A gossiper is a tattler or a person given to idle talk. In companies today where most employees are overworked and time-challenged, idle talk is a luxury organizations cannot afford. And yet, social scientists have long known that gossip isn’t just a frivolous pursuit or guilty pleasure. It creates power hierarchies, strengthens bonds and is an important form of communication.
So here is another way for managers and leaders to approach the gossip in their organization — don’t fight it, use it.
Managers and leaders can use gossip to increase productivity in their business. The mistake most managers make is trying to ignore the idle talk or negative comments. They want employees to stop talking and get back to work — or to bring solutions, not problems. If it isn’t constructive dialogue, they shouldn’t waste time on it.
However, gossip continues whether leaders want it to or not. In fact, when researchers from Georgia Tech University combed through the emails at Enron — when they became of public record — they found that about 14.7 percent of the messages contained what would be considered gossip.
For the purpose of this study, gossip was considered neither positive nor negative; it was defined as messages that contain information about a person or persons not among the recipients. The study’s director, Eric Gilbert, an assistant professor at the School of Interactive Computing, explained: “When you say ‘gossip,’ most people immediately have a negative interpretation, but it’s actually a very important form of communication. … Gossip is generally how we know what we know about each other, and for this study we viewed it simply as a means to share social information.”
Managers and leaders who want to transform gossip into a productivity tool might consider revising their definition of gossip to a medium that can be leveraged to increase knowledge.
Seasoned managers know that saying gossip should just go away doesn’t work. In fact, the more exertion leaders put into asking employees to stuff any complaints, insights or obstacles, the more pressure they ended up creating. That pressure will likely blow up to hurt those in charge at some future date.
Of course, gossip can range from talking about which employee is about to have a baby to the rumors about layoffs at the company. Managers might not be able to stop everything, but here are some ideas about how they can use the information that’s transmitted in gossip to be meaningful to their business.
Establish a problem-resolution environment. By consulting with managers, department heads, team leaders and HR, the CLO should be able to determine if the workplace has a gossip culture, characterized by frequent complaining on the part of employees to bosses, as well as negative talk among employees.
In a gossip culture, the leader needs to address the negative aspects of gossip head on. A problem-resolution environment asks that employees make a commitment to only talk about another person when that person is present.
Consider a hypothetical example. If Sally walks into Mark’s office to talk about how difficult it is to work with Cheryl, Mark listens politely and then suggests a meeting time with both Sally and Cheryl to talk about the difficulties. Sally can use Mark as a sounding board, but only if it leads to a problem-solving approach with Cheryl. If employees all agree that they will work together to help build relationships, the people who are talking merely to make trouble will stop quickly, and those who need to build better bridges with their co-workers will have an environment that supports doing so.
Hold an obstacles session. The CLO should be part of an organized effort to bring together stakeholders on a regular basis to air concerns and identify obstacles to employees’ success.
Employees are often trying to get the best work done facing difficulties they need to overcome. Many times management has heard about the obstacles, but more often they have not. Consider hiring an outside facilitator or using someone from HR to hold an obstacles session. What’s getting in the way of our being as successful as we’d like to be? What can we control? What can we influence? What can individual employees or teams do differently to address the obstacles?
Create forums for raising issues. It can be hard for management to hear the problems, but in the long run — and sometimes short run, too — it’s better to know what is going on and have a chance to deal with it. Have these forums focus on teaching employees problem-solving strategies.
Help employees learn about one another. One of the most powerful things that separate people is a lack of understanding about communication and their approach to business. Using profiles generated by personal assessment tools such as DISC (Dominance, Influencing, Steadiness and Compliance), which can reveal behavioral and communication preferences, or values-oriented profiles that show why we do what we do often helps employees see that the other person they are working with — and gossiping about — isn’t really out to get them, but is just different in his or her approach.
In many cases we reject others because we simply do not understand them. Once understanding increases, our ability to like them and work with them also increases.
Bottom line: Gossip is not necessarily a problem, but should be viewed instead as a helpful red flag. Gossip is a symptom of larger issues that the CLO and other leaders need to deal with — that of disempowered employees, a need for better communication and more problem-solving skill training for everyone at the organization.
Beverly Flaxington is author of Make Your SHIFT: The Five Most Powerful Moves You Can Make to Get Where YOU Want to Go. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
