Communication, Conflict and Motivation

Keep your ear to the ground

Information is currency. Connect to your org to learn and to influence.

Office gossip is a feature of all organisations past a certain size. It tends to have a bad reputation: malicious gossip hurts feelings and damages reputations. But the rumour mill can be a valuable source of information too. It’s worth staying plugged if you can.

You’ll learn how other teams are feeling, and why; information that might affect your approach to them, or your decision making. You’ll hear about decisions that have been made without you; especially useful when those decisions affect your team. While these can be frustrating to discover, the person deciding might not even have realised you needed to know. You’ll have a chance to fix that now.

Office gossip will also give you a feel for what people think of you, your team as a whole, and of the individuals in it. This is valuable information for helping manage your team’s performance and development, and your own. Once you know the gap between how you are perceived and how you want to be, you can figure out how to close it.