Be objective, not detached

Context isn’t only about facts and what happened--it’s also helping your audience understand how to interpret this information.

👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my weekly newsletter on managing up, leading teams, and standing out as a high performer. For more, check out my intensive course on Executive Communication & Influence.

Read time: 5 minutes

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There’s a scene in Civil War, where Kirsten Dunst is a war journalist mentoring an aspiring journalist.

There’s a shoot out, people are chopping each other up, and the 20-something-year old reporter says (paraphrased):

“Omg why aren’t we helping these people??”

Kirsten Dunst says (paraphrased): “We are journalists. It’s not our role to intervene. We document, so others can intervene.”

At that moment, I thought, “You know what, Kirsten Dunst, I respect that. That is some principled stuff right there.”

If you’re thinking the lesson of this post is “be objective, just show the facts,” you’d be wrong.

Because here’s the thing:

You are not a war photographer.

You are a product manager. You are a head of post-sales. You are a marketing lead. You are a GM. You are an engineering manager.

You actually ARE responsible for “intervening.” You are not simply documenting information for others to make decisions. When problems happen, YOU are the one who needs to solve them.

In my course, I bang on the drum of sharing your logic, being evidence-based, and explaining your rationale.

But I’ve noticed that some students, in an effort to be logical, swing the pendulum too far: They take “logical” to mean “facts only.”

“Facts only” is actually not as helpful in an organization as you might assume:

Asking others to interpret information adds cognitive load. If you only share information without a throughline, you’re forcing your recipients to do the heavy-lifting of interpreting what these facts mean. Humans are wired to conserve energy, i.e. they try not to think if they don’t have to. So if you’re relying on others to come to your same conclusion, they might never get there.

You have tacit knowledge your audience doesn’t have. “X fact obviously leads to Y conclusion” might feel true in your mind, but it’s often not obvious to others. Due to your proximity and lived experience with the issue, you have tacit knowledge you might not even realize you have. People living outside your head don’t have this context.

Facts can have multiple interpretations. This is why sharing the “so what?” is important. I can show the same data points to 10 different founders, and they could come up with 10 different interpretations of how they’d solve the problem—or whether they believe there even is a problem.

There is such a thing as being too objective

Being objective is good.

But when you are TOO neutral, you become detached—you withhold the emotional sentiment and your interpretation, which serves as important context.

Let’s say you share some not-great news with your executive.

Basically, when a leader hears a piece of information, they’re likely asking themselves: “How bad is this?”

If it’s not that bad, they don’t need to spend that much effort or attention on this. It’s low stakes enough that someone else can handle it, or it’ll handle itself, or even if things go wrong, it won’t do that much damage.

Leaders need to conserve their attention, so they are often assessing situations to be able to accurately diagnose how serious something is.

Acting too detached robs your audience of context clues about how serious an issue is.

When we have non-ideal news to share—the launch is delayed, a hiccup happened in production, there was an error that messed up the recent batch of X—we are afraid we’ll be blamed. This is a real concern.

But sometimes, this fear can manifest itself in overcorrecting and being too “facts only.”

Being overly matter-of-fact can make others think you’re spinning this news or hiding something: Does this person realize the gravity of what happened? Do they feel a little bad about it? Are they hiding something? They’re being so neutral it’s a little suspicious…

Luckily, you can strike a good balance:

🚫 Too groveling: “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

🚫 Too detached: “An issue occurred and caused a delay. It affected X units over a one week period. It has since been corrected.”

✅ Just right: “An issue occurred, which caused us to need to toss half the units from the batch last week. This is pretty unfortunate, but luckily we caught it quickly and fixed it. We’ve also put fail-safes in place so it won’t happen again.”

In the “just right” example above, notice how I didn’t grovel or dwell for too long. I’m professional, concise, objective—and I still acknowledge that what happened wasn’t great.

Show that you understand the gravity of what happened because it shows you situational awareness and good judgment.

What you can do today

The next time you have negative news to share, be objective—but don’t be so matter-of-fact that you strip away emotional context that allows your recipient to understand the situation.

Acknowledge that what happened wasn’t ideal, then end on a positive note or redirect to mention what you’re doing going forward. Here’s what this looks like:

• “This is not ideal, but [positive thing].”

• “This was definitely disappointing, but [positive thing].”

• “This was a miss because [impact]. Luckily, [positive thing].”

• “This was a bummer and caused [impact]. Going forward…”

When you do this, you make it easy for your audience to understand the situation and therefore make a more informed decision as a team.

Have you ever been too matter-of-fact and detached? Or have you gotten information from a colleague who was like this? Hit reply because I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8am ET.

Wes

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