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.