Gary Martin: Frontline employees don’t deserve abuse for communicating bad news

An airline attendant tells you that your flight has been cancelled. A retail assistant explains that your urgent order has been delayed indefinitely. A call centre operator informs you that your insurance company refuses to pay your claim.

Even though we know that frontline employees are mostly the bearers of bad news rather than the creators of it, we have a dreadful track record for “shooting the messenger”.

During the pandemic, the practice of shooting the messenger seemed to take off as much as baking bread and binge watching the hit series The Squid Game.

We’ve managed to shoot down everyone from health officials who have communicated unpopular decisions made by politicians, to journalists who have failed to adequately sugar-coat grim news about the pandemic’s casualty rates, to restaurant staff enforcing vaccination mandates.

Most recently we have directed our blame toward those working on the frontline in the rebounding but besieged travel and leisure industries.

We’ve raised our voices, hurled insults, threatened to lodge formal written complaints about their behaviour, and even told that we will sue them.

We know it’s wrong to shoot the message carrier but that’s not stopped the frothing hordes at airports and hospitality hot spots around the country from playing the blame game.

There’s any number of possible explanations as to why we tend to defy logic and blame message bearers instead of those ultimately responsible.

We can attempt to live by the golden rule that tells us that we should treat others the way we want to be treated.

A recent study published in the Harvard Business Review found we have a natural in-built tendency to shoot the messenger even though we know that they are not personally responsible for our plight.

The study concluded that we attempt to make sense of unfair or untimely bad news, by making ill-considered and adverse judgements about our messengers — in other words, holding them accountable or to blame for things outside their control.

We convince ourselves that the bearer of bad news is incompetent, has malicious intentions or ulterior motives, or has the power to fix a difficult situation fast but simply does not want to help.

An alternative explanations of our odd behaviour is that by “killing off” the messenger, we mistakenly believe we will be able to kill off the bad news itself.

Another is that blaming front facing employees instead of those higher up might be something to do with the message carrier’s proximity. We lash out at the closest possible target.

Regrettably, we appear to be naturally wired to blame those who tell us the things that we don’t want to hear.

Having someone to blame makes us feel better. That’s particularly the case in instances where we feel we have a complete lack of control over a situation like when a flight is unexpectedly cancelled.

While it might be difficult to reverse our well-ingrained practice of shooting the messenger there is one simple piece of advice that might help suppress our urge to lay the blame squarely at the feet of a frontline employee.

We can attempt to live by the golden rule that tells us that we should treat others the way we want to be treated.

That can be as simple as asking ourselves a single question: given a reversal of roles, would you want someone else to unfairly place the blame on you?

Prof Gary Martin is chief executive officer with the Australian Institute of Management WA.