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Your response to hard news at work.
Imagine this. It’s Friday and you’re about to sign off for the weekend. It’s the close of a hard work week but you have this child-like excitement because days earlier, you sent an investment memo summarizing a business case on why your company should pursue an acquisition. You’ve been working on this business case for 4 months. You socialized the case with key people across your company, everything’s pointed in the right direction. You genuinely gave it your all and the final vote to proceed was supposed to happen that day.
You see an email get delivered just as you’re about to close your laptop. Your heart starts beating faster as you race to open it.
….but dread takes over. The acquisition gets put on hold. There’s a bunch of text after reading the main message but you almost don’t even see it and you certainly don’t comprehend it.
What happens next? How do you react?
Every person reading this has experienced a version of this story at some point. I’m not talking about the hard conversation where a colleague gives you difficult feedback, or the performance review that didn’t go as you wanted. I’m talking about project outcomes.
The work you poured yourself into gets cancelled. The acquisition falls apart in the final hour. The FDA rejects a submission your team spent years crafting. The layoff notice on a Tuesday morning. The kind of news where you did the work and executed, but the result went against you.
The circumstances vary but the body’s response is consistent. The body knows something is wrong before you’ve figured out what to do about it.
What separates people isn’t whether they get hit with hard news. It’s what happens next.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career on both sides of this. I’ve delivered layoffs, sat across from people whose faces told me everything. And I’ve been on the receiving end of hard news. The acquisition story I told above is a real one I went through.
When hard news hits, here’s what I’ve noticed, in myself and in the people around me:
Early on in your career, you collapse. The project dies and it feels like you die with it, at least for a while. Then experience accumulates and you overcorrect. You get good at shrugging things off. You may even say out loud: “I get it. This isn’t my first rodeo.” You call it growth or resilience. But you don’t learn from the situation. You move on.
The goal though is landing somewhere in between.
There’s A Spectrum
There are two failure modes and they look very dfifferent.
On one end of the spectrum is collapse. The news hits your inbox, and within minutes it stops being about the situation and starts being about you. The deal fell through, which means you failed. The layoff happened, which means you weren’t good enough. The promotion went to someone else, which means the last three years were a waste. Any of these reactions sound familiar? The event becomes a verdict on you, and of course we take it personally. Why shouldn’t we? We worked hard for the outcome.
The second failure mode I’ll call it the shrug. It’s the person who takes the news, nods, says “okay, what’s next,” and moves on before they’ve actually processed anything. They skip the reflection entirely. They’re already problem-solving or already updating their resume before they’ve realized what happened. It’s often viewed as strength but it’s a dangerous pattern to get into.
Both responses are a way of not dealing with the news. The collapse makes it mean too much. The shrug refuses to let it mean anything at all.
The Collapse
Early in my career, I spent months working on an acquisition. I was operating more like a corporate development lead than anything else. I courted the target company, built the relationship while earning their trust, created the business case, put together the financial model, socialized it with every stakeholder who needed to be on board, and finally got to a deal structure both sides were ready to sign. I was super proud of myself for getting to this point. Then one person stopped it in its tracks.
Internally I questioned everything. How could this have happened? Had I missed something? Was all of that work pointless? The team felt the same way. We had all transferred our sense of worth into the outcome, and when the outcome died, we went with it.
The deal didn’t fail because we were failures. It failed because one person didn’t vote for it. Those are not the same thing. But at the time, I couldn’t separate them. I took it personally.
The Shrug
Odds are, you have been in a business that has gone through a layoff. You can’t exactly get away from them in the current economic climate. Have you ever been one of those left behind? The person who made it through and didn’t get impacted? There is a depressed feeling that overtakes the team in the subsequent days. Slack channels go quieter. You get an email that reads something like “Go about your day, nothing else changes. These things happen and we need to move on quickly.” That’s the shrug I’m talking about. There is a feeling of lack of reflection. Hard news inside a business is data. Why did we get here? What do we need to do differently?
The pattern is the same as the collapse, just in reverse. Refusal to let the news be information. Moving past it so fast there was nothing to learn.
What the News Is Actually Telling You
Hard news at work is information. Not always fair information, not always the full picture, but information. The question worth asking is what it’s actually about.
Some of it is about the situation. The business ran out of runway. Investors were unwilling to back the business.
Other situations are worth a serious reflection. Maybe there was part of a process you missed? Maybe you didn’t see the signals early enough or you saw them but ignored them? Maybe, you left too much optionality in the process and didn’t focus enough of your attention on the critical load bearing wall?
Processing Hard News
All of the scenarios and questions above are part of the journey we’re all on. Nobody gets through a career without taking a hit and getting knocked down. The question is never whether it happens. It’s whether you let it mean something.
I had an entire ending here but then Packy McCormick published his latest essay (a talk he gave last week) titled “Riding the Leopard.” It’s the best essay I’ve read all year and you should head over and give it a read. I can’t help but reference it.
Packy told a story about a founder named Forrest Heath who, when told he would make a great billionaire, looked confused and said something like “Why would I take money out of this? This is the machine I’m building to do everything I want to do.” The outcome wasn’t the point. The work was the point.
That is easier to say than to live. When the deal dies or the project gets cancelled, it does not feel like the work was the point. It feels like the work was wasted. But that is the collapse talking. The work was never wasted. It built something in you.
The pause matters. I’m not talking about the stall out and marinate in what went wrong for months type of pause. I’m talking about taking a step back, and actually ask what the news is telling you before you move on. What did you learn about the process? What would you do differently? What signals did you see and ignore? That reflection is the whole thing. Skip it and you take the hit for nothing. Sit in it too long and you become it.
Hope you have a great end to your week.
Dave
