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What workplace behavior rates as the most annoying and distressing?
Gossip comes up, again and again, as a central contributing factor to workplace toxicity.
Gossip is corrosive to workplace culture. It eats away at trust, undermines teamwork, and ultimately destroys morale. And in workplaces where gossip abounds, productivity declines because people are distracted by the drama, their attention diverted to conflict and to protecting and defending themselves from bad-mouthing and backbiting.
Why is gossip so pervasive?
One reason is that, as odd as this sounds, people don’t always know they are gossiping. While some gossip is malicious, intended to harm or discredit the target, there is also unintended and inadvertent gossip, gossip that flies under the radar. People can gossip without being aware they are doing so. With the best of intentions, to help sort out a conflict or be supportive to a stressed-out colleague, people get drawn into gossip, inflaming a conflict, and creating an even worse situation.
Consider these scenarios:
In each instance, you did what you thought best. Whether or not you meant to gossip doesn’t matter because it has the same negative effect on the workplace. It was seen by others as gossip — and for good or bad, perception is reality.
How do we know, then, what is, and what isn’t gossip? Here’s how I help people distinguish gossip from not gossip. Ask yourself what, who, and why:
And most importantly,
How would asking what, who, and why help the situations above?
You listened to your direct report continuously vent about his co-worker and was accused by the co-worker of gossiping. What happened? You violated the “what” rule.
You weren’t discussing the right thing. You spent time talking about the co-worker, instead of redirecting the conversation onto your direct report. You should have asked him what he was doing to contribute to the poor working relationship, and what he was doing to resolve it. Where was he having trouble? Why couldn’t he resolve it? And if he couldn’t make progress, then you should have offered to sit down with them both to resolve it.
You tried to help your friend, Caleb, by telling the group that his unexplained absences were due to his divorce. Caleb found out and accused you of gossiping about his private affairs. What happened? You violated the “who” rule.
You talked to the wrong person. Rather than tell the group, you should have told Caleb that the group was frustrated by his unexplained absences. You could have asked Caleb if he wanted you to let the group know the reason he was absent, or if he wanted to tell them himself.
Afraid of losing your biggest customer you agreed with her that product manager was hard to talk to. What happened? You violated both the “why” rule.
You gossiped in order to keep the sale. But a better “why” would have been to make sure the product was successful. You should have shared your customer’s feedback directly with the product manager. Clearly, if your customer doesn’t like the feature, there is a good chance that others don’t either, and a potential loss of sales.
In this case, you also violated the “who” rule because rather than talking about the problem with the person who could do something about it, i.e., the product manager, you talked with the customer.
As these examples show, gossip is prevalent because there are many different reasons people share information, and it’s not always evident — even to ourselves — that we are gossiping.
Gossip might feel like an inevitable part of workplace culture, but there are ways to stop it. To reduce the amount of gossip, it’s important we ask ourselves what, who, and why. What kind of information am I sharing? Why am I sharing it? Am I trying to help solve a conflict? Am I trying to keep a sale? Gain recognition or make friends?
Finally, don’t underestimate your influence. Set the example yourself. No matter what position or role you play, your unwillingness to go along with gossip has a bigger impact than you think.