Share Examples

Some time ago and I created a web site www.makingworkabetterplacetobe.com. The purpose of the web site was to promote ideas that would make work a more attractive and productive place for employees. Part of my interest in creating and sustaining a blog around the topic of gossip reflects the corrosive impact of gossiping on the workplace; malicious gossip does not create an attractive workplace. In the recent past I have encountered a number of gossiping incidents in different workplaces that had a devastating effect on relationships and morale. Many times I’ve been asked the question, “How do you keep this from happening?” This blog is in part a response to that question.

I intend to continue to share my ideas related to gossip and its impact on the workplace through this blog. Increasingly I intend to provide suggestions on how to control the dark side of gossip and how to minimize the negative impact from gossiping behavior. As a reader of this blog, you can help. Please respond with personal examples of destructive gossip from where you work and any efforts, successful or not, that have been attempted to deal with the gosiip. Be clear as to how the gossip created harm either to employees, relationships or productivity. Since the point would be to share your examples with a broader audience, write the example in a fashion that keeps the place of work anonymous.

Thank you in advance for participating in this activity.

Islam and Gossip

In the last blog I focused on Christianity and gossip. What about Islam? "Do not spy nor let some of you backbite others. Does one of you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother? As this verse from the Qur'an indicates (049.012), yet another major faith abhors gossiping, in the strongest possible terms. Central to the faith is the concept of universal brotherhood - you should treat every other man like your brother. So when you gossip about another, you are, in effect, defying those bonds of brotherhood.

One recent book, “Gossip & Its Adverse Effects on the Muslim Community,” covers the topic. The book examines what its publisher calls “Ghibah” in its excellent preface. “Ghibah” isn’t an easy term to translate- there is no single equivalent word in English, although “gossip” comes closest initially. Ghibah is an interesting, all encompassing word that gives a clue to feeling of Islam on the concept - it also includes back-biting, slandering and scandal-mongering.

As the book’s publisher says: “Whichever word we chose, we cannot escape from the fact that Ghibah affects us all. We have all been victims and - we must be honest - we have all been guilty of this sin. But it is not a matter to be taken lightly - gossip can wreck lives and shatter communities. If we seek to unite as Muslims, we must combat Ghibah. Islam is a practical faith which recognizes the human conditions and offers achievable remedies to the problems that beset us. Every human society faces the problem of gossip, and Islam shows us how to tackle it in a sensible and humane manner. (Interestingly enough, it is not assumed to be solely a female preserve, as popular notions would have us believe!)”

Religion and Gossip

Part of my research into the subject of gossip includes a review of what the great religions have said about the act of gossiping. Gossiping is generally associated with slander and back-biting and universally condemned by all religions.

Christianity is a good example with prohibitions against gossip go back millennia in the faith. These prohibitions are interwoven into the teachings of many of the great Christian thinkers. In the Apostle Paul’s writing, gossiping is sin, akin to other misdeeds as grave as greed, murder and slander. In his famous letter to the Romans, he writes “They are gossips…they know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die.” Whew – that’s perhaps a bit heavier a punishment than we might prescribe, though it does neatly illustrate the passion Paul felt toward the transgression.

Elsewhere, the Bible has several references to gossip, perhaps the most on-point being: “You shall not go about as a slanderer." (Lev. 19-16), “This is the sort of gossip which tarnishes reputations, divulges secrets,” (Proverbs 20:19), “reignites quarrels” (26:20-26), and “leaves friendships in ruins.” (16:27-28).

What is particularly important to emphasize is that the great religions see gossiping as a transgression on the same level as other serious wrong doing. Thus, while gossiping tends to focus on the sins of the others, the act of doing gossip is viewed as a deadly sin similar to what is being talked about.

Women and Gossip

Let’s face it: our culture isn’t filled with stories about how much men gossip. All the phrases or sayings in our language reflect the image of women as gossipers. The words are so easy to call up - cat, tattler, prattler. Obviously, none of the images attached to the notion of women as gossips are particularly flattering or admiring. Quite the opposite, in fact. These stereotypes, which are deeply rooted in our culture, are always pejorative or negative. “She’s a gossip” is an epithet that’s been hurled at women for time immemorial, and a misapprehension that continues on to this day.

A top level manager was recently over heard to say that it bothered him to see two females walking down a hallway and talking together, because he was so convinced they invariably were engaged in some form of gossip. (Of course, he didn’t have the slightest clue what they might be talking about.) And it’s no secret that in more rigidly patriarchal societies, those in authority, the men, have an even greater tendency to label much of the communication that occurs between women as mere “gossip.” This downplays and even denigrates the significance of what women say to one another, reinforcing the superiority of male communication (women talk about people and relationships while men talk about politics, work and sports). This, naturally, can encourage women themselves to downplay their interactions and communication.

Since my interests focus on the destructive side of gossip, the fact that women may spend more time than men talking about every day occurrences and relationships is not particularly significant. I have found no research evidence that shows women to be guiltier of malicious gossip then men. More importantly, there is no indication that I have found that indicates malicious gossip from a woman to be more destructive than malicious gossip from a man.

Stopping Gossip

To the extent gossiping is a learned behavior, just like any other behavior, it can be changed. For starters, what must be understood is that there are different levels of gossip. Strangers can certainly gossip together – who hasn’t swapped stories with an airplane seatmate about a nutty co-worker or an accounting unit that just can’t seem to get it together? This kind of gossip causes less harm than other forms of the problem, because it’s on a much less intimate basis then, say, a team of co-workers who have worked together for five year. When people who work closely together gossip, and when that gossip turns ugly, the harm and pain it causes can be extreme.

The truth is its part of the human condition, as much as kindness and hatred. We are, after all, social beings where human contact is a necessary ingredient to our well being. We don’t, and will never, have the capacity to completely stop gossip. What we can do is teach people how to deal with gossip – particularly the maliciousness of it. Workable strategies do exist, which can stem the toxic tide without plunging a workplace into totalitarianism. It’s a mistake to say “We’re going to act bigger than it and simply ignore it.” Rather, the critical question concerns what we are going to substitute for malicious gossip. That is a question that I will continue to explore on this blog.

Revisiting Gossip v. Rumor

This blog draws a distinction between rumor and gossip. While each can contain elements of the other, gossip is defined here as the sharing of potentially harmful, strictly personal news between two or more individuals about a third. A rumor is the transmission of information, such as a guess that a company may be sold or that a new CEO is coming on board. The study of rumor typically focuses on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the information that is being transmitted. Gossip, on the other hand, is only incidentally interested in the truthfulness of what is being talked about. Gossip is about being exciting, juicy, scandalous, spicy, salacious and sensational regardless of truth.

While both involve the informal sharing of information, primarily based on personal relationships, I see a significant difference between the two both in content and tone. What we are interested in is the destructive content and tone of gossip not the accuracies and inaccuracies of the informal spread of information through the grapevine of an organization. On the other hand, gossip and rumor collide when gossip is spread by way of the grapevine. In this case, gossip becomes the subject matter of rumor. It is the vibrancy of the grapevine that explains how gossip can quickly be transmitted throughout an organization.

A Management Perspective

This blog is specifically concerned with the destructive effects of gossip on organizational culture and performance. The primary goal of my writing is to provide a thorough understanding of gossip and a path by which to overcome its destructiveness. Informal communication is an essential part of organizational behavior and, in my view; it does not have to have a malicious, corrosive side. Gossip is all too often a beast running free in the workplace inflicting great harm. It must be tamed and controlled to minimize the damage.

Managers must use as much sophistication when dealing with gossip as they would any other aspect of business life; taking employee communication seriously. Thinking about gossip requires work, because when you analyze it you must also think about concerns like the atmosphere of a workplace, whether interactions between employees tend more to the positive than to the negative and about whether positive communication is even encouraged at your workplace. It also makes managers think about a workplace’s corporate culture or style, something often admittedly uncomfortable. But ignore it at your own peril. If the style of your workplace is oppressive, or the overall tone or policies of the workplace is repressive, you’re guaranteed that toxic gossip will flourish.

Read Aloud

Most gossipers in an organization will initially deny it and will be offended if accused. They probably even believe their own denials. Even when directly confronted with a vicious or poisonous e-mail, the person may insist that they were just being blunt or honest.

So, what can you do? Here is one suggestion: to break through the denial have the person read the nasty or gossipy message aloud. This can also be an excellent tactic to ensure that your own emails are not loaded up with a nastiness that you are not intending. When read aloud, you may very well get a response like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe it. No wonder that person got out of shape.’ Ultimately we all need to become better monitors of our own communication.

Say-it-in-Person Test

A cornerstone of this blog is the belief that an organization can build a communication culture that supports positive interaction while discouraging negative, personally destructive acts. So what is the enlightened office to do to encourage healthy, supportive and productive communication, be it a church or a Fortune 500 company? First off, thinking back over the immediate prior blog, if you can say something in person, don’t use email. Talking to someone personally has the impact of creating greater accountability for what a person is saying. If you can’t simply walk down the hallway to speak with someone, pick up the phone. E-mail has its place as a communication tool but it should be treated like a letter going out, versus something flippant. We should all remember that an e-mail is less personal than face to face interaction and does create a permanent record. The communicator should know that they will be evaluated on the basis of that permanent record. The defense that it is an e-mail not a formal memo should not be persuasive.

Gossiping with Thousands

Recently I was talking with a professional colleague who specializes in the study of communication. He believes that there are those among us who hide their gossip behind a façade of honesty; “I am just being honest.” But, from his perspective, people who pride themselves on bluntness or what they term “honesty” in dealing with others seldom like to get a taste of their own medicine. “They don’t want anyone to communicate back to them that way. They want to send out a rocket or missile, without taking any flak themselves.”

We were further contemplating how e-mail has changed the impact of gossip. The following is a summary of his basic argument:

What I have noticed is that people who communicate face-to-face verbally have less issues of ever being misunderstood. With the advent of email and instant messaging, what should be routine communication easily turns into full-blown misunderstanding. At least when people used to gossip, they were talking to someone - it was one on one. Now it’s one on 1,000. With an email, I can pass my gossip on to 100 people, then stick it in my blog and it’s on to 1,000 more people. Gossip used to be somewhat restrained. Now it’s viral, and you can’t track it down anymore. Nowadays days, where can you go to get your good name back?”

Tilting at Gossip

Recently it was suggested to me that discussing the topic of gossip had a Don Quixote element. From this perspective, working to control gossip is futile given the propensity of the human race to talk about each other.

I would find this argument persuasive if my purpose was to eliminate or control every day chit-chat. But, I am not concerned about normal, benign interaction. My focus is on the destructive impact of communication when it turns ugly and I am not convinced that it is a futile effort to work on controlling or eliminating this type of communication from the workplace. I would further emphasize that my primary focus is not directly on eliminating malicious interaction but rather on building a civil workplace that is strong enough to choke out the dark side of gossip.

Magnifying the Problem

During the past year there has been an ongoing saga with regard to a small town in the New England states. It seems that a number of employees engaged in acts of gossiping about the city manager’s relationship with a female employee – the gossip all started when she received a nice promotion. Four long-term employees were discharged for having participated in the gossip. Lawsuits have been filed, at least one employee was returned to work and the drama continues.

So, should employees have their employment terminated when they engage in acts of gossip? Under a union contract that would be extremely difficult unless the problem was severe and the employee had been repeatedly warned that gossiping behavior was inappropriate and could lead to termination. Without a Union contract, there are still two primary problems. The first is the extent to which employees have been put on notice as to the fact that gossiping is considered a serious breach of conduct and can lead to discipline. The second is the problem of proof; what is the evidence that the employee has engaged in gossip? I will have much more to write about the relationship between discipline and gossip in a later blog.

Ultimately, one has to wonder whether the decision of the City manager to terminate the four employees works contrary to his interests. For one thing, it seems like an overreaction to what is a rather common phenomenon . Also, it can creates increased suspicion that the gossip was in fact true. Most important, regardless of whether the gossip was true or false, reacting formally to the presence of gossip gives it a front page presence and insurers that everyone is well informed about the subject matter.

Basically I do not believe that in most cases gossip can be attacked head on. Instead of reducing the problem it will most often magnify it. Rather, I believe that the only truly effective approach is to promote, primarily through modeling, the kind of behavior that leads to a positive, civilized workplace.

Rumor v. Gossip

I have often called gossip the dark side of informal communication. The term informal communication is usually associated with an organization where communication has both formal and informal dimensions. Informal communication has a lot to do with the social networks within an organization and the word grapevine used as a synonym. Informal communication can be very important to the success of an organization because it is almost always faster than formal communication. Additionally informal communication has the advantage of candor but also the potential problem of inaccuracy.

Rumor is another form of informal communication. Rumor can be defined as spreading and collecting information through the grapevine. Gossip, as I am defining it in this blog, can be spread by way of rumor. However, while it is easy and often common place to use the words rumor and gossip interchangeably, they can be distinctly separate activities. Gossip is defined as malicious communication about a person or persons. Rumors do not have to be personal in nature as they often involve organizational activities, technical information, changes in organizational strategy and other matters of importance to individuals within the organization.

Examples

One of my reasons for publishing this blog is to provide a venue for sharing examples of destructive gossip and tactics that have been tried to address the problem.

Please, share your thougts and experiences.

Say it to Their Face

One of the difficulties in discussing gossip is the fact that the term encompasses a wide variety of behavior. My interest in the topic is narrowly focused on gossip as malicious, destructive communication behavior. I recognize that we are all social creatures and that spending time with others discussing the details of people’s lives is both normal and important. So, how does one distinguish between the gossip that I want to expunge from the workplace and that which is both necessary and healthy? Here is one test; in talking with a fellow employee about a third employee would you change what you were saying if the third employee joined the conversation? If what you are saying about a person cannot be said when that person is present then maybe you should not be saying it at all.

Gossip as Punishment

One of the articles that I recently read about gossip focused on the act of gossiping as a payback tool. In other words, an individual feels wronged by a person in a power position and gossiping about that person is a way of punishing for the wrongdoing. An example that was given in the article focused on a study of women in a traditional, middle-eastern culture. The women in the study were all married to a man with multiple wives. The researcher found that the women spent an inordinate amount of time talking in extremely disparaging ways about their husbands. Conclusion, a culture in which women have little power and in a marital relationship with even less power, gossip becomes the available tool by which to strike back.

It is not hard to extrapolate from this example to the American workplace where women have traditionally had little power. In this context, gossip on the part of low power women can be viewed as a method to punish, for example, a male boss who abuses power. Similar logic can be applied to racial or cultural groups that have been assigned low power positions in organizations.
Keeping in mind the basic purpose of this blog which is to promote a civilized workplace over one filled with malicious, destructive communication, the problem with gossip as a tool to redress grievances is that it promotes a hostile work environment while not addressing the problem. Obviously from the above examples, there are two significant problems: 1) the power imbalance and 2) the abuse of power through a failure to show respect and appreciation for those in a subordinate position. Gossiping will not confront either of these problems.

I recently ran across a short internet article about a town in Brazil that was so fed-up with gossip in the workplace that it passed an ordinance prohibiting it. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings to the town council but their ordinance will have little impact on the private communications between their employees. Instead, the council might look to the relationship between superiors and subordinates and evaluate the extent to which some groups (women perhaps) have been traditionally denied access to power positions and/or look at the way power is used by the individuals occupying positions of power. My sense is that the council will achieve a lot more towards halting destructive communication by taking these actions than by their anti-gossip ordinance.

Gossip: Good or Bad?

Gossiping is not always seen as something that is bad. It depends somewhat on how you define it and what perspective you take towards it. Gossip can be defined as communication about the doings, the virtues and vices of others. From this context anthropologists and sociologists often see gossip as providing the positive outcome of maintaining the unity, values, norms and morale of social groups. Gossip, then, is a censoring of inappropriate behavior, a way of ensuring conformance with group standards. One academic source I recently visited insisted, in fact, that it is nieve to view gossip as a destructive event.

With due respect to academics (I am one) and recognizing that there is a larger context within which to study the impact that gossip has on groups of various size, we are still left with the reality that gossip within an organization can be highly destructive and certainly demoralizing. We are also left with the question of whether the hurtfullness of gossip is a price that must be paid to ensure conformance with group norms. Are there not more constructive ways for the group to ensure adherance to basic values?

Paint me naive but I am convinced an affirming civilized workplace can be achieved without the presence of the dark side of gossip.

Taking the Sting out of Malicious Workplace Communication

During the past year in a small farming community, located within the state of my residence, the town newspaper had a front page article about a confrontation between two male principals in the local school district. A yelling match occurred in front of students to the extent that police had to be called and both of the principals were arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct. Both entered guilty pleas to the charges and one resigned from the district while the other was demoted back to the position of a teacher. Allegedly one of the principles had been engaged in the spreading of gossip about a relationship between the other principal and one of the female teachers in his school.

Gossip, as it is being defined in this blog, is the dark side of informal communication within an organization. No workplace is free either of gossip itself or the negative effects that often accompany its presence. Obviously, there is a lot of on-going chit-chat that might be called gossip. That is not the focus of this blog. My concern is the type of informal communication that is destructive and hurtful.

My intention is to share thoughts and examples that will illustrate the nature of the problem and just that spell out tactics and strategies for dealing with the problem. Please feel free to sharing samples from your work experience: what happened? How was it dealt with? To what success?

So what about the process of taming gossip? There was a recent blurb on the internet about a town council in Brazil that became so frustrated with the gossiping amongst its employees that they passed a law prohibiting gossip. I don’t think this is going to work. While it undoubtedly makes good sense to discourage gossiping behavior, particularly the heavily destructive type, employees will always talk amongst themselves. Therefore, instead of focusing on getting rid of something, I would like to start with the thought that we should focus on what we want to build. I find myself joining in the perspective set forth by Robert Sutton in his wonderful book, The No Asshole Rule:

I also wrote the No Asshole Rule because there is so much evidence that civilized workplaces are not a naïve dream, that they do exist, and that pervasive contempt can be erased and replaced with mutual respect when a team or organization is managed right – and civilized workplaces usually enjoy superior performance as well.

My thought is that civilized workplaces do not feature malicious gossip. So, let’s go about the business of building a civilized workplace. I will have much more to say about this in future blogs.