I was wondering whether to buy tomatoes as I walked through the mid-sized grocery store in my neighborhood the other day. Like everyone else, I was concerned about getting sick from eating contaminated tomatoes.

In the produce section next to the tomatoes was a sign. It reported the concerns about tomatoes. The sign then described the states where the suspect tomatoes were coming from and reported that, as far as the store knew, those farms had not been implicated in the outbreak.

That was good enough for me. The store was evidently being candid in disclosing what it knew about the problem, even though that sign might have been enough to keep some people from buying any tomatoes. By comparison, another, larger grocery store I also shop in had posted no information about tomatoes, and I hadn’t bought any from them.

The lesson in all this is plain enough. I trusted the store, on the basis of that sign and my other experiences with it, to be candid about bad news. That’s never easy, especially when your job is on the line, as it might be with facility executives who can see that it won’t be possible to meet the energy budget or that a project will take longer than a business unit head wants. But the higher the stakes, the more important it is to be upfront with bad news. Doing that builds credibility.

Of course, simply delivering bad news isn’t enough. It’s also best to be able to say you’re working on a plan — or at least trying to identify options — for mitigating the problem. What if the problem is intractable? Then explain why, and offer any options available for dealing with it, even if you know in advance that those options won’t be palatable. That way, you let top management know you’re giving them all the information you have and that you’re doing everything possible to.