Emotional signposting: Why you should tell people how to feel
Emotional signposting: Why you should tell people how to feel“Wait, is this good news or bad news?” When you don’t give enough context, your audience can’t always tell. To reduce cognitive load, remember to account for the emotional subtext.👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my weekly newsletter on managing up, noticing what others miss, and standing out as a high performer. Read time: 6 minutes When his parents were getting a new couch, my 7-year-old nephew asked, “Is getting a new couch a big thing, or a small thing?” He’s a kid, and he couldn’t tell if this piece of news was supposed to be a big deal. Turns out, this happens all the time to leaders in the workplace too:
I'm sure you’ve had this happen. I’ve been on both ends of this. As humans, we like knowing the “right” reaction to a piece of news. It’s jarring when you expect to be emotionally led in one direction, but the message goes in a different direction. It’s unsettling, confusing, and adds cognitive load. Luckily, you can avoid this. Enter: emotional signposting. What is emotional signposting?In an essay a few weeks ago called Signposting: How to reduce cognitive load for your reader, I defined signposting as follows:
Emotional signposting is giving your audience clues about whether a piece of information is positive, negative, or neutral. It’s tacitly suggesting how your audience should interpret what you just told them. My rule of thumb for emotional signposting: If you share information that’s not obviously positive or negative, you must proactively tell people how they should feel. Give context to the information, data, or fact. If there’s even a slight chance your audience might benefit from the extra clues, I would consider using signposting. It’s super fast for you, and super helpful for them. The mood and the content should matchEarlier in my career, I was responsible for accounts payable on my team—sending invoices and ensuring they were paid. Occasionally, I would get emails that started like this: “Hi Wes, I want to inform you that…” Has anything good ever come after that phrase? I held my breath. I continued reading. “...your invoice has been processed as of yesterday.” Oh. I thought this note was going to be bad, but it was actually good. Folks who wrote like this were usually more corporate, so the formal tone made sense. If you have a more conversational brand, here’s how a simple “good news” would have made it much easier to know this message was, in fact, positive: “Hi Wes, good news: I wanted to let you know your invoice has been processed as of yesterday.” I’m not saying to throw in “good news” for everything. But also, I use it relatively liberally. Don’t make your audience hold their breath because they’re worried about where you're going. Rephrase to make your message more instantly understandableTrain your eye to notice potential misinterpretations. I can’t list every possible way someone may misunderstand you, but luckily, even the act of asking yourself will surface what you might want to clarify.
Before is like, Omg what terrible thing happened? After is like, Oh cool, I know this is nothing serious. This is light-hearted news. Give context to numbersI’ve seen many strategy docs and recaps that started like this:
On the surface, this seems decent. It does a lot of things right. But the problem is: This doesn’t tell me anything about how to feel about this information. I have many unanswered questions:
Don’t ONLY share your subjective observations. But also, don’t ONLY share numbers either. Your audience wants to hear your analysis, the context of actualized vs forecasted numbers, and your reaction to what happened. This actually helps folks get oriented, so the facts and numbers become easier to digest. Don’t make good news sound like bad newsI see people do this all the time. Here’s a social post where I couldn’t tell if it was positive or negative: “As you all know, my co-founders and I have been working on Acme since 2018. Like with any startup, we’ve had countless ups and downs. Yesterday was the last day...” Oh no, are they shutting down? “…of our annual customer roadshow, and it was an incredible turnout!” Oh, it’s positive news. To be clear, this is not simply about “sounding positive.” This is about giving accurate context, so your audience can easily understand and interpret what you’re saying. Emotional subtext is a type of context. When people read the first few lines of a post they believe is sad, they’re mentally prepared to read the rest of the post in that head space. If you do a bait and switch, they will feel momentarily confused—and then tricked. Try to avoid a sentence/paragraph structure that does this bait-and-switch. Most facts can be interpreted in multiple waysThis is why framing is powerful and necessary. As the messenger and strategic leader, you get to shape how the information is interpreted—and therefore, increase the chances that your audience reacts the way you want them to. You can signal how your audience should feel. Don’t throw away this lever. Let’s say you and your leadership team decide to change the company strategy, which means you’ll need to do a reorg. Is a reorg good news or bad news? It depends. If you don’t proactively own the frame, your team will probably default to thinking “this is bad.” Is the company doing poorly? Is my job at risk? Should we be worried? When there’s a risk that your recipient may interpret the news negatively, this is prime time for emotional signposting. This is your chance to position the information as positively as possible. By using the lever of messaging, you increase the chances of getting the outcome you want to get.
The signposting was mainly at the front: Notice how I said the off-site was great and described the updates as exciting. This might seem superfluous for folks who are die-hard about being concise, but the goal is to be effective, not just efficient. And with two extra words, I’ve signposted to set the emotional tone of what I’m about to share, i.e. the news of the reorg. If there’s a risk that my direct report might be worried, I want to frame so they won’t be. I’m signposting by calling this is an exciting update, then explaining why this news benefits them, why we’ll still work together (I’m not disappearing out of their lives), etc. Ask yourself:
Now that you know of this concept, you’ll probably start seeing examples everywhere. The next time you feel a bait-and-switch (in your own writing or someone else’s), pause and rephrase to make the emotional subtext more obvious. One of my favorite parts of writing this newsletter is hearing from you. If you’ve applied what I write about and would like to share a story/example, hit reply or share in the comments. I’d love to hear about it. Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8am ET. Wes PS If you found this valuable, here are other ways I can help: |
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