When should you use an indirect approach in delivering a negative news message explain your answer to the class?

•When should you use an indirect approach in delivering anegative news message? Explain your answer to the class.

EXERCISES•Ask five friends which they would prefer: negative news in adirect or indirect format? Why? Discuss your results with aclassmate.

EXERCISES•Sales have decreased for two consecutive quarters at yourbusiness. You have been instructed to inform your salesteam that their hours, and base pay, will be reduced by 20percent. While you may have a few members of your salesteam that are underperforming, you want to retain theentire team. Write a negative news message in a direct orindirect approach informing your sales team of the news.

EXERCISES•You have observed and documented an employee being lateand taking long breaks for the past two weeks. Write out abrief summary of the conversation you need to have. Youmay be assigned to another classmate for a role-playingexercise. Share and compare with your classmates.

EXERCISES•Describe a time when you received negative feedback intime to correct your error. How did you feel about thecorrection at the time? Looking back, how do you feel aboutit in retrospect? Discuss your thoughts with a classmate.

EXERCISES•Find a negative message online and write a brief review.Share and compare with classmates.

EXERCISES•Prepare a sample customer satisfaction survey with at leastten questions. Make sure you include a couple of questionsto learn more about your audience as well as their opinionsof the product or service. Post your results in class andcompare them with classmates.

EXERCISES•Locate the crisis communication plan where you go toschool or work, or find one online. Briefly describe theoverall plan and please note at least one part, element, orpoint of emphasis we have not discussed. Post and comparewith classmates.

EXERCISES•When people don’t know what to do in a crisis situation,what happens? How can you address probable challengesbefore the crisis occurs? Discuss your ideas with classmates.

EXERCISES•As a case study, research one crisis that involves your areaof training or career field. What communication issues werepresent and how did they affect the response to the crisis?Compare your results with classmates.

EXERCISES•Locate a crisis communication online and review it. Shareand compare with classmates.

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1.When should you use an indirect approach in delivering a negative news message? Explain your answer tothe class.2.Ask five friends which they would prefer: negative news in a direct or indirect format? Why? Discuss yourresults with a classmate.3.Sales have decreased for two consecutive quarters at your business. You have been instructed to informyour sales team that their hours, and base pay, will be reduced by 20 percent. While you may have a fewmembers of your sales team that are underperforming, you want to retain the entire team. Write anegative news message in a direct or indirect approach informing your sales team of the news.4.You have observed and documented an employee being late and taking long breaks for the past twoweeks. Write out a brief summary of the conversation you need to have. You may be assigned to anotherclassmate for a role-playing exercise. Share and compare with your classmates.

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Behavior Modification: Principles and Procedures

Miltenberger

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Saylor URL:Saylor.org661[1]Bovee, C., & Thill, J. (2010).Business communication essentials: A skills-based approach to vital businessEnglish(4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.[2]Limaye, Mohan R. (1997, June 1). Further conceptualization of explanation in negative messages.BusinessCommunication Quarterly, 60(2), 38–50.[3]Covey, S. (1989).The seven habits of highly effective people. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.[4]Yardley, William. (2009, September 6). 2,000 Washington state students report signs of swine flu.New YorkTimes. Retrieved from

Saylor URL:Saylor.org66217.2 Eliciting Negative NewsLEARNING OBJECTIVES1.Understand the importance of feedback, even if it is negative.2.Describe and demonstrate the effective use of open- and closed-ended questions.How do you know when you are doing a good job? How do you know when, where, and how you could doa better job? What makes the difference between business or organization that is stagnant and one that isdynamic? Often the response to all these questions involves one key, but often overlooked, companyresource: feedback. Feedback is the verbal and/or nonverbal response to a message, and that messagemay involve a company product or service.Employee surveys, for example, may be completed online, in written form, in small focus groups, and caninvolve both oral and written communication. In the same way, customer satisfaction surveys may involvesimilar options and both provide a valuable opportunity to take a critical look at what we are doing, how itis perceived, and what areas we can identify for improvement. They often measure opinions, satisfaction,attitude, brand affiliation, preference, and engagement of customers and employees. In this section wewill consider negative news as a valuable tool in self, team, company, product, and service improvement.Across the years there have been extensive studies on how to improve businesses and companies, fromTotal Quality Improvement to the Six Sigma approach to excellence. Regardless of the theory, approach,or label, they all rest on a foundation of effective communication. One way that communication is oftendescribed involves customer relationship management,[1]or the relationship between the organization(sometimes represented by the product or service itself) and the customer.This leads us to our first point: who is the customer? You might be tempted to say the end-user, thepurchaser, or the decision-maker, but customers are often categorized as internal and external.Employees themselves represent internal customers, and their relationship with the business, product, orservice has value to the organization. External customers may include the end-user, but can also includevendors and related businesses that are part of the supply chain. This expanded, global view ofcommunication and customer service relationships will guide our discussion as we explore ways toeffectively elicit negative news, critical feedback, and praise for a job well done.Positive news is part of feedback, and indeed the difference between positive and negative news often liesmore in the interpretation of information than the information itself. For example, if a software product

Saylor URL:Saylor.org663that your company has been testing for some time, scheduled for a release date in the near future, hasfailed several tests, the tendency to view the news as negative is understood. The fact that the problemsand issues were identified prior to release, however, provides an opportunity to correct them before theirimpact is magnified by negative news in the press, customer rejection of an inferior product, and adiminished view of your brand, all of which could ultimately damage customer loyalty and even your stockvalue. The chain reaction doesn’t stop there; these effects could in turn limit your ability to get additionalfinancing as an organization, the perceived risk could elevate interest rates on your company debts, andthis could reduce budgets across the organization, limiting the very research and development budget thatgives rise to the new, innovative, or breakout products that will gain market share.Viewed in this light, it could be a very positive development that the faults in the software were detectedbefore release. In addition, by learning to view information in a dispassionate way, noting that there ismore than one way to interpret much of what we gather as data, you as a business professional canenhance your ability to see new approaches to products or services.Thomas Kuhn, author ofThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions(1996),[2]states that communities operateon a set of beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the community, business, and organization.Employees and customers alike become socialized, learning the values, meaning, behaviors, culturalcustoms, expectations for excellence, and brand associations through interaction with the community. Inbusiness, we can clearly see the example of new employees becoming socialized into the company culture;they are training, learning about their jobs, and getting to know their coworkers.We can also see how a customer interacts with a product or service, and comes to associate feelings, ideas,and expectations with a brand or company. This foundation or set of actualized beliefs becomes the normor the status quo, and can become static or fixed. If a certain process is successful and an individual orcompany is rewarded, the process is often repeated. If a customer buys a certain product that works asthey anticipate it will, they are more likely to make a similar purchase decision in the future.Kuhn discusses research and the scientific method as a process that can affirm the status quo, but can alsoproduce an anomaly, or something that doesn’t fit, challenges the existing norm, or stands apart from theanticipated results.[3]This anomaly can challenge the status quo, and may not be greeted with open arms.Instead, it may be ignored or dismissed as irrelevant, but nothing could be further from the truth. AsKuhn (1996)[4]notes, this outlying information that challenges the norm is precisely the necessary

Saylor URL:Saylor.org664ingredient for a paradigm shift, or a change in overall view. The view itself can be as simple as the newawareness that a product has more uses than originally anticipated, or as significant as a new awarenessof the brand and the company focus.Is there a better way toproduce a product? Is there a new feature that customers want? You’ll never knowif you don’t ask, and you’ll never improve or change if you don’t listen to the feedback.One story that articulates this power of the anomaly, of unanticipated information that results in a changein view, involves a common business product. A research chemist for the 3M Company, Spencer Silver,was used to trial and error as he pursued his goal of a new superglue.[5]By mixing simple organiccompounds in unusual ratios, he tried to create this superstrong glue, but one result in particular was aspectacular failure. This particular result, a polymer, would stick to many surfaces, but it was also easy toremove, leaving no trace of itself. This odd substance was considered useless until Arthur Fry, a fellow 3Mscientist, found a new use for it: removable paper notes that could be used to mark pages in his hymnalwhen he sang in his church choir. Minor modifications resulted in sample note pads that were passedaround at 3M, and soon a new form of written communication and information organization was created:the now-famous Post-it brand note.[6]Silver and Fry could have dismissed the negative result as a failureto reach the established goal of inventing a super glue, but by undergoing a paradigm shift, theyrevolutionized business communication. Learning to be open to information that challenges your views isa key business skill.This now brings us to the question of how we elicit negative news, critical feedback, and assessmentinformation. How do you learn more about the people around you? You watch, listen, and ask questions.Asking questions while watching, listening, and learning is the foundation of eliciting feedback. We canask questions in interpersonal interviews, in small groups, and even large groups in person. We can usetechnology to help gather and process information, categorizing and classifying it. We can also createsurveys with questions designed to elicit specific types of information.Academic researchoften uses the terms “qualitative” and “quantitative” to categorize two types ofinformation gathering. Qualitative research involves interactions, which by their very nature are subject tointerpretation and, as a result, are less reliable and statistically valid. Their strength is in the raw data, theproximity to the source, and the possibility of unexpected results. The weakness in the results is often theinability to replicate the results the same way again. An example may be a focus group, where participants

Saylor URL:Saylor.org665try a new beverage and report their experience in words and nonverbal expressions. By recording thegroup, we can replay and study their response to the new drink, and learn that many of the participantsperceive it to be sour from their facial gestures. The written responses may not indicate this response tothe same degree, and the recorded responses may portray a different story. If you replicate the focusgroup with new participants, you may very well have a different outcome.Over time, patterns may emerge that produce reliable results, and indeed double-blind studies for manypharmaceuticals use a similar approach, but the number of participants has to be significantly increasedwhile theconfounding factors, or factors that can alter the results, must be anticipated and controlled. Allof this involves a cost, and not every product, service, or study needs this type of investigation.Quantitative research involves investigation and analysis of data and relationships between data that canbe represented by numbers. The categorization and classification from the moment the investigationmeans that some aspects of the raw data will be necessarily lost in the process, but the information thatremains will have a reliability and validity that compensates for this loss. Indeed, quantitative measuresand representations of data are increasingly the norm in business communication, and are used to makedecisions at all levels.If your company produces automobiles, you may want qualitative information from potential consumerson their impression of the placement of the cupholders, but you will probably prefer quantitativeinformation when it comes to engineering and safety. As you stress-test the steel in crash tests, assessingthe force of the impact, the displacement of parts of the car as the crumple zones deform to absorb theenergy, and the relative location of the crash-test dummy driver to the crush zone, you will measure it interms of numbers. Each time your repeat the test, you should see similar results. If you don’t, you mayneed to test the welds and examine the production process to determine why there is an inconsistency.You may even need to test the steel itself to see if it is a materials issue, rather than a process andproduction problem. All this information would be measured in terms of numbers and symbols,representing velocity, tensile strength, and related factors.Another factor in gathering feedback is confidentiality. Before you consider how to ask questions, you maywant to consider to what degree you want identifying information in the process. If you are designing acampaign where employees submit suggestions to save the company money, increase production, orimprove quality, and want to offer a financial incentive for ideas that are adopted, you will need to be able

Saylor URL:Saylor.org666to identify the contributing employee for the reward. On the other hand, if you want a feedback system foremployees to report coworkers who are under the influence or have substance abuse problems on the job,threatening the safety of all, then you would want an anonymous 1-800 number to give out, and toencourage its use by assuring employees that it carries no identifying markers.Anonymous surveys can elicit information that would not be revealed otherwise, but they can also be aplace for employees to vent, exaggerate, or invent responses. The validity is an issue, but the opportunityfor insight may outweigh the risks. You can also provide an optional opportunity for the employee orcustomer to self-identify by providing a place where they could indicate contact information. A customerthat completes a postpurchase survey may be offered a coupon if they register, and that contactinformation may be useful for follow-up contacts. Some customers will prefer, however, to write a directcomplaint without identifying themselves. When designing a survey, brochure, or procedure to elicitfeedback, you need to consider identification and anonymity.In order to gather information, we often ask questions. For this application there are two types ofquestions: open and closed.[7]Open-ended questionsallow for interpretation and a range of responses inthe respondent’s own words.Closed-ended questions limit the responses to a preselected range of optionsor choices. Your choice of open or closed questions depends on what type of information you plan togather.Open-ended questions may sound like the following:

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When should you use indirect approach?

When you write a bad news message you should use an indirect approach what does this mean?

How do you use the indirect approach effectively when conveying negative news?

Where do you place the bad news in a letter using the indirect approach?