A spoonful of sugar: handling the negative with your employees.

• Author: Haraldsen, Tom
• Position: Business Trends

In the movie Up in the Air, actress Anna Kendrick shadows co-star George Clooney as his character does his job--firing employees for other companies as a hire-on-demand terminator. He flies in from his company headquarters, sequesters himself with a video screen and a camera in a conference room, and then gives employees sitting in another room the bad news. As Kendrick later delivers the news of a layoff to an employee via that same sort of video conference, she chokes up.

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Even in a Hollywood film, telling someone they're losing their job isn't easy.

The reality in 2010 is that many supervisors and company executives are in similar situations regularly. It may not always be the ultimate bad news--i.e., someone getting fired or a position being eliminated by a reduction in force. Still, discussing work furloughs, reductions or changes in benefits packages or any potential mood-altering development is never easy. There's no perfect time to deliver that news, but there are some important elements that can soften the blow.

Heart to Heart

"You have to start by sharing how hard this decision was to make," says Kerry Patterson, chief development officer and co-founder of Provo-based VitalSmarts. "The person who is meeting with that employee should share a personal experience involving a layoff or detail other things that have been done by the company to try to avoid layoffs. Having a heart-to-heart discussion rather than just a discussion of facts is the better way to go."

Patterson has co-authored three New York Times-best selling books dealing with employer-employee interaction, including Crucial Conversations. VitalSmarts trains executives in improving their organizational performance.

"There are many executives who simply can't do it, who can't face their employees face-to-face and have these kinds of discussions," he says. "They are unwilling to show emotions for fear of looking weak. So it sometimes falls on someone else to be the bearer of bad tidings."

Joseph Grenny, co-founder of VitalSmarts and Patterson's co-author, says such scary conversations "are crucial conversations. In these moments, most people run the other way because experience tells them the other person will be angry or defensive."

Grenny conducted a poll that revealed that nearly one-third of employees put off having a "scary conversation" with their bosses for at least a month, and some for as long as a year. And some employers feel the same way...