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. To learn more about how I can support you via 1:1 executive coaching, fill out this form.

Read time: 6 minutes

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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:

Person A: [Shares a piece of data they think will elicit an obvious reaction]

Person B: “Wait, so… Is this good or bad?”

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:

“Signposting is using key words, phrases, or an overall structure in your writing to signal what the rest of your post is about. This helps your reader quickly get grounded, so their brain doesn’t waste cycles wondering where you’re taking them.”

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 match

Earlier 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 was going to be bad.

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 understandable 

Train 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: “This morning, my mom texted me to share the news that…”

After: “My mom shared an interesting update…”

Before is like, Omg what terrible thing happened? After is like, Oh cool, I know this is nothing serious. This is light-hearted news.

Here’s how reader Matthias Muehlbauer, Founding Partner at OnePointFive, uses emotional signposting to make his intent instantly obvious with job applicants:

For hiring outcomes, we use the subject line to get to the point to avoid creating an emotional rollercoaster.

Successful? Email subject line: “Congrats, Summer Associate Offer”

Unsuccessful? “Not now, but let's keep in touch”

This allows them to know the outcome straight away in the subject line.

Give context to numbers

I’ve seen many strategy docs and recaps that started like this:

“Our launch generated ~13,000 new users, and 90 users in the X revenue tier. Plus, 500 users were identified as SQLs (high-quality leads for sales follow-up calls). In Q3, we will start to increase the number of high-quality SQLs by understanding the best channels for successful customers, targeting communities where our ICP spends time, and experimenting with X.”

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:

• Is 13,000 new users good or bad? If we forecasted 50,000 users, then 13,000 is awful. If we expected 5,000 users, then 13,000 is insanely good.

• 500 leads identified as SQLs—how much more or less is this than our average baseline, without the launch?

• How does the operator who wrote this feel about this? I don’t mean touchy-feely feelings, I mean, if you were in charge of this project, at a high level, how did you do? Are you thrilled, a bit disappointed, surprised but optimistic?

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 news

I 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 an emotional bait-and-switch.

Most facts can be interpreted in multiple ways

This 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.

Before: “So… We came out of the weeklong leadership off-site and I have some news. Effective Monday, we are implementing a reorg. You’ll now be reporting to [NAME]. They will be your new manager.”

After: “We had a great week at the leadership off-site, and I wanted to share some exciting updates: We realized the business had a stronger chance of winning if we did X. We want to reorient the team to support this new direction, which means we’ll be moving teams around and you’ll be reporting to [NAME]. I think you’re going to learn a lot from [NAME] because ABC and it’ll give you more exposure to new areas you’ve mentioned wanting to learn. Also, you and I will still collaborate on Z project and I’m always here if you want a thought partner.”

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), why their new manager is awesome, etc.

Ask yourself:

• How might someone misunderstand what I’m saying?

• How can I make the emotional tone more obvious?

Now that you know 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.

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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

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