If you’ve made it the top of an org chart, you won’t find yourself there alone: Bad news and your company’s toughest challenges find their way to the top, too. To ensure you succeed, memorize and use three key words: Tell me more.

On the surface, those words seem the antithesis to how leadership should respond when you’ve just heard that a major customer is leaving or your primary vendor has raised costs again. Yet, in the moments they are uttered, leaders we’ve coached with this tactic report these five outcomes:

As the head of an organization, you can either take the high road or the low road with your leadership. A leader who is concerned with fixing and resolving a situation in the present moment with little or no regard for developing people and relationships is taking the low road. High road leaders, on the other hand, consider people and relationships to be just as important as their responsibility to manage their team and achieve business goals.