Just as Gene reached for the phone to call Eileen, it rang. He picked up with his usual "Morning, Gene Phillips." It was Eileen. "Gene, got a minute? I want to update you on Marigold." "Sure," he replied, "come by." As he hung up, he marveled at how often this happens — you reach for the phone to call people just as they call you.
This time he thought he could explain the coincidence. Marigold was in crisis, and it weighed heavily on them both. A minute later, she popped in, closed the door, and sat down at his conference table. He rolled his chair over to join her.
"So. Tell me," he said.
"It's about what we expected," she began. "Bellamy can't make the slipped date, so it's Plan C — Plan B is dead."
This was news to Gene. "Plan C?"
"There isn't one yet. We get to work it out."
"Typical," he said. They talked for a time about options, but none seemed especially wonderful. Then Eileen's pager went off — she was late for a meeting. So they decided to let it go for now, and talk tomorrow.
If we learn to deal with
doorknob disclosures,
we have more choices
and less risk of
feeling trappedEileen stood up to leave, stepped to the door, and grasped the knob. "Oh, and I'm thinking of moving on. I've got an offer and it's too good to pass."
Gene stared.
What Eileen did is known as a "doorknob disclosure" or "bye-bye bombshell" — an uncomfortable, painful, or embarrassing revelation offered at the end of a meeting or conversation, usually by someone who's about to exit.
Organizations also engage in doorknob disclosures. An outstanding example is the Friday layoff.
When we learn about bad news in this way, we can feel frustrated and trapped, and sometimes angry, but if we recognize a doorknob disclosure as it's happening we can make more useful choices. Here are three tips for dealing with doorknob disclosures.
- Deal with fears
- Perhaps the motivation for the doorknob ploy is fear or embarrassment. Explore this. You're more likely to make a constructive connection with the discloser after you first work to calm the fear.
- Work from a place of mutual respect
- The doorknob ploy is disrespectful, because it limits your ability to respond. Work first towards mutual respect, rather than addressing the disclosure itself.
- When power is a factor, think
- If the discloser has greater organizational power than you do, think carefully. Even if you get around the doorknob, the discloser might use more heavy-handed techniques to limit your freedom.
Because the doorknob ploy imposes a time constraint, it adds stress, making a good outcome unlikely if you try to deal with it immediately. Ask, "When would you like to talk about this?"
And understand that the discloser might not want to talk. Sorry to end on a down note — gotta go, I'm late for a meeting. Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
- Favors, Payback, and Thoughtlessness
- Someone at work who isn't particularly a friend or foe has asked you for a favor. What happens if you
say no? Do you grant the favor? How do you decide what to do?
- Why Don't They Believe Me?
- When we want people to believe us, and they don't, it just might be a result of our own actions or demeanor.
How does this happen?
- Take Charge of Your Learning
- Many of us let others set our learning agendas — peers, employers, or the mass media. But you
can gain much both personally and professionally by setting your own learning agenda.
- Unnecessary Boring Work: II
- Workplace boredom can result from poor choices by the person who's bored. More often boredom comes from
the design of the job itself. Here's Part II of our little catalog of causes of workplace boredom.
- The McNamara Fallacy
- The McNamara Fallacy is the idea that measuring properly chosen attributes of inputs and outputs provides
all we need for decisions about organizational and human performance. And we can safely ignore anything
that can't be measured. It doesn't work.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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- And on April 10: Managing Dunning-Kruger Risk
- A cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect can create risk for organizational missions that require expertise beyond the range of knowledge and experience of decision-makers. They might misjudge the organization's capacity to execute the mission successfully. They might even be unaware of the risk of so misjudging. Available here and by RSS on April 10.
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