When your team talks about you, treat what you hear as information about what’s unclear to them. Sort it into 4 buckets: decisions, fairness, the future, or you personally. Then explain your reasoning, make fair processes visible, check personal criticism with people you trust, and give the hallway conversation an open place to land.
Key takeaways
- In a UC Riverside study of 467 people, participants spent an average of 52 minutes a day talking about someone who wasn’t present, and about three-quarters of that talk was neutral.
- Talk about a manager usually traces back to a decision that made sense to the manager and was never explained to the team.
- Criticism that is personal, consistent and would survive a direct question is feedback, even when it reaches you secondhand.
- How you react the first few times someone brings you uncomfortable news decides whether they bring you the next piece.
- A 2-minute rumor check at the end of team meetings gives hallway questions somewhere to go in the open.
If you manage people, your team talks about you when you’re not in the room. That comes with the role, and it says very little about whether you’re good at it. After roughly a decade of working with first-time managers, I’ve found that for capable managers, the talk usually points at something they can fix.
Why does your team talk about you when you’re not in the room?
Teams talk about the person who has authority over their work to make sense of what’s unclear. What did that decision mean? Is this fair? What’s coming next? Those questions get answered somewhere. If you don’t answer them, they get answered in the hallway, or at home with a partner or a friend.
Megan Robbins and Alexander Karan at UC Riverside had 467 people wear a small recorder that captured short samples of their day. According to the university’s summary of the 2019 study, people spent an average of 52 minutes a day talking about someone who wasn’t there. About three-quarters of it was neutral, roughly 15% was negative and about 9% was positive. A lot of what we call gossip is people keeping each other up to date.
Here’s how it plays out with a manager. Tom is about a year into managing his team and doing a lot right. Then he hears secondhand that people think he plays favorites. What happened is that one person asked for a stretch assignment in a one-on-one, and Tom gave him a high-visibility project. Nobody else knew about the ask. From where the rest of the team sat, one person got the good project and nobody explained why. He didn’t have less on his plate and he hadn’t done better work than anyone else, so the team came up with a reason, and it wasn’t one that assumed good intentions.
Tom hadn’t done anything wrong. He left a gap, and the team filled it with an explanation that made sense to them. When you don’t explain your decisions, the people affected by them explain them for you, and they do it together.
How do you know if the talk about you is accurate?
Sometimes it is. A manager who is struggling or making poor calls often hears about it this way first, and treating it as noise is a mistake at any level of experience. I use 3 questions as a quick check:
- Is it about you, or about a decision you made?
- Is it one person, or are you hearing the same thing from several directions, or hearing something that also came up a few months ago?
- Would you hear the same thing if you asked people directly?
If it’s personal, consistent, and would survive a direct question, take it seriously as feedback, even though it didn’t reach you in a useful form.
Say 3 people in 3 different settings mention that your one-on-ones keep getting canceled. That’s data about your calendar and how it affects them. They bring it up because it costs them something: they feel they don’t get enough of your attention, that their time isn’t respected, or that they can’t count on you when they’re stuck. The fix is in your hands.
What are the 4 types of things teams say about their manager?
Sort what you hear into 4 buckets, since each one needs a different response:
- Decisions: why we did this, and confusion or disagreement about it.
- Fairness: who gets what, especially promotions, bonuses, assignments and responsibilities.
- The future: what’s going to happen to us, where the team is headed, and how it affects each person.
- You: your style or your judgment.
For a manager who is working at getting better, the talk is usually about clarity and fairness. That’s good news, since both come down to how and how often you communicate. Neither one is a personality trait.
How should a manager respond to each type?
For decisions and the future, explain your reasoning, and explain it more often than feels necessary. When you feel like you’re repeating yourself, that’s usually when the message is landing. Include what you don’t know yet. Managers tend to create clarity by sharing what’s been decided and forget that saying what hasn’t been decided creates clarity too:
“I know there’s been some talk about the reorg. Here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t, and here’s when I expect to know more. I’ll keep you updated as soon as I have more information.”
For fairness, make the process visible. If stretch projects, schedules or recognition look random from the outside, tell people how they’re decided and how to put their hand up: “A couple of people have asked how project assignments work, so let me lay it out.”
The fourth bucket, you, is the one that stings, and it’s the one to slow down on. If you hear that you’re hard to read or that you change direction a lot, don’t get defensive, and don’t announce a personality overhaul either. Ask 1 or 2 people you trust whether it matches what they see: “I’ve become aware of some concerns. How do you see it? In what situations does this come up?”
If it holds up, pick one visible thing to do differently and do it consistently before you move on to the next. A big change that lasts 2 weeks and then slides back erodes more trust than no change at all.
What should you say when someone tells you “people are saying…”?
Thank them, don’t ask who said it, and don’t react to the content on the spot. How you respond in that moment decides whether anyone brings you something again. Something like:
“Thank you for telling me. I’m not going to ask who said it. Give me a day to think about it so I know what to do next.”
Then do something with it, and let them see what you did. That might mean being more transparent about a decision, or talking with the people affected about what you’re trying to improve, without mentioning that you heard anything.
Two things not to do. Don’t try to find out who said it, and don’t ask one person to report back to you, which makes them the team’s mole and costs you trust. And don’t address it in a group meeting with “I’ve heard some of you are saying…”. Both tell the team they were right to keep the conversation away from you.
What does gossip do for the people doing it?
It calms them down. Matthew Feinberg and his colleagues at UC Berkeley had people watch a player cheat in an economic game while their heart rates were monitored. Heart rates went up. When observers could pass a note warning the next player, their heart rates came back down and they reported feeling less frustrated, as Berkeley’s summary of the 2012 study describes.
When your team talks about fairness behind your back, they’re running a check, and you can make that check easy to pass. It also feels like bonding in the moment, which is why people sometimes walk away from a gossip session feeling closer to each other and a little guilty later.
Why are managers the last to hear bad news?
In 1970, Sidney Rosen and Abraham Tesser described what they called the MUM effect: people are reluctant to pass on bad news. Inside organizations it shows up as filtering. Bad news gets softened at each level on the way up, or it never arrives.
Being approachable in theory doesn’t fix that. Reacting well the first few times someone brings you something uncomfortable does. Ask for it directly in your one-on-ones: “What’s the team saying about the change that I might not be hearing? If something about how I’m handling this isn’t landing, I’d rather hear it from you than secondhand.” The first time, you may get “nothing really.” Keep asking.
How do you handle someone who is badmouthing you to others?
Handle it privately and directly, and keep it about behavior: “I’ve heard you have some concerns about how I’m running the team. I’d like to hear them from you directly.” Then listen. Don’t say where you heard it, don’t add to it, ask a question and let them talk. There may be something useful in it.
If it continues after that conversation and the person is on your team, it becomes a performance conversation. I covered how to approach that in the episode on handling a disrespectful employee.
How do you bring hallway conversations into the open?
Add a standing 2-minute slot at the end of your team meeting called the rumor check: “What are you hearing that we should clear up? It could be about the company, the team or anything else.” It helps in particular when side conversations have already become a problem and everyone knows it. The point is to give concerns a place where you can answer them, so they stop turning into stories the team builds without you.
A team member says, “People are saying the Q1 budget is getting cut.” The manager answers, “Thanks for bringing that up. Here’s what I know so far. The travel budget is getting cut, that’s correct. Headcount is not. If I know more by Friday, I’ll let you know.” No defensiveness, nothing personal, and the meeting moves on.
When you get promoted, you leave the group chat. The conversation about the boss used to include you, and now it’s about you, which can sting if you used to do some of that talking. You can’t stop these conversations, and trying pushes them further out of sight. You can remove the uncertainty that fuels them. When you communicate early and openly, there’s less left to talk about.
What should you do this week?
Think of a decision you made recently and never fully explained, and explain it with your reasoning in your next team meeting, before anyone asks. Then ask yourself who on your team would tell you directly if something wasn’t landing, and what you’ve done to make that easier for them. And a year from now, what do you want the hallway version of you to sound like?
FAQ
Can you ban gossip or side conversations on your team?
Not effectively. Telling people they can’t talk without you present pushes the conversations further out of sight without stopping them. Reduce the uncertainty that fuels them and give questions an open place to go, such as a rumor check at the end of team meetings.
Is all workplace gossip negative?
No. In the UC Riverside study of 467 people, about three-quarters of the talk about absent people was neutral, roughly 15% was negative and about 9% was positive. Much of it is people sharing updates.
Should you explain yourself right away when you hear criticism?
Usually not. Thank the person, ask for a day to think, and then act. Defend yourself in the moment only if there’s a simple explanation you can give calmly and briefly.
What if nobody speaks up in the rumor check the first few times?
That’s normal. Keep the slot, and respond calmly when something does come up. People learn it’s safe by watching how you handle the first few questions.
What if the person talking about you is a peer, not a direct report?
Have the same private conversation focused on behavior. The performance route only applies to people on your own team.
If you want to build these habits with coaching and a group of peers, the Leadership Accelerator is Archova’s 12-week program for new and early-stage managers. To map your own leadership growth, schedule a Leadership Strategy Call.
Free download: get the Episode 337 cliff notes, with the scripts from this article: resources.archova.org/337
