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Difficult conversations: delivering bad news professionally

Difficult conversations — a C1 English lesson. Practise using modal verbs for advice and obligation and expand vocabulary around professional communication.

Difficult conversations: delivering bad news professionally
Photo by Vitaly Gariev / Unsplash

Summary

This ESL lesson for C1 English students explores Workplace communication. Using a real video as the basis for discussion, students develop reading and listening comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar skills across a 90-minute class.

The grammar focus is Modal Verbs of Obligation, Necessity, and Advice. Key vocabulary includes humanity (noun), humiliating (adjective), multifarious (adjective) and more, all drawn directly from the source material. The practical English section gives students useful phrases for real-life situations: You are a manager who needs to inform an employee that their position is being eliminated due to restructuring. You want to be clear, direct, and compassionate..

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Activities

00:00 Firing is one of the things that you have to do. The more that you do it, the less stressful it is. But I think if it ever becomes sort of standard, you know, just another day at the office, you probably have lost a little bit of your humanity.
00:15 This means a major change in somebody's life. It can be so humiliating to the person, so troubling to them. It may mean that they have to tell their kids they're moving. It may mean that they can't make their mortgage payment, et cetera.
00:28 So you want to make it as smooth as you can. We're all in this together. We're all responsible for each other.
00:35 I've been at this 45 years, either running companies or being on boards, et cetera. And in one case, we had to take the size of the company from 3,500 down to 2,800. In other cases we've had to shut down divisions.
00:49 You're building a Super Bowl winning team, and that just takes work. And you're going to have some layoffs and some benchings.
00:59 Mistakes made in firing people are multifarious, and I think I made all of them. I think I tried to give the reasons. I gave a big long discussion. I offloaded it on other people.
01:13 Yes, I've been fired, and it's not fun. And I had a bad experience with it. So I've developed over time a far better script.
01:26 So good bosses have human emotions just like the employee that's being terminated has emotions. People don't like to hear the word, you're fired. It has a connotation that people just don't like to hear.
01:39 You can be sad about it and say I'm sorry this hasn't worked out. But you're firm. It's essential when you let someone go to let them know in the first 30 seconds what the decision is.
01:49 You're trying to help them to move on to a new place that's better for them and is smooth for the company.
01:55 I like to do my own firing. I don't like to do it, but I want the organization to know that I'm not afraid to do difficult things. That's fair to the party being let go, and it's fair to the rest of the team that's watching.
02:10 Most people delay. They procrastinate. They're often waiting for a triggering event, say, well, I can't do it now. I know this isn't working out, but they've not done anything terrible.
02:21 So I'll just wait until they do, and then I'll make it. And then the emotions are much higher.
02:27 I had one where I had to walk the person to the elevator, lock them out of their office, encourage them to get a lawyer. And so that didn't go well.
02:38 Most of the time, firing does take place over a period of time. There are some events where people actually breach some kind of a moral turpitude, or there are things like that where firing happens on the spot.
02:51 But in most cases, you realize things aren't going well, you need to pull people aside in the moment and say, that meeting didn't go well. Or did you recognize what happened in that exchange?
03:02 Nobody should be surprised when they're fired. People are smart. They sense, I'm not really doing very well.
03:10 The more that you realize that you're solving for a good outcome, it's not nearly as stressful. It's a better outcome generally for the person who's being let go. It's a better outcome for the enterprise.
03:22 I try to regard everybody that I've let go as an alumnus that I'm going to work with. I'm going to run into them in the marketplace. They may be friends. Their kids may date my kids.
03:32 And so if you think about them that way, it's not as stressful. Let's move forward in the most elegant possible way.
03:40 I don't want to be known as the firing guy. I was introduced at a private equity conference by one of my former students. And she said, you know, Joel teaches a leadership, he teaches a class on, his class talks, well, it's basically a class about firing people.
03:55 I mean, I teach all kinds of things, and I just hate, that's not the brand I want. It's just I think it's one of the really critical things that you do as an entrepreneurial leader to build a great organization.

Vocabulary focus

The vocabulary section introduces C1-level words and phrases related to Workplace communication. Key terms include humanity (noun), humiliating (adjective), multifarious (adjective), connotation (noun), procrastinate (verb). Students practise using these terms in context through exercises drawn from the source material.

Grammar focus

This lesson focuses on Modal Verbs of Obligation, Necessity, and Advice. In professional contexts, we use modal verbs to express different levels of obligation, necessity, and advice. 'Have to' and 'must' express strong obligation, often from an external rule or an internal conviction.

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