“They know I’ve got bad news to deliver, so it’s no good me beating about the bush; I’ve just to tell them the way it is!” This is roughly what one of my clients was saying to me last week. He was obliged to gather his workforce together and confess that redundancies for some of the staff had been planned. Understandably he just wanted to get the ordeal over with as quickly as possible.
It reminded me of that old joke where the Sergeant has to tell one of the soldiers that his mother has died – so he calls them all onto the parade ground and says “All those of you with a loving mother at home take a step forward. Wait! Where do you think you’re going Jones?” brutal and cruel, and perhaps not very funny.
I was concerned that my client was going to be regarded in the same way – as some uncaring member of the management who was out of touch with the workforce. Instead, after some discussion, we explored how this speech would sound if we followed the classical structure endorsed by the ancient Greeks. This would mean beginning, not by breaking the bad news but by showing the workforce how he, the Managing Director, was really one of them. I was won over when he revealed he’d formerly worked in virtually every part of his engineering works. The Greeks would call this ETHOS (letting us know who you are). Next he had to make sure the audience understood the whys and wherefores of this decision, so the facts and figures had to be included – what the Greeks would call LOGOS – and lastly he had to finish the speech with a display of sympathy and regret PATHOS as he revealed the action he was about to take; to lay-off some 40 members of staff. The bad news was now at the end of the speech rather than at the beginning and overall the whole announcement sounded so much better – and he came out of it well too.
As I listened to the finished speech I was reminded of how the ancient Greeks knew exactly what they were doing. Following the order of Ethos, Logos and Pathos works every time.
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