These HR leaders messed up delivering bad news to employees. Here are the lessons they learned.

Nobody’s perfect. It’s a good mantra, except when delivering bad news to employees. Then you want to be as perfect as possible.

HR leaders and their teams are often tasked with delivering bad news—whether it be earth-shattering (layoffs, firings) or lower-stakes (smaller raises, the end of a beloved perk). Missteps along the way can create uncomfortable, yet critical, lessons.

HR Brew spoke with two HR leaders about instances in their careers when a sensitive conversation went haywire, the lessons they learned, and their advice for practitioners in similar situations.

My bad. For RC Whitehouse, that learning moment followed a layoff announcement gone wrong at a former employer. Nearly a decade ago, the now-CPO at ad firm MiQ was assigned to a team responsible for laying off employees. While he’d been prepped on the basics, he said he wasn’t equipped to effectively communicate the information.

“I just over indexed on the empathy piece to the point of, I dare say, it almost became about me and not about them,” he said, telling employees things like, “I’m sorry this is happening. I know this is so difficult. I understand how you feel.”

He didn’t get the point across, and the call to inform employees of the layoff turned into what he described as “almost like a grievance session.” Employees used the moment to criticize the business decisions and performance that led to the RIFs.

“Once that train has left the station, it’s very hard to pull that conversation back,” he said.

Colin H. Mincy, now an HR consultant, had a similar experience firing an employee. When he was several years into his HR career, and had enough experience under his belt to manage the conversation, he got off on the wrong foot.

“I start the conversation, and it’s just not my best moment. I’m babbling like a brook,” he said. “And at some point, I reach over to get a folder which has his separation paperwork inside of it. And he looks at me, and he looks at his manager, and he says, ‘Wait a minute, are you firing me?’”

Ten minutes into the termination meeting, Mincy said he had to restart the entire conversation.

Lessons learned. For both leaders, the biggest lesson was that those delivering bad news to employees should focus on clear, direct communication. While they shouldn’t be callous in their delivery, they said expressing too much sympathy can backfire. In more serious scenarios, employees may be shocked by the news, and if HR doesn’t get to the point or shares too much information without clear next steps, it can cause confusion, they said.

“It’s a really powerful reminder of how important it is in conversations like that to really be direct and really be clear and make sure that everything you’re expressing is really intended for that audience,” said Mincy. “And fortunately, I’m proud to say that I’ve not had an experience like that repeat itself.”

That lesson has had other applications, Whitehouse said, such as when navigating difficult performance conversations, particularly with younger employees, who may be used to being high performers, in school or at a past job.

“That first conversation can feel like, ‘Oh, my God, am I going to get fired? What’s going to happen?’” Whitehouse said. “So the clarity of saying like, this is an improvement process, this is not an exit process. That we believe in you, that we put people on the plans because we believe they can improve.”

While HR professionals are often trained for these conversations from a process and procedure perspective, they’re not always coached on communicating the message.

“It would have been really wonderful if someone had briefed me on that lesson before I went into the room,” Whitehouse said. While he was coached to be sensitive and given the main talking points, he said he would have appreciated being advised on how to deliver those talking points, and to ground himself before starting the conversation.

At the same time, though, sometimes lived experience is the best teacher, Mincy said.

“As an HR professional, I think some of my biggest lessons have been from when your heart and your intentions were set to achieve a certain outcome and the experience falls short of those expectations,” he said. “Those are great teachers. We just don’t want to learn these things on the backs of other people’s bad news and demise.”