Bad news is hard to deliver. No one wants to tell a client things didn’t go as planned.

Just do it.

Waiting, stalling, or holding off until later only makes it worse. Bad news is best delivered fresh.

The impact gets even worse when the stalling and delaying turn into skipping the delivery of the news altogether.

It’s easy to see how it happens. The bad news comes.

• Maybe it’s an adverse decision.
• Maybe it’s a mistake like missing a deadline.
• Maybe it’s worse than that.

You want to find the right time to deliver the news.

There is no good time to deliver bad news.

You wait. You wait. You wait some more. The right time never comes.

Eventually the bad news comes to light; it always does.

Now, it’s much worse because of what you did to keep it to yourself.

The minute you find yourself thinking about the timing of the delivery of the news, force yourself to go ahead—now—and tell your client. Get it done. Finish it. The chips will fall where the chips fall. The impact will be uncertain, but—and this is a certainty—doing it now will make it better than slipping into the cover-up.

The minute you feel that you don’t want to pass the info along to the client, you know it’s important to go ahead and get it done. The cover-up is worse than the crime.