(no title)

Dear Blog,

Today I read Jack Dorsey’s letter to his employees in which he announces he will be laying off over 330 employees. At the beginning of the letter, Mr. Dorsey states that he will “give it to us straight.” He then proceeds to give ‘it’ to us in a maze of vague explanations of plans to better the company and promises to reimburse these 330 employees with a “generous” exit package of about 20% of his annual salary. For those wondering, this equals out to about one day of pay for every five employees that are now out of work.

I have no issue with companies deciding to lay off workers. I understand that sometimes, it is necessary to let people go, so Jack Dorsey is not in the wrong on that front. However, I am ticked off that I was expecting a straight explanation from his announcement, and instead was given a page and a half of explanations and excuses that I am sure nobody cares about. I understand the need to soften the blow by coating the bad news with a dozen layers of good news, but if I was one of the employees losing their job, that letter would have made me feel much worse. If he really wanted to show respect to the employees that were being laid off, he wouldn’t have spent 70 percent of his letter describing what a great future he has planned and the other 30 percent explaining how generous he’s going to be to those employees.

I would prefer he just announce that they were being laid off, explain how he will reimburse them, and end the letter there. This article I found goes more in depth about why people shouldn’t use this method https://www.reliableplant.com/Read/24506/Sweet-talk-sugar-coated.  Too many people in positions of power fail at delivering bad news because they try to disguise it as a part of a bigger set of good news instead of just allowing it to be bad news. It makes it a lot harder to actually accept when there is actual good news because we become so used to good news being partnered with bad news and vice versa. This article talks about how sugar coating bad news can actually cause people to receive it in a worse way than if it had been delivered bluntly. This article explains how sugar coating bad news can cause someone to seem condescending and manipulative https://psychologycorner.com/why-sugar-coated-communication-is-bad-for-you-and-for-everyone-else/. I think CEOs and other leaders need to start actually giving it to us straight instead of trying to give us big clusters of positivity to distract us from the main point.