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It’s an unavoidable part of leadership: Sometimes, you have to tell people things they don’t want to hear. Here’s a guide on how to do it without getting whacky, closing yourself off, and/or coming across as judgemental, forceful and careless.

Get to know thyself before you go in with them.

If you have followed me for a while you know I sound like a broken record on this.

But really, this is the single most important thing in leadership: You have to know your own inner workings to be able to support people with theirs. And when you have to bring bad news, they will not be happy and not necessarily show their best sides.

But you as a leader have to be able to hold them wherever they are in this moment. And for that to be possible in the first place, you need to know your own human reaction to others’ fear, disappointment, anger, etc.

Because only if you know that you recoil when someone shouts at you or that you try to fix it for them when they get afraid, you can learn to hold back with your reaction. This doesn’t mean you can’t process or aren’t allowed to feel by the way – at all. It just means that in this moment, you are there for your people as their leader with empathy and care, as they process bad news.

If you don’t do the work, this is how it usually goes:

Here are a few typical patterns that we have when we bring bad news, already bracing for impact:

• Putting it into a shit sandwich, like pre-empting everything you say before you even get to the point, then telling them about the bad news, and then putting a ton of apologies out after to make everyone “feel better”. It’s not your fault and they are lovable people after all.
• You frame the news by blaming others. It’s not your fault what the board decided and/or what the economy is like for example. You can act as the bearer of bad news you couldn’t avoid and then side with them against the other evil people.
• No being quite honest. You can stay as vague as possible and use bullshit speak that doesn’t quite get to the point. Instead you tell them a part of the whole, hard truth in a way that leaves leeway for interpretation and takes away responsibility from you.
• Rushing it. You go tell them essentially as fast as possible, leaving out the details, giving them the big picture, possibly already jumping to solutions you have ready for them before they even digested what you just said.  
• Telling them via e-mail. That’s the easiest cop-out of them all, at least short term – they will have processed one way or another when you see them again, and you may still get backlash, but it’s better than getting it in the moment, with people having settled back into their usual resignation or similar.
• Bite the bullet and toughen up. No frills, no games. You get hard and tough and just tell them and that is it. No empathy, no waste of time.

The problem with all of these is that you treat your reports not like equals who deserve to know, but more like petulant kids (and even looking at kids that way is questionable). You hide behind a bunch of strategies that make it more comfortable, first and foremost for yourself, and maybe for them, too, but only short-term.

And this is a prime ingredient to make people hate you.

How it goes if you are willing to take the brunt

Let’s say you learnt to wield empathy and clarity at the same time and look at your reports as equal human beings who have a right to know whatever the news happen to be. What does that do? It allows for them to have a reaction (and it gives you more leeway, too!). It allows them to lean on you as their leader as they need it. It allows you and them to partner on a solution that is best not just for the company or for you, but for them, too.

Here is an example what this could tangibly look like. Let’s say you need to tell your people that they won’t get a bonus this year because the company is struggling.

Predictably, people will be disappointed, afraid, angry and sad.

Before you tell them, ground yourself. Breathe. You could even bring up your team members and their typical reactions as a mental image and practice a different kind of reaction. This is NOT about rehearsing and trying to find the perfect thing to say. This is about already knowing what makes your breath quicker – conjuring it up and training to slow your breath in the face of it. (Side note – for more, deeper and bespoke strategies on that, check out the change work intensive)

In the actual conversation, do your people a favour and tell them about the cut right away – and add that you want to support them through it and talk about what they might need. Own what you can own and apologise what you can genuinely apologise for. Keep it as concise as possible and ground yourself throughout.

Invite them to get it out. Let them vent while you keep breathing. Hold them and their emotion. And gently nudge them towards telling you more – the more you know, the better you can not just help them, but move everyone forward without losing momentum because everyone needs to lick their wounds first. Do not argue and justify or rush to concessions, but be open to apologising more and take responsibility for what you can. Stay genuine.

Lastly, help them to get their brain back online and move on to find solutions with them, thinking as far out of the box as you can without violating your boundaries or making promises you can’t hold after.

If done well, this process will help them to stay engaged and deepen the trust in you. Yes, they may still feel anger, but they won’t hate you, and especially not beyond a couple of intense minutes in which you talk to each other and find back to human connection.

p.s. Learn more strategies in my upcoming workshop on conflict and crisis on September 24. Sign up below to get notified – plus get my «no guide» right away, which will provide you with some additional ways to go deeper with yourself and your own reactions right away.

There are people who feel like you hit a wall every time you try to talk. Like you never get «through» to their real selves, what they really think and hope for. Instead they feed you just a bit, so, you walk away «happy enough». But you are left feeling unsatisfied and not much closer to making the difference you wanted to make with them, for them, the team and yourself.

It’s you just as much as it’s them.

So here’s the frustrating bit: No matter how much you tried, it’s you as much as them. Not because something is wrong with either of you, but because every one of us has only limited strategies to deal with people and their antics are limited. They work well with some and not so well with others. That’s just human and roots back into childhood:

Let’s say you grow up with a very rational parent – this gets you a TON of practice to deal with people who love to reason and argue. Not so much with someone who is volatile and following what they feel like in he moment.

This article depicts a few different archetypes and what the walls tend to be like you will hit with them, and how to potentially get over them. Important: They are obviously just this: archetypes lacking in subtlety. No one will be exactly like them – nor will your reaction be exactly like the ones I describe. Do not stop because of that. In fact if you want to stop and dismiss something I write… it’s probably worth having a closer look where the grains of an uncomfortable truth may lie for you.

Speaking of dismissal: Keep in mind that it’s easier to dismiss someone as “not being a good fit” or “he’s just too xxx”, or “I’m just bad with this kind of personality”, than having a closer look. This may be less comfortable, but would allow you to see how you can get past your usual stop and how you can contribute to change by starting with yourself.

You can’t avoid the vulnerable conversation

With all of these, you will find that you will have to have a conversation in which you will need to lean out the window. Like this: You will need to tell people what hasn’t felt great and that you would like to get past the wall. That you would like to do so in partnership with them. That you can see what you didn’t do well, but that you would also like for them to make an effort to do things differently on their end.

No matter how well you prepare and how vulnerable and “leader-ly” you show up to these conversations: Very most likely, you will see them do exactly the thing in defence. That’s why it is so important to look at your own default reaction to their pattern first, and know how to modify it. And be open to try again, as long as you and them are willing to keep trying. It’s not always easy to get past an entrenched mutual pattern.

And please know that it is always okay to set a boundary: I’m not writing all of this to encourage you to not honour your own capacity. It’s the opposite. I want you to lean out as far as you can, make an effort as long as you feel you can hold it together as a leader. Not further, because that will do more harm than good: When we lean out too hard, we always return to default patterns, hard and you will create more walls instead of less. Also, sometimes, relationships are beyond repair with any two people and their circumstances given.

Here are the archetypes:

The uber rational type

Let’s start with the type I just alluded to: The ones who always have a really good reason.

The wall: You may come in with brilliant arguments, but they will best you at one point or another. They tend to make you feel slightly helpless, and it doesn’t feel great to feel like you’re stupid. So you tend to leave them to their devices after they brought enough of their wisdom. Partly because you run out of arguments, but just as much because you’re just tired to keep arguing.

What to do about it: Stop arguing. Don’t make it about good reasons, but don’t go to the other extreme aka “I told you so” either.  Instead, set a boundary and tell them that you won’t discuss every single reason of yours. Ask them what they need to make things happen. Get curious together with them: What do they get out of their reasoning, and how can they fulfil that need or desire instead? Listen for feelings they don’t want to feel – often we put reasoning over uncomfortable feelings underneath.

Ideas to work on yourself: Develop a bigger capacity to feel stupid. We all feel it, or are it at times, no matter how smart. Don’t fall prey to your own love of arguing if it’s not what serves you. How is your own relationship to “feel the feelings” vs. “just find good reasons”?

The preoccupied type

The wall: They just never have time and are already and always busy with some top priority stuff. Somehow they always convince you that it is indeed more pressing than the thing you have. And you end up leaving them to their devices really, because you can usually somehow reallocate resources (even if you do it yourself). You struggle to tell them

What to do about it: Have a look at their overall time management and ask more questions than you usually would about their workload. Do they get work from someone else, too? Do they get lost in details? Slow down more than both of you are comfortable with to really see where the time and effort goes and create a strategy together that better fit the actual reality.

Ideas to work on yourself: Slow down, have a really close look on time management in your team – especially if it’s painful. If you end up doing stuff yourself, assess if it’s what you really want or if you just struggle to “intrude”. Assess your relationship to micro-management.

The haughty/dismissive type

The wall: They manage to make you feel inferior. A bit like they lead you instead of you leading them, and not in a good way. They turn questions around to you. They subtly undermine your decisions, let you and others know that they have more experience or are otherwise superior. This can be a tough one, as it is often rooted in deep-seated insecurity on your end. And when you talk to them about it directly, they essentially keep going longer than you.

What to do about it: All of these types are easier to get through to by getting support, but this is probably number one. Essentially, you need to get curious about their underlying world. What makes them tick this way? It could be that they and most often, they actually really need to be heard on an emotional level. Think disappointment, anger, frustration and resignation.

Ideas to work on yourself: Practice to stand for yourself and others. Learn to sit with a lot of discomfort in the moment without being deterred from your goals. Have a look at what tends to uproot you, make you insecure, and leads to a more solid understanding of your place in the world.

The resigned and/or angry type

The wall: They either don’t really care, or they care too much, or they oscillate between the two. Either way, their reaction shuts you down and you don’t dare what feels like prying further.

What to do about it: Set a boundary when they treat you in a way that isn’t okay for you, but at the same time, create accountability: When can you talk if not now? What do they need to be able to stay in the conversation? What do they need to find back to what matters to them?

Ideas to work on yourself: What is your relationship with anger and resignation? Do you push through, or push down? Do you deal with them upfront and actively, or do they catch you unawares because you try to ignore them, or even tell yourself it’s not what you feel.

Best course of action: Get support

I said it before, but keep in mind that all of these are merely beginning points. My prediction is that you manage to modify some of the conversations, and turn around some of them at best – but often, these are temporary. It’s tough to see your own strategies, and impossible to do so at their full depth on your own. It’s like looking at let’s say orange or purple and trying to figure which two colours made it and see them separately.

So the deeper you go into mutual human dynamics, the more I recommend you get outside support to be able to clearly see your own patterns. Come to make a start in my workshop on conflict and crisis on September 24 – and get notified by signing up to my list for now. Bonus: My freebie will support you to see some of your patterns and give you a few more ways to work on your leadership right away.

What can you do when something goes up in flames at work? More than you might think, although it isn’t always easy. Here’s the problem: Our very human instinct is to join the action, aka to call it code red and act fast, hard, determined. This is less often a good idea than you might think. Here are the reasons why and what you can consider instead.

Your emergency mode is not as good as you think.  

… and it’s basically invisible to you. Because it works and you could (and probably used to) stop here. I mean, never change a running system, right? You need your “best self” in an emergency, no wiggle room.

So why on earth should you think beyond what works well enough? Why should you implement steps you haven’t in the past that possibly even slow you down at first?

Here’s why: There are a lot of (hidden) disadvantages to any well-oiled emergency protocol you function on as a human. Side note: I’m not speaking stuff like a literal fire alarm here. I’m speaking highly complex, nuanced leadership situations.

Here are the top 3 disadvantages of your best crisis strategy:

1. You will fall into your most familiar brain patterns, but these are narrow. Like… You know A will cause B and you want B? You won’t fool around with anything other than A instead. No experiments, no room, even if the result could be way better.  So you will happily do A ten times instead of once, and live with the mediocre quality of B for a long time Because. They. Work. Well. Enough.
   
2. The solution patterns in your brain are inevitably narrow, because emergency = fast and there’s literally no room to get broad and creative. Also, you can only cobble together so many aspects of a situation when time is of importance. Lastly, these aspects tend to be the loud, screaming ones that stick out to you. However, the power for sustainable change lies in the voices you can’t even hear.
   
3. Especially if you excel at crisis mode, you will actually (unconsciously) contribute to causing more emergency-like situation without even noticing it. Like de-prioritising everything that doesn’t burn YET, because once they burn, you shine. So why make a decision before you can play out your genius? It will save you the energy of needing to choose more actively as opposed to just let things run.

Let me use a metaphor here: You are really good at wielding a hammer, so everything becomes sort of a nail. With enough effort, you can hammer a screw into a piece of wood, and you can do it times and times again. Everyone sees the screw hammered in, so you don’t risk using a  screwdriver (imagine using the wrong size!!! Eek!). Instead you keep using  the hammer, no matter the fact that longer term, you waste a lot of energy, time and other resources – barely noticing it.

Alternative leadership steps for a better result:

One thing before we take tangible steps: Don’t practice when stuff already burns hot. You may not be able to cope. Try them in smaller, lower stakes situations. But here goes:

Step 1: Make sure your brain is online.

When you go down the emergency lane, you get into tunnel vision, narrow down, focus on the essential right in front of you. But I just mentioned it: This is literally narrow and takes away a lot of possibility to solve a problem differently, with more perspective and creativity and unusual angles. All of these only work when your have brain space to look left and right to the obvious.

Here are a couple of actions you can take to help you you getting as much as possible of your brain online and maximise its capacity:

Make sure the bare necessities are met: When you are hungry and sleep-deprived, you will not be at your best. Make sure you meet your most basic physical needs. We can push them away for a bit, but they come back around and greatly diminish your capacity. While this may sound trivial, I invite you to really check – it’s something we neglect a LOT because it is kind of easy to ignore. But it sabotages you from behind more than you can imagine.

Breathe: There is a LOT that can be done with breath and it goes way beyond this article to write it down, but for right now, here’s the simplest possible thing to start with: Focus on your breathing as many times as you can during the day. Remind yourself with a post-it. First notice it – no changes. And second deepen it by a couple of percent.

Move your body: Even if it’s just getting up and walking a couple of steps, but it’s astonishing what a few steps can do to your brain. Again: We are physical creatures – act accordingly. Find out what is good for you and do as much as you can of that.

Cross the midline: When you go into tunnel vision, you get stuck on one half of the brain, and an incredibly simple thing you can do is to stand up and swing your arms like a pendulum, and watch them go left and right. So this isn’t just movement, it also reminds your brain to connect its halves. Literal anti-tunnel action.

Emote: Go scream somewhere remote, or into a cushion. Let yourself have that moment and cry, wail, complain loudly. Whatever wants to get physically and loudly out of your system. This leads me right to step 2:

Step 2: Forgive yourself first, and others second.

This is an incredibly powerful piece to move through crises IF you are willing to forgive how things have gone so far. You may not be and it’s better to admit that than to try anyway. You don’t have to see how you may get rid of any intense feeling, but are you genuinely willing to give it a try?

Here’s the thing about doing it over the top of not being ready: The whole practice is one of getting honest with yourself, your feelings, the facts. If you aren’t honest to begin with, it can’t work, because you just defied its very purpose.

Willingness implied, this is what you can do:

Get a piece of paper, a writing app, a recorder and set aside an hour. It might take you less (rarely more, but an hour is a solid start). If you feel you can’t take an hour, go do it all the more. Do NOT go through it in your mind, you will stay stuck in your usual thinking patterns. It needs to be physically written down or at least spoken out loud. And do NOT hold back, because you’ll destroy it after.

First, get allllllll your grudges & any other feelings out. Write them down (again, delete after to be as free as possible). The more judgemental, angry and disappointed you are the better. You need it OUT in the open.

After, move on to writing down the facts & responsibilities. What was the chronicle? Who was supposed to do what? Bone dry, as a news reporter would who is hired to exclusively tell people about measurable, visible or otherwise objective occurrences. Also, write down what you can see to own: Where did you not say no? Where did you not listen to your intuition? If that’s hard, get more of your feels out.

Lastly, acknowledge yourself and others. Again, if this is hard, go back to the feelings. There is always something you did well even when things went super wrong. You tried hard, you did the best you could. You assessed the situation to the best of your abilities etc. Same goes for others involved. Write down everything you can honestly see now.

Reminder: Delete or burn everything once you wrote it down.

Doing this can be both hard and incredibly freeing. I personally do it a lot and it helps me to clear my head and find fresh ways out of a misery every single time.

(Credits: I learnt the original version of this practice from Accomplishment coaching)

Step 3: Have the conversations you need to move things forward

When you have done 1) and 2), this is actually less of a huge step. The first two steps are FAR more important in terms of getting a fresh angle. Still: You need to take action to make use of your internal insights, otherwise they will quickly fade away.

So for step 3, do this: Make a list of the conversations you need to have next with what you can see now. Write down what you need to talk about, what you want to get across you haven’t before. Get super clear on your end. And then go, say the courageous thing and have those conversations in a way that moves things forward differently – as opposed to getting stuck in the same rut again.

Want more? You can read more about getting stuck in similar ways with similar people and how to say the tough shit without making people hate you

For even more depth and learnings on this topic, sign up for the workshop I on conflict and crises on September 24, 2025 right here: