then you continue to build a culture of learning and reflecting throughout the project. Not just, and I say project, it could be really anything, but not just at the beginning or the end, but you continue to learn through the process and always do after action reviews very, very periodically, which are structured ways to reflect on the situation, evaluate responses, identify lessons learned and to focus on the upside.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Jennifer, I just want to say thank you for joining us today and sharing all of this. I mean, Joe has our cat remain calm at all times and Joanne brings chocolate to diffus the situation. And we’re going to remember, you know, you’re the cool jazz lady. You’re, you’re playing in the background and keeping us calm through no matter what is happening to us. And some really good advice. I think the, you know, the one thing I’ll remember is how important continual communications is, you know, and then, you know, when you’re escalating something that’s really bad news, you have a benchmark to compare that off of something is really awry off of what we’ve normally been communicating and therefore the executives need to know about it. And therefore here are the things we really need to consider based on what just happened or what we just learned. Jennifer, thanks for joining us today and thank you for joining me as a star CIO digital trailblazer expert. And we’ll have you back on here soon.
[00:23:58] Speaker B: Excellent. Isaac, can I say one thing?
[00:24:01] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: Okay, I’m going to add one thing. It’s about the cool jazz. So years ago I went into a very important meeting and I was presenting and sort of the staffers, very senior people who were in the next room from the very important meeting had papers flying, like literally papers all over the place, papers flying. We’re two minutes late. And it engendered no confidence in me that I was going into a meeting that knew what was going on and it didn’t make me feel like they were any more important in this side meeting and in the side room. And I always thought that the drama of it all sometimes makes people feel in the know, in the middle and empowered. And the output of that, the response to that, the energy that that sends back is exactly the opposite. So it isn’t that you’re less crazy inside, it’s just that in control, facile with the data and the insights. And to Joanne’s point, always focusing on the forward and the upside is really critical. And I so look forward to continuing to work together and I’ll speak to many of you soon.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: Thank you again, Jennifer. Folks, you’re listening Today to the 96th episode of Culture Transformation. Today we’re talking or 96th episode of the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers Today. Today we’re talking about Culture Transformation communicating bad news to executives. Next week we have our episode on Geez, I lost it. I had it right in front of me and I lost it. Next week we’re talking about shaping tomorrow green tech platforms and initiatives. I’ve left you two links to my articles that I published this week. This week I did a article for CIOs for those or not just CIOs, but if you’re not reading it, the tea leaves are changing.
You know, we had an interesting announcement this week about interest rates, but I’ve been posting around this the 6% unemployment in it.
Amazon made some announcements about people coming back to work five days a week. We are definitely at an inflection point in terms of the IT and technology and transformation economy. That most likely will be an episode that we cover in October. But I left you five things to think about for your digital transformation budgets going into budget season. That’s on blogs, that’s star cio.com and then an article got a lot of lot of feedback on around the emerging role, the next gen roles of enterprise and solutions Architects. That’s on CIO.com I have a few more weeks. I’m doing my free coupon to the Star CIO Digital Trailblazer community. The link is drive.starcio.com the coupon code is in the comments. Several of you did take advantage of that last week. I’m keeping that open for a couple weeks. You’re getting free access for a full year and you’re going to be able to sign up for advisory connect programs with some of the experts that you see here.
Joe has one on Ask the Expert. Liz has joined Us as an expert. She is now on the website. I’ll be working with her on an advisory Connect program very soon. Jennifer is one of our experts, so we will be doing one with her as well. So and of course, John, Joanne, Heather, Martin, they’re all experts on the program. So again, look at the comments.
You’ll see the link, you’ll see the coupon code. You get free access for a year. I’m keeping this open for the next couple of weeks. And thank you for joining this week’s session on communicating bad news to executives. I want to bring John and Liz in first. Joe and Joanne, thank you for your question questions there, John.
You know, I just feel like we haven’t really nailed how to establish what needs gets escalated. I know you wanted to talk about that earlier. So how do you set principles not just with the executive group, but how do you do it with your boss?
[00:28:06] Speaker E: Yeah, what I really like to do is have a conversation about what type of items get escalated, who they get escalated to and how fast. And for example, at my company, the things that I know that if I get any whiff of these, I immediately have to go and notify people. One is if we have a brand issue, like if we’re doing something that’s going to impact our brand, I know I immediately got to get a hold of and notify the people that I work for. The other one is a lawsuit. Right. And so to me, I have really prescriptive guidance on if you see these two things, let us know immediately what’s happening. And the thing about bad news is that it doesn’t get better with time. And then there’s a quote from Rand Fiskin. He says bad news is like kimchi. If you bury it, it only gets worse. Right. And so he’s the founder of CEO Moz seomoz, and I just love that quote.
But the thing is, when you’re going to go talk to the executives, it’s like there’s or the people above you, there’s some things you have to figure out. Do I have this covered or am I asking for help?
If you need help going to your leadership team, absolutely. They can help you out. And then you have to think through what do I want to tell them, what do I want to ask them, what help do I need and what do I need them to do? You think through those things so that when you go tell them what’s going on, you can get whatever help you need, you can get whatever guidance you need. You can get them to take actions for you or you can get them to go enable other people to help you respond. And the one thing that I’ve seen in bad news that really kills me, though, is I’ve seen when there’s peers and toxic companies that really weaponize it, they’ll hear bad news in kind of like my area. And then they wait until we’re in a leadership group and they say, hey, I just got this bad news. Sorry I didn’t give a chance to give you a heads up. And then they tell the people that run the company or that own the company.
And so you’re hearing the bad news at the same time as them.
And so that’s what you absolutely want to avoid doing because that just is bad. It’s like it’s a toxic culture trait. And so it’s like figuring out who you talk to in what order is really, really helpful. And that’s a good trait that you should have so you can collaborate good with your peers and people around you. The very last thing I was going to say is sometimes when you go, you actually don’t have a solve for it.
And I really tell people, if you have bad news and you don’t have a solve for it, just go tell people so that you can get help on solving it.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: John, really good advice there. I mean, being sabotaged by bringing up bad news when you’re not aware of it. And that surprised me. That’s just awful. And I’ve experienced is a culture issue, but that idea that, yes, you’re going to come up and escalate bad news, whether it’s legal or brand, what your guidelines are, and, and even if you don’t know what the solution is, being able to communicate the issue and the potential impact is fairly important.
Liz, I’m hoping, you know, running PMOs and, you know, we’ve talked about governance here, even though we don’t like to use that word, the G word. The G word. Liz, what’s your best case scenario where there were clear guidelines about how to escalate and what to escalate?
[00:31:26] Speaker F: Of course, yes, fantastic question.
So often the communications charge is underneath the pmo and communications usually includes, you know, risk communications to leadership, especially because the pmo, if you’re in charge of any kind of complex program, you’re typically the group that knows about it first and foremost.
Some of the stuff that she shared about knowing your executives and understanding, you know, your culture and the context of what’s going on is extremely important, like how much an executive likes to know detail, but also understanding your own role in the process is really important because, you know, it could be that you’re accountable for fixing the problem, or it could be that you’re just the person who’s supposed to be informing and making sure that the communications.
Or maybe you’re just the risk person who’s supposed to be evaluating the impact or possible options. Right. You have to understand there’s so much more than just knowing your executives and as well as your culture and also understanding how much you personally can influence that solutions and how bad is bad. Listen, if you find out that all of a sudden your subcontractor is going
[00:32:46] Speaker A: belly up, like, we’ve been through that.
[00:32:48] Speaker F: Right.
[00:32:49] Speaker A: We’ve been through one of those together.
[00:32:51] Speaker F: Right?
[00:32:51] Speaker D: Correct.
[00:32:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:53] Speaker F: And. But you also know that you thought it was coming down the pike. You had already lined up some other subcontractors. You had already told your executive leadership that this is a possibility, and you had already, you know, that you’re, you know, kind of primed for that to happen.
Then you can, you know, it’s a different situation than something coming out of the blue where you had a subcontractor that had two people, they were on the same plane and then went down, God forbid. Right. There’s. Those are two different, very different situations, you know, with, with all their ip.
So clarifying the information that you have, and I love what Patrick said, if you don’t have the information, say so.
Right. You use the kimchi example. I use the fine wine example. Bad news does not age well. It is not a fine wine.
So basically it’s more like, you know, cheese. It gets stinkier and stinkier. But we’re gonna, we’re gonna run out of analogies.
Cheese. Wine. I like wine and cheese. You know me.
But anyway, remaining solution focused. But if you don’t have the information and you feel the need to share the information, share that it’s happening, making sure that you’re clear on when you’re getting back with data. Right.
This is what happened. I know it’s impactful. I’m going to find out the impact. I’m going to find some options for you. And regardless of what information I have, I will be getting back to you within two hours.
Right. Or whatever. Right.
And the impact, the impact of the business, especially the impact because it could be, in the end, the impact very low.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: So sometimes I want to bring Joe back in here. Maybe we’ll do a little scenario planning with Joe and, and maybe even David. Joe, I’m sure you’ve been in that this situation, you know, we’re talking about, you know, legal and brand crisis. We’re talking, you know, we’re crowdstrike is still in the back of our minds. That’s a, you know, completely hemorrhaging customer outage. What, you know, long term issues as a cio, you know, you’re getting, you know, escalations that are a few, you know, rungs down the ladder. You know, a system is out, the ERP didn’t take last night’s data feed.
You know, the project is got some material risk and you know, you’ve led long enough, right? You know, big enough teams, they’re coming to you with these material risks at your level. What do you want the team, what’s your temperament? What do you want to know as a CIO about a material issue? And what should the team come to you with when they have to escalate something like that?
[00:35:43] Speaker C: That’s a great question, Isaac. And first, I want to cite the first of my three golden rules. If you work for me, you learn my three golden rules and you can read about them in, in my blog. But for purposes here, I’ll just tell you. Rule number one is I want to be the first to know if there’s an issue. I never want to hear about the issue from anyone outside of my department.
And, and that’s critical. And I make sure that my staff and their staffs understand that.
So often people will come to me with a problem, sometimes sheepishly and sometimes with their arms flailing in the air.
As I’ve already stated, I’m unflappable, so I will listen intently and I would try to put things in context.
Several people have used the term context, and I think it’s so important to really put it in context, to put it in perspective.
Just exactly how big of a problem are we talking about?
Is it something that’s going to have a broad impact across the entire organization, or are we talking about a router that failed in, you know, Muskogee, Wisconsin, and easily dealt with just within the department?
What do I want to know? Well, I want to know everything you know about the problem. And if you don’t know much, then I’m probably going to send you back to get more information.
And the last thing I’ll say is in the conveyance of any messaging, whether it’s bad news or anything else, you have an objective in mind. If you come to me to deliver a message, in this case some bad news, what is your objective? Are you merely letting me know and you’ve got it under control.
Are you letting me know because, oh my God, this could have a tremendous impact and you need to take this upstairs or are you coming to me because you found something and you’re not sure what to do about it and you want advice?
So tell me, you know, what’s the purpose for you conveying this information to me and then we’ll deal with it appropriately.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: Joe, thanks for that. I hope you can leave the link to the any posts that you’re referencing in the comments for everybody.
You’re giving us examples of what Jennifer and John had recommended. Set expectations with your teams in terms of how you want to be notified and what to come with.
Joanne, I’m going to bring you back in a second. I want you to think about culture for a second, but I want Dave to answer the same question.
Security issue is, you know, I think it’s a little bit different. You don’t always have the full context.
You might have had one desktop have a ransomware notice around it. You might have had passwords exposed and in the public. No.
Usually when the SoC gets some kind of alert about a problem, they really don’t always know the magnitude and they almost always don’t know the resolution.
What’s the best way to handle it to avoid, you know, the sky is falling reaction, which unfortunately a lot of organizations feel when they feel like they’ve been attacked and there’s an issue out of their control.
[00:39:02] Speaker G: Yeah, that’s a very good question. But let’s just back up a little bit.
So the security organization is often, you know, the house of no. Right. You know, so you bring a question there, you expect to know, well, let’s turn the security organization over and say, find a way to. Yes, okay, so how do you do that? It’s fact based. In a security organization, opinions hold no water at all because security tooling brings you a lot of facts. That doesn’t mean, however, that in the course of doing business you don’t follow your intuition in order to get the facts associated with a sense that’s developing.
Bad news can be the. There can be a leading sense of bad news is imminent. Right. You have a pattern that’s coming out of your sock, as you suggested. You don’t have enough information to know what’s going on there, but you suddenly have a sense of the sky is falling. So, you know, the first thing is to get the facts right. And it could be a fact that you cannot get the facts right.
So what do you do with that?
You bring it to leadership that we have a gap in our metrics. Our ability to measure in this particular sense isn’t bringing us facts because, you know, when it comes to bad news, facts trump everything else.
Another point I’ll bring up about bad news in the security world.
Whenever security speaks up, it’s like a, you know, a hundred pound hammer, right? It just trumps all other activities.
You know, the crowd strike, for example. All our systems are going down.
Oh my gosh, we’re going to put all our resources there, right?
So security has to be cognizant of how the bad news is communicated, such that overreaction is not the result. Right.
Let’s see, one other thing.
Security is an organization that brings a lot of bad news.
But I like the way it was mentioned. It’s all relative, right? So if the entire company has a metric that’s below industry standard, that could be our operational context.
If one particular part of our company is exceptionally poor relative to the rest, that’s a different thing entirely.
And I would like to close this little contribution with a mantra that I picked up, you know, more than 30 years ago. Let no crisis go unexploited. Right?
So as bad news is developing, look for the opportunity in it, right? Is this an opportunity to inform a future investment, to inform an organizational shift?
So as I’ve gathered information, I mean, you look for the big picture, what’s the pattern that the bad news is telling you the negative trending data is leading you towards, and then anticipate that as an opportunity to improve things in the future.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: Thank you, David. I mean, that’s just a good solid takeaway is always coming with the facts that you have. But leaving off what you don’t know, being clear that, hey, we don’t know the magnitude of this, we don’t know if it’s taking everything down and then always going back and saying, you know, where are we going to button things up for the future? Joanne, thank you for being patient today. I know you probably have a lot of comments on here, but I’m really interested, beyond your comments, if we can talk a little bit about culture.
You know, we’re, we’re focusing on bad news and we’re also sort of talking about extreme bad news.
And that’s why I try to bring it back down to Joe and David. Every day there’s something going wrong in a company, some days worse than others. And many of us have seen organizations where they’re just, you know, always in firefighting mode and you can’t drive transformation. You can’t try, you know, have a healthy culture. You can’t get employees excited if every day your day is disrupted because of the latest risk or issue that somebody has escalates. I really want to hear your thoughts around that, but start with your general comments. Thank you for being patient, Joanne.
[00:43:56] Speaker D: No worries.
First of all, to your, to your comment about firefighting mode.
One of the things that I’m a little disturbed by in this discussion is that we’re viewing bad news as one bucket, if you will.
And I think particularly for digital trends, Transformers, what’s required is to set up a level to level set on what is the criteria that makes up a crisis, what is the criteria that makes up bad news, what is criteria that sets up for.
We’re all having a Monday today versus it’s an incident. It might have some impact later, but we can mitigate both the risk and the cost and the impact.
And that’s, I think the first thing that people really need to look at is how do you classify, quantify, clarify the difference between those buckets? Because the strategy for each will be different. The communications up, down, sideways will be different.
You know, when I asked the question before about what about the upside?
One of the things that I’ve always tried to do, and yes, I do it with chocolate because it’s an endorphin releaser, it makes people feel better, it calms their mood and it distracts them just enough to not, you know, go to full outrage if it’s something that’s really horrible.
To me, a security breach is a crisis.
To me, bad news is we didn’t close that deal with so and so that’s going to impact cash flow. Our share price might go down, we’ll see a bit of fluctuation, etc.
Those type of events. Then there’s the mitigatable risk and, and, or, or the event that makes you say, okay, we can mitigate this in each of those cases to something that David said as well. There is always an upside. And so I try to balance, you know, my delivery of the chocolate to the executive along with the news in whatever bucket it’s coming from with. And by the way, the silver lining or the opportunity that I can see from this, maybe in the near term, maybe in the midterm, maybe in the long term, is blank.
So I’m trying to convey the notion that you have to think holistically and you have to think about not only the sort of steps that you would take in the how to do the retrospectives, but to deliver the news with both the bad and the good, and in a way that the context that you’re creating fits one of those buckets. It’s really a crisis.
Somewhat manageable, or we’re all having a bad day today. And don’t let it color your judgment going forward, because unless we quantify and clarify that that bad news does color people’s judgment for a lot more than just the next hour or the next 12 hours or two days, it lasts, they remember it, and they immediately go to, well, maybe the sky didn’t fall then, but maybe, maybe it is actually falling down.
[00:47:33] Speaker A: Joanne, I love your definition. I just love your definitions. Because we come from a world where these things get classified as SEV1s and SEB2s or P zeros and P1s. And only the folks who created the system that manages that have any clue what that actually means.
You know, bad news means something different.
Liz could talk all day about how to, you know, get a one sheeter in front of the organization that starts putting some language around that so that John, John knows how to deal with this and Joe knows how to deal with this at a, you know, at an escalating down level.
Joanne, you know, I, I do want you to comment about, you know, let’s put you in a scenario like I asked Joe and David, but let’s do something different. What happens if you’re the CIO or the CMO and your CFO is one of these panic people and they’re a ladder up or diagonal up the ladder, and they’re creating a culture around firefighting, around everything is a crisis and you don’t have a lot of room to change the culture directly with that.
How do you manage to that. How do you live through that? How do. How do you not let that affect you and assume that your CFO doesn’t want chocolate?
[00:49:00] Speaker D: I’ll say he’s chocolate allergic or she is on a diet, whatever, whatever frame you want to put around that. How I’m. How I have always managed around that is I have something to tell. And I always start with this in one form of wording or another. I have something not great to share with you.
Sit down, please. Take a deep breath.
And what I found is some people Bach, because they find it a little bit pejorative, but I do it in a, In. In Joe’s version of an arat way.
But really try and make them understand that if you look at everything as a firefighter, you are instilling Fear you are losing productivity. And to a CFO in particular, that translates into you’re increasing your cost. I don’t think that’s what you want to do.
And really, in a very brass tax sort of way, because if you allow that, it’s not a FOMO culture, but it’s a firefighting culture to permeate.
You’re constantly behind the eight ball. You have higher attrition rate, you have lower productivity, you have a longer period of time to get back to productivity. And, you know, it’s like my skip the dip kind of comment, which is basically when you’re doing a changeover on anything, whether it’s a light in a factory or a piece of software, timing is everything.
And so if you start creating that kind of culture where if it took five minutes longer, but nobody suffered a victimless crime, let’s say, so what? Who cares?
It’s not a crisis. And that’s where I started learning to really classify these things into these kind of bucketed areas to prevent that from happening, because I lived in environments where it was a constant firefighter, even in. At sea level, even in some board levels. I was in a meeting the other day, and it was getting into a firefight, and I basically said, look, this is costing a lot of money to have bickering and firefighter when the issue is really not that significant. If you kind of go to the end state, reverse engineer it, and break it down, how really significant is this today?
And at the end of it, the response I got was, yeah, okay, not everything is a firefight. It doesn’t have to be a firefight.
So we need to learn to sort of clarify and classify around that.
[00:51:42] Speaker A: Joanne, I love how you just unpacked someone’s deposition, brought them to a different space, and then started rebuilding them up in their context. Particularly when you start talking to a CFO about cost and revenue impact. I think it’s a really smart way to coach folks here, listening, because maybe you’re not talking to the cfo, you know, maybe you’re talking to just a director of marketing.
And, you know, as much as we try to have a healthy culture, we have individuals that we’re working with, and not everybody, you know, works in this calm RC mode. John, I think you’re going to bring us a funny story. This will be a good way to potentially end us.
[00:52:28] Speaker E: Yeah. I have a friend that leads manufacturing and assembly at a company, and people come to him with problems, right? And they’ve had some funny problems, like a truck full of their product once Drove into a plane. Right. And they have all sorts of crazy stuff, and every time somebody comes to them completely frantic, he always asks, okay, has somebody died in this situation?
And every single time, the person always responded, no, no one’s died. He said, okay, great. So it’s a problem. No one’s died. So we can work through this. And it’s just the concept of putting it into perspective about how serious the problem is and so that your response can be as appropriate as the situation is one thing. I found it just super helpful. And so he just, like Joanne said, he frames every issue on how serious it is, and then the org responds to a level that’s appropriate.
[00:53:19] Speaker D: Well, you know, to your point, John, and I know you have children. We all have kids. But those. Those in the listening audience and. And even amongst us where there are younger children, I always did this as a mom, and I think Liz might agree with me on this. The first thing you say to a child who’s like, screaming at the top of their lungs is, are you bleeding?
If you’re not bleeding and you’re not hurt, then calm down.
And I think the same may be true of executives, but in clearly different words.
[00:54:02] Speaker A: Go ahead, Liz. Let’s just. We have five minutes left. I’ll give everybody.
[00:54:06] Speaker F: No, no, no. I just was gonna say that’s.
[00:54:07] Speaker D: Well said.
[00:54:08] Speaker F: Well said, Liz.
[00:54:10] Speaker A: If you. Let’s give everybody one minute.
Last comments on our topic today. It’s been a really good episode communicating bad news to executives. Go ahead, Liz. One minute. Final, final thoughts.
[00:54:21] Speaker F: It really is. And I loved how Joanne put this in context. And. And each. Each one of us as leaders in the space, have given our take in our own way, our own leadership way of putting this in context of the executive that you’re speaking to, understanding their world and how you’re going to land in the context of that person and how they take bad news and figuring out the best way, whether you can, like, get them to breathe or just, you know, if they’ve already coached you on how they like to receive information or whatever. But that is extremely important to understand the person that you’re speaking to and how they receive that information and be prepared. But I just.
I just love working with you leaders. You’re fantastic. Fabulous.
[00:55:09] Speaker A: Thank you, Liz. We’ll go, Dave. And then Joe.
[00:55:13] Speaker G: Yeah. So I like the way this topic has been presented, but let’s point out two different ways of messaging. So I have a lot of data that could be acted on individually, but will that drive a whack A mole response.
[00:55:30] Speaker D: Right.
[00:55:31] Speaker G: Because, you know, going after the details. A lot of leaders like details because they can always win the argument at the detailed level, or you can aggregate it, as I was suggesting before, big picture. And my best big picture summary that I’ve ever provided anyone was there’s nobody at the cybersecurity helm. And they were so excited because they’d been playing whack a mole for two years.
And they said, can you prove that? And I said, you’ve been proving it for two years. And I put all the two years worth of evidence in this report.
Go get somebody in charge of the cybersecurity helm.
[00:56:13] Speaker A: Thank you, Dave. I just made a note. I mean, there’s a side topic here we might want to bring up about what level of information to share, not just in a crisis.
There, you know, it’s very easy to see too little information, but most of us who are very data driven tend to fall victim of sharing too much information.
And that could not only be overwhelming, but it can also lead people down what I call the rabbit holes, particularly in security and operations, where, you know, the culture is everybody’s all hands on deck. Well, maybe you don’t need all hands on deck. You know, maybe we just need this one group to really do a deep dive into what’s going on. What’s the root cause? Joe, last thoughts for today.
[00:56:58] Speaker C: I think it’s been touched on already, but let me reiterate that when communicating bad news or any kind of news, it’s good to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. As I said earlier, someone comes to me, they know that I want to know why they’re coming to me. Is it. Is it because it’s so urgent I need to push it upstairs? Is it something they’re just letting me know they got it under control or are they looking for help? Well, let’s turn that around. If I’m communicating to the board some bad news, I either want to tell them because they need to know, but I’ve got it under control and I can share that, or it may be, as I believe was alluded to earlier. It may be that I’ve got to bring this up because, hey, you guys have to help me figure out what’s the right strategy to, you know, to deal with with this impending crisis.
So I think seeing it from the other person’s perspective and then lining up, as David said, the relevant facts, the relevant information is key.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: Thank you, Joe, John and Joanne. We have one minute left. John, you left a really important comment Here, I think it’s worth saying, yeah,
[00:58:09] Speaker E: I’ve, I’ve been coached to just really thank people for bringing bad news, being the messenger that brings the bad news and communicates it. And, and what I’ve seen is, is that when you’re in a toxic environment, the messenger gets shot and then if the messengers are getting shot, they don’t bring the bad news. And so it’s just like really bad stuff happens if people don’t, don’t know what’s bad out there. And so it’s like if you can, a healthy organization, it’ll, it’ll really let people know that they’re not going to get shot for being the messenger.
[00:58:38] Speaker A: Thank you, John. I think that it was just really important to share that. Joanne, we’re at our close. Last thought for everybody.
[00:58:45] Speaker D: Last thought for everybody. Just remember this, the executive that you’re delivering the bad news to, this is not the first time that they’ve heard bad news and give them the credit for being seasoned leaders and understanding. So if you give them the out of understanding and being empathetic to them just as much as they may be to you, you stop the firefighter or fear of flight mentality that tends to permeate some cultures.
[00:59:17] Speaker A: Thank you, Joanne. Thank you Jennifer. Earlier who joined us, one of our Star CIO Digital Trailblazer experts along with Liz and Joanne.
John and Joe David, thank you for joining us as a speaker this important topic of communicating bad news to executives. Our session next week shaping tomorrow green technology platforms and initiatives. I’ll announce October’s lineup next week.
Just remember I have the link for the Star CIO Digital Trailblazer community drive.starcio.com in the comments. You have a free coupon to join for a free year.
One of the things you’ll get are the recordings from the coffee hours and this one particularly I think is really important one. Ronan is here listening. He will be putting up that recording sometime in the next week.
So tell your friends we’re launching this slowly but for those of you listening, I do have a coupon code for you to join for a free year. Thanks everybody for joining our next week episode again for green tech platforms and we’ll see you all here next week. Have a great weekend. Thank you again Joe, Liz, David, Jennifer and John for joining me on stage.
[01:00:36] Speaker E: It.
