“What? Really? Who told you that?”
Gossip is the idle talk about people and events that can sometimes overpower a team or organization and create a toxic work climate. When team members actively trade in negative news and suspicions, the rumors that spread breed divisiveness and cynicism.
Teams with a high occurrence of gossip experience lower productivity and poor morale. Gossip strangles the trust between team members necessary for high performance. Good leaders do everything in their power to reduce the frequency of gossip and loosen its negative grip within their teams and organizations.
Gossip exists for a host of reasons. Talking about people and events creates excitement for some people, reduces boredom, and gives people a reason to connect.
With no one in authority to set the record straight or to make a counterargument, gossip allows people to air perceived grievances with safety. As a result, it often validates how people feel about unpopular team decisions and what bothers them about their teammates. Unfortunately for leaders and teams, it is a mainstay for how people share what they really think and suspect.
Completely eliminating gossip is implausible, but good leaders do their best to lessen its prevalence and minimize the damage it creates. The first line of defense against gossip is the leader’s openness and transparency about issues shared with the team.
In the absence of information, people make it up. So, leaders who keep the team well-informed and anticipate what team members want to discuss and know can head off gossip simply through their transparency about events, issues, and people. While there are clearly some things that can’t be shared, leaders who go out of their way to openly address the workings of the organization can circumvent gossip before it becomes tasty news.
Warning against the dangers of negative gossip and asking the team to actively engage in positive news and affirmations is another shield against this poison. Good leaders encourage team members not to participate in negative rumor sharing and, instead, actively share the good news happening across the organization. Creating a culture of positive gossip, where team members are on the lookout for positive information to share with others, makes negative gossip stand out as pessimistic and unworthy of distribution.
When leaders engage in frequent forums where concerns can be tackled out in the open and lead by example by spreading good news quickly across the team, gossip becomes an infrequent sideshow with minimal effect on the team. Remember the truth in the old admonition, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
