The Pros and Cons of Workplace Gossip

0:00people are the most consequential and dangerous forces on earth well personality psychology is about the nature of human nature it's about people and wouldn't that be useful to know it seems to me i can't i can't think of a more important problem you're listening to the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments the global leader in personality and leadership guided by your hosts hogan chief science officer and world-renowned personality psychologist dr ryan sherman alongside hogan's pr manager and

0:35resident storyteller blake lepp this podcast explores the impact of personality on life leadership and the nature of human nature hello everyone and welcome to the science of personality podcast i'm your host ryan sherman along with my co-host as always blake lepp say hello blake hello everybody and welcome back to the science of personality podcast episode 141 today ryan and i are joined by hogan assessment

1:06ceo allison howell to discuss the pros and cons of gossip in the workplace gossip is common in all facets of our everyday lives but in the workplace gossip is often viewed as disruptive and unproductive however more recently gossip has been seen in a more positive light what was once perceived as an organization's worst enemy is now often its biggest ally this is a topic allison explored in depth over the past year and that's why we thought she would be the perfect guest to discuss the positives and

1:37negatives of gossip in the workplace but before we get to our conversation with allison if you wish to give us any ideas for upcoming episodes or you want to ask ryan or me a question shoot us an email at hello at the science of personality dot com or follow the science of personality on linkedin now let's get to it allison welcome to the podcast is there anything you'd like to share with our audience before we get started thanks for having me i'm excited to talk with you guys today um i will

2:08just share the on the topic of our topic of the day gossip um this might seem like a maybe an odd topic for me to be talking about but i just wanted to share with the audience that my background is in mass communications and i spent a lot of time studying the flow of communications between people in fact um a silly little anecdote from when i was in graduate school that i spent a lot of time studying um bait shops and their role in preventing the spread of aquatic invasive species uh as sort of

2:39an informal communication channel so um i find it to be a fascinating topic and i'm excited to talk with you guys today wow i did not know that that is really interesting uh well we can talk more about it today or some other time however you feel allison but uh super excited to have you join us today on the podcast um you know so for our audience uh members who may not uh know you you've been uh in the role of head of marketing and our head of our product teams and i'm i know i'm not getting the title correct for the last several years been prior to that uh just running uh our marketing being the

3:14head of our marketing department as well uh here at hogan but why don't you give our audience sort of a a career run-up to to this new role as ceo yeah absolutely how far back do you want me to go i can go back to my my start in the bait shop space or we can go a little bit more more recent let's go bait shop to the c-suite yeah yeah the episode oh probably yeah uh no i i say that jokingly because i i did

3:45start my my first job uh when i was in high school paid under the table was at a local bait shop and old-fashioned ice cream parlor and it kind of opened up doors for me that i never really would have imagined so um but that was that was very very early days um i let's see so i got my start at hogan um a little over a decade ago actually i was living in paris working uh actually i was on a uh scholarship at the sorbonne in paris doing some teaching and some research um and that's that's

4:17where i met dr hogan i got introduced to the the world of hogan and started working with our our distributor in paris for a couple of years moved back to the u.s uh and started in that market research role um which is kind of a natural fit just because i love to listen to the market and see what trends are it fits really nicely with my mass com background um that led into a brand strategy role supporting our global markets marketing director senior marketing director vp of market innovation with product and now uh as of earlier this week ceo

4:52well i mean it's been quite the journey and uh i know uh i uh speaking for myself but i'm absolutely sure i'm also speaking for for many others uh i was i mean i saw uh reactions and things on social media uh to the announcement earlier this week as well that that many of us are looking forward to the future looking forward to um you know uh what the what the future looks like with you as ceo what kind of changes might you have in mind not asking you to to answer those questions here today but um or or what what you know what uh the vision for hogan might look like

5:26in the future and i know that uh all of us are super excited for it and and really looking forward to it so again thanks for making some time early in your tenure to uh to join us today yeah thanks for inviting me i'm happy to chat with you guys yeah and for our audience allison has had to put up with me for quite some time now and if you have to work with me directly hey this is it's not it's not an easy task because uh but how we kind of equal each other out is we are both very high on mischievous um for

5:57for our hogan users out there and um we have uh i think found both found each other on the end of each other's pranks um and sometimes uh you know i i believe there was even one prank i won't even get into it where you started the prank and then i kind of got i i sniffed it out and then played along and got you back in the same prank but we don't have to get into the details of that but i do recall what i'm talking about i i do indeed yeah we've had a number of of good pranks throughout

6:31the years that's been one of the most fun parts of working on the marketing team well if we run into any of our listeners in person we'll tell you the full story but but uh well allison let's kick this up the way we do with most of our episodes today's topic is gossip in the workplace so allison how would you define gossip what whenever you think of gossip what's how would you describe it to someone else yeah it's a great question i think at its core gossip is really about uh an informal means of communication uh oftentimes working its way through some social networks uh the key here is that gossip

7:06tends to be unofficial um i will say though that when we think about gossip a lot of times we kind of jump to spreading rumors or misinformation or um manipulating situations through these unofficial channels um or in certain cases that could be just a group of ladies gabbing together and that's considered gossip um but it is a lot broader than that and it's really about leveraging these unofficial channels to share information um it serves an important purpose for people to make sense

7:38of what's happening around them um and i would also add that gossip tends to focus more on people in relationships than say policies although that you know that could certainly be part of it um but the goal is really to kind of provide contextual clues for understanding the world around you yeah you know allison we talk a lot at hogan about identity and reputation and it strikes me that uh you know gossip is one of these ways of conveying information about someone's reputation uh it's

8:09also i think it feels like it's sort of a way of maybe controlling uh the conversations around people or but but i think it's also a way of sort of um communicating what's to be expected or or what you might predict in a future interaction uh do you have any care to round out any of those issues for for some of our listeners particularly around that reputation topic and about how gossip ties in with our reputations yeah absolutely um i mean i think we could just think of an example one that

8:40we can all probably identify with is like you think of when you start a new job you go through all the official uh steps of interviewing and onboarding and doing all your paperwork and all that stuff and then you have a chance to meet your team and you're able to have some time with your team in a more informal setting and that's when you get the real information that's when you know you can you can dig into like okay what do i need to know about working with this boss like what traps might i fall into what things you know do i need to be be aware of and like that type of information tends to be a

9:13lot more valuable for uh an employee coming in to like navigate the social situation at work than you know anything that you're going to get from the official channels yeah i think that that makes a lot of sense to me too particularly when you think about um like you know the kind of information you might find out about your boss on an interview even if you're not interviewing with your boss right you're interviewing with somebody else and you know you might ask them well what's it like to work for this person right they're going to tell you a certain sort of things but you know the kind of information you might really want to to get like the kind of information you're talking about might be

9:46something you have to pick up more informally can you say anything about like um how you know i don't know how long does it typically take or can somebody might expect before uh they can start picking up that kind of gossip do you have to earn people's trust first or you know how does it how does that sort of work in practice yeah i mean that's kind of a hard question to to answer because i think there's a lot of factors that can play into it and part of it isn't on an individual level right like some people are

10:17just more attuned to others uh than other people are um and and able to kind of discern characteristics about somebody else other times um it might be the work environment where there's a little bit more openness to sharing and the relationships that people have with their managers you know if you have somebody who is working for a boss that they despise and they suddenly feel like they trust this new person they're probably going to disclose a lot more information than they would if the if the new person is uh you know a little bit more suspect or you haven't quite determined if they're they're

10:51trustworthy it kind of happens on both sides so it's hard to say how wrong but i think that that trust element is crucial to kind of being able to access the information that you're trying to to get to because there's a risk in sharing certain information and engaging in gossip right like you could get you could get caught you could you know you might be saying wrong information and you never you never know where that will end up sometimes yeah i guess there's there's also the people who um um perhaps they're they're like oh well i'm already looking for something new so i don't really i don't

11:26really have much to lose here or maybe they've you know they're like well i've been here long enough i'm tired of this i'm ready to move on so maybe they're more likely to engage in gossip as well and just trust the new person or not even care if they have to trust them or not but i mean i guess that just depends on what situation you're in you know at your employment status but you know the word gossip seems to carry with it a mostly negative connotation i'm curious why why do you think that's the case if we're seeing more of a positive uptick now because predominantly i feel like it's it's got a

11:59negative uh association with it yeah i i love this question because it's actually a lot deeper than you than you might think it to be um i think on its face the kind of the more obvious answer is that gossip is thought about as you know spreading rumors uh or that information is just incorrect and and like i think a great example of that is you know think about the telephone game that you played as a kid and you saw how easily information can change when it's like when it passes hands and so i think

12:29there's sort of this natural thought well you know you can't really trust gossip because you don't know if it's the truth or if it's not so so that's like one level of it um but what i think is more interesting is when you dig a little bit deeper into the topic of gossip and looking at the role that it's played in more of like a historical context um so gossip is often framed by people in power as sort of morally suspect um i know it's kind of back channel communication and information that uh people in power might not want being shared and so so there's this level of um social control in

13:05uh trying to to stop gossip from happening or prevent it from happening or even just labeling it as negative and trying to um you know dismiss it because it's uh viewed as this way um the other thing that you know i'm happy to dig into at any time is looking at the gendered aspect of it um which is it's just really endlessly fascinating to dig into that where like you know on its face like i mentioned that gossip can be viewed as sort of a you know a women's thing of girls getting together and gabbing um but it serves a really important purpose throughout history of almost acting as like a survival mechanism

13:40uh where you're sharing information about like dangers and risks and things that you're not allowed to speak about openly and so this like this kind of under or sorry the difficult to detect method of communication is able to share information that might be uh helpful for somebody's survival or you know success or happiness that sort of thing yeah yeah you know your your comment there reminded me allison that it's now been many years ago many but many years ago i had the great fortune to have

14:11this trip to burton oro italy and you can look it up it's a very tiny town in italy uh for for some some conference events there uh and in the town there's this this tower or not tower it's sort of like this pole in the middle of the town and there's these rings on this pole and you go wow what's this pole all about well it turns out the town is supposedly like well known for hospitality that's their big thing and uh what what happened many many years ago was that travelers would come through town

14:44and they would stop and all of the the sort of elite families of the town would argue over who would get to host the traveler because they wanted to hear the latest gossip what was the latest news this was the way information was spread there was no internet there was no newspapers right this is how information travel was by word of mouth and so this this uh pole was erected with different rings on it with each ring corresponding to a different family in town and whoever the traveler hung their

15:17rung their uh then they tied their horse to one of the rings that's the family that got to host them that way it would end the sort of dispute over over who got to host the traveler but it strikes me based on your comments allison that that's just one of those indications about the the sort of positives that have been associated with gossip for a long time um i mean i i just i guess i'm sort of curious about sort of gossip throughout history we're tending to think about it as today gossip in the

15:47workplace but you know i assume it served this kind of function historically as well no oh absolutely uh you know and and i think when you think about it in terms of like power dynamics there throughout history there are people who are in positions of power and people who are not in positions of power and gossip has really played an interesting role in uh you know earlier times when the methods of communication were a lot more archaic than what we have now and you know providing information about potential dangers and risks and um even actually i did a project at one point looking at uh

16:23the role of the role of like witches and and witchcraft and witch hunts and things like that and and when you dig into this and you you look at the the role of witchcraft like there's an element of that where it is actually about kind of having these spaces for primarily women not exclusively but primarily women to share knowledge and information that's outside of these you know these power structures and and people didn't like that and so you know it's not an exaggeration to say that people have been killed over gossip um and usually there's there's good reason for it yeah so i mean

16:59that's a really interesting point because we we started talking a little bit about some of the you know why what gossip isn't always negative but certainly sometimes it is can you can you talk about you know times or occasions or what are the sort of the downsides that are associated with gossip as well yeah of course and i think that's that's a lot easier to like think of i think we've all had experiences throughout our lives where you are the subject of rumors or um you know like like school age people are fighting this all the time right where there's information being shared that may not be

17:32accurate for you so it's it can be quite dangerous can be quite destructive i think it really depends on the intent of the person who's uh you know sharing the information or gossiping um you know smear campaigns and that sort of thing things that really kind of get to that reputational damage are are pretty dangerous okay now that we've covered some of the you know negatives of workplace gossip i'm curious allison why is it making such a positive comeback you know what are some of the pros of workplace gossip

18:02so yeah once again i think this is the this is a pretty layered uh question uh and and so i'll i'll kind of take a broad answer to it first which is that the world is full of misinformation right now um and we between ai and kind of a crazy political world and distrust in mass media or mainstream media if you will uh it's really hard to know like what is happening and so i think the role of gossip is is

18:36is i don't want to say it's coming back because it's always there but we're talking about it in different ways because it becomes this more in a sense almost a more trustworthy way of communicating like i don't want to say the gossip itself is going to be trustworthy but you look to people in your social network who you trust to to gather information right and uh i think you know in addition to just kind of the state of the world if we talk about the workplace we've got vuka and bani the the new acronym it's brittle anxious non-linear and incomprehensible i think it's sort of the way of

19:10the world where you don't know what's happening and so you're kind of constantly looking for uh reliable sources of information to make sense of the world um on top of that uh especially for those of us living in the u.s where it's everything is advertising people are getting really tired of constantly being advertised to or sold to uh and um we see this trend playing out where it was traditional advertising for a long time now it's influencer marketing and now you're starting to have this mistrust of anybody on on tiktok or social media who's going to be trying to sell you

19:43things and so you're you're looking at other ways to gather information to have you know some more authentic interactions or uh recommendations or advice or that sort of thing or it's it's just it's not the the traditional thing so that whole landscape is changing in a really interesting way yeah i think that is really fascinating awesome because i think about um you know it used to be uh you know expertise uh was considered so valuable sort of in a communication standpoint right you wanted to have an expert an expert could come on and persuade uh people of of a sort of way of thinking or a

20:19point of view uh but to your point it seems like one of the things that has hurt expertise has been that feeling of being sold to right oh we're going to bring on this expert this is doctor so and so who's going to tell you that you should take this pill or you should eat these foods uh or uh or that these are these things are bad for you these things are good for you this is the right exercise for you um or you know experts around any kind of thing i mean right we've seen it thing with things like climate change we've seen it uh around other kind of you know big health

20:51scares uh so i mean do you think that that's part of this this tie in here the sort of loss of trust and expertise has to do with that uh phenomena of feeling like we're being sold to all the time and maybe it's sort of raised the levels of skepticism among uh among consumers yeah absolutely uh well and if i may i'll let me share a story from this bait shop research that i did long ago um where i so like i mentioned my my graduate work is in mass communications and i was working as part of this

21:27grant for uh preventing the spread of aquatic invasive species which is a total mouthful um and the the goal was to figure out how to persuade people to take on certain behaviors like cleaning off your boat before you transfer it from one lake to another and um you know there's a whole series of steps that that you should be doing so that you're not polluting the lakes um i thought it was a fairly noble thing right and uh we did this project to look at bait shop owners as uh like opinion leaders

22:03was the term that we were using um so i drove around the state i lived in wisconsin so i drove around northern wisconsin where there's lots of lakes more lakes than minnesota just a fun fact um and met with a bunch of bait shop owners and dug into it and what i found was really fascinating because i kind of expected to have pretty straightforward conversations because i had worked in a bait shop before i sort of knew what the environment was going to be like but i found first of all they didn't want to talk to me because i was being funded by the department of natural resources through the state

22:33and there is a huge mistrust around the state in that governmental department then when i shared that okay yes i'm and this is where the funding is coming from but i i work as a graduate student for the university of wisconsin okay that opened up the lines of communication just a little bit more and i was able to dig in and i found pretty quickly that uh these bait shop owners really were viewed as opinion leaders because they were were kind of trusted people within their their communities and people like to talk to them and go into the bait shop and they'd have conversations about you know where the

23:06fishing is good or anything around town um and the information about hey let's protect our lakes was a much less concerning you know it was the messenger was much less concerning because it was this trusted bait shop owner um and it kind of uncovered all of these other things in these these communities where there's um it just challenges across you know the various populations that are fishing and buying bait and so it ended up being like a way richer topic than i expected it to be but

23:36it really showed me how these like kind of nodules of trusted parties um they might not be what you think but they can be really really effective in in sharing information in a world where you might not be able to trust the institutions that you probably should be able to you know alison there's this topic or you know touching you know connecting gossip and and trust together reminds me of another i think related concept you know but we haven't talked about this so i don't know what you'll think about but it's the concept of secrets right so um you know there's

24:10workplace gossip but there's also secrets that are shared uh probably everyone has had the experience of you know someone says hey i'm going to tell you this but don't tell anyone else right that kind of thing and it it strikes me that there are you know a number of different motives for sharing a secret right you sometimes you don't have to share a secret um i i do know of one one person once told me a story that happened in their workplace this did not happen at hogan to be very clear uh this was a totally different workplace uh but they told me about someone who a colleague of theirs a work

24:42colleague of theirs who told them about a couple who were having an affair who both also worked at that workplace and my colleague the person who was telling me this i thought why does this person share this secret with me and i wondered the same thing myself to the extent to which is this about trying to build trust is about trying to build bonds and to some extent i wonder if gossip is about the same kind of thing right these sharing secrets or sharing gossip is also about um affiliation and building bonds between people what do you think about that

25:13oh absolutely yeah i mean i think there's a couple of parts of that story that that resonated for me yeah it is absolutely sharing bonds it's sort of you you put out some information and see how the other person responds and depending on how they they respond that's going to uh build a relationship or not depending on on how that reaction is i think there's an aspect to like something like that as well where when somebody is like the keeper of a secret there's a little bit of a status element to

25:44it too when you're the person who's in the know um that kind of positions you in a way or you might be useful or valuable to other people um so i think it's interesting to kind of look at how that impacts some of the relationships when you're able to to gather information effectively uh especially compared to other people oh yeah i like that this this idea that you know hey i'm a person who has information right you know this i have a little bit of power i have a little bit of of yeah it's on the one hand you could say they're they're trying to build trust me but on the other hand they're also letting you

26:15know you know i'm the kind of person who knows information you might need me for something in the future that's really fascinating right yeah yeah yeah there's a lot of value and in having access to that kind of information okay this has nothing to do with our overall conversation but just humor me for one second for the invasive species thing where any did any of this involve the lamprey um yes yeah there's a lot of different invasive species and the ones that i was focused on were less of the

26:49lamprey uh like zebra mussels and god i can't i can't even remember what all we were focused on but yes that that is one of them okay so okay i'm sorry sorry for the audience i i'm a nerd about this stuff i love fishing and i i did look into this before i went up and uh visited lake michigan so i was i was really really curious about that so sorry moving on to our our next question uh so what do we know from a personality standpoint about those who engage in gossip because obviously my first instinct says extroverts are probably the likely culprits but what other personality factors might be at

27:25play and and ryan i'd be curious you know after allison gives her answer what your thoughts are on this as well yeah and i same i'm curious to hear how ryan responds to the question too because he's much more of an expert than than i am on the personality side of it but extroversion i think does um although i don't know that that would be like the biggest contributing factor i mean certainly if somebody is looking to build relationships or get attention because they want to share some information absolutely but i also think to like skepticism curiosity um status related value is kind of what we were just

28:02talking about people who are like you and me blake who are maybe more hype mischievous we like to kind of know what's going on and you know get the a layer deeper than you know what's on the surface um leisurely i have to think would would play into it too where there's sort of uh here's the kind of the official stance but behind the scenes i'm gonna act in a different way and that might be engaging in gossip um so i think there's a number of different things but i also think it really depends on the context too right like that you could be somebody who's very empathetic and very curious and you want to engage in gossip because you're wanting to like protect yourself or

28:35protect your team and find out what's going on so it's not necessarily you know a nefarious thing you might be driven by some like fairly admirable qualities but um i think those all kind of come into play depending on the scenario so ryan really curious to hear what you have to say yeah well i think it's a really interesting question i don't know that we that there's great data um there probably is in some journal somewhere there's probably and and i admit i didn't try to go search it up ahead of time so there probably is something i mean it on just sort of at a base rate

29:08sense it does make sense of those sort of extroverted kind of things might be related to frequency engaging in gossip but that's i think a little misleading because that's also just going to be frequency and engaging in social interaction period so i think it's a little unfair to be like all those people gossip more because they're extroverted it's like well they just socially interact more and part of social interaction includes gossip i think from a personality standpoint i mean the reality is everybody needs gossip at some point everybody uses gossip everybody engages in gossip i do think

29:40allison some of the ones that you pointed to um make more sense to me in terms of being uh associated with frequency of gossip or using gossip or engaging in gossip that's beyond um like imagine if we took the entire percentage of your social interactions right and we said okay what percentage of those were or gossip that's where i think you would see some of the things like uh mischievous and things like leisurely show up i think also colorful to some extent um to the degree to which uh you know

30:16it could be seen as exciting to gossip and kind of you know fun and and and um sort of dramatic uh you know here's the latest story the latest news i have to share this with you right that i can kind of have a bit of a colorful feel a little dramatic feel to it as well so i mean i think those kinds of things stand out to me um but again it's to your point it's not necessarily that it's always bad i i do agree with you that i think um you know uh people can be gossiping for altruistic reasons as well

30:46certainly yeah well and i feel like you could even go uh scale by scale and kind of break it down i was just thinking of people who are probably lower adjusted might be more inclined to gossip because they just they want to know what's happening and they're a little bit more fearful of you know if there's a communication void like what's going on people who are higher adjusted maybe they just don't care as much and might not engage and so that probably has an impact on the other scales too how those are expressed and in the ways that gossip happens but i think at the end of the day i totally

31:19agree with you and gossip is going to happen um everybody is going to engage in some sort of gossip it might not always be ill-intentioned or you know for a specific purpose but we all like to share information with each other you know one that stands out to me though i mean yeah you're probably right we could probably go scale by scale especially on the hds you know maybe see why this is a factor that people are you know engage in gossip more but skeptical started to stand out to me you know someone who's you know kind of questioning what maybe what upper management is doing um and in doing that maybe

31:56they already have they've formulated their own theory or maybe they're trying to formulate their own theory and as such they're maybe um trying to you know talk to other people just to figure out what's going on behind the scenes that maybe they're curious about i don't know what do you all think about skeptical as being another culprit yeah i absolutely think it's part of it and you know i think people who are highly skeptical are going to be constantly sort of scanning their environment to

32:26see potential dangers and gossip is just part and parcel of that or you're trying to gather as much information as you can to make sense of what's going on um you know i don't know if there's more of a tendency as somebody who's higher skeptical to engage in kind of the rumor mongering or leaning into like conspiracy theories i'd be curious ryan if you have any insight on that that was exactly the term that came to mind for me when i was thinking about blake's question was i we just did a pie i think i want to say we just did it i'm going to say we just did it this last fall but blake's probably going to be like no ryan that was like two falls ago or something i don't know but i swear we just

33:01did uh not too long ago a podcast on conspiracy theories and it got me thinking that yeah to some extent skeptical is has got this connection with both gossip and and and creating right sort of establishing these kind of conspiracy theories as well well ryan i i would love to tell you when it was but i think whenever you count the 141 full episodes that we've done i think we've done like 19 or 20 bonus episodes so that's 160 episodes i can't keep track of it all at this point so i'm not

33:34even gonna try or even look it up so well allison um traditional corporate communication you know it often moves at a snail's pace while gossip seems to spread like wildfire especially i'm from a small town so i grew up with gossip i mean you say one thing on one end of town it makes it to the other end of town before a f1 card could get there um but what are some of the benefits of the speedy pace of gossip within organizations yeah that's a really good question i think i mean it's absolutely true

34:08right like traditional corporate communication often takes time and there are reasons why an organization might not be able to share all of kind of the juicy details that you would want to know like if somebody ends up being fired from a role an organization's not going to go and share all of the details of why they were dismissed so that's where gossip can sometimes slip in and say okay what what happened like you know unofficially what do we need to know or you know is am i at risk that sort of thing and so gossip you know i think the the positive side of of the speedy pace of gossip is

34:41that it it can fill in the information gaps when you don't have a lot of information of what's going on you can kind of look to your social network to help figure out what is happening and what you need to know um and i think that's just sort of a natural thing right if there's is there something that happens uh whether it's through communication or an event and you're not quite sure what is going on it's natural to look for somebody that you trust in your in your network or you know trusted co-worker to see what they know what they can tell you um so so i think it just does provide that expediency

35:14and like in a sense some stability for people who are just like maybe naturally nervous in the absence of information um so i yeah i think there's kind of a reassuring aspect to it at times you know of course there are limits to that when it when gossip tends to be more of the destructive nature that's not necessarily going to help or if the rumors are just you know wildly untrue that doesn't help either but i think having some of those you know the unofficial mechanisms to get information out can can help reassure people a lot yeah i agree and that also ties in to this concept that that bob

35:50hogan talks about in socio and socio-analytic theory uh which is around the sort of need for for uh predictability need for order need for structure right needing to know uh what's going to happen next and that's one of the to your point about reassurance right that's what that's about it's it's wanting to feel sort of safe and secure because we know what's going to happen next or we know why this thing has happened i think to to your example allison if someone's terminated you know people wonder well could this happen to me right and that's that's a a common thing that somebody might wonder

36:24about and uh sometimes gossip can help go okay i'm okay because it was for these other things and these things don't right because to your point you know typically an organization isn't going to announce this is why this person was terminated right so it has to right be found through those through those other channels and in the io world that they often refer to the the sort of uh there's the the structure of the organization the organigram right so you could like draw out the structure of the organization say okay these are where everybody is and it's sort of um naive i think but also um sort of you

37:02you might think looking at the structure of an organization ah this is how communication flows through the organization but actually we know that an organization uh communicates very differently it's what io psychologists would call the sociogram right that there's different people in different parts of an organization who are actually connected to each other because they're friends maybe they're related to each other uh or they know somebody in another part of the organization who knows somebody in another part of the organization and so communication often spreads through organizations much more quickly through this sociogram rather than through that um organigram and you know it's

37:39it's really interesting i don't think i've seen any research on this alice and i don't know if you have either um like with the way things work now with with organizations so tied into things like microsoft products collaborative products microsoft teams even these systems like slack you you would think there could be more research on these sort of sociograms and how information actually travels in the organization but i don't know that i've really seen anything on that have you seen anything around

38:09that it's a great question i'm trying to think i i haven't seen anything more recently and and absolutely from a quantitative standpoint it's it's a lot easier to gather that information because we can track the communication much easier if everything's online um but when i think back to my grad school days i i do recall seeing a fair amount of studies that did look at kind of the networking effects of communication and um you know following you know where well a few different ways to look at it like i can remember seeing some maps about like uh tweets and how information gets kind of

38:43centralized with like a few different key influencers or you know people who are really active on twitter um i there's also some interesting research on uh kind of the network effects on individual behavior and like i think there was was studies looking at um like healthy behaviors and how like you know the people within your orbit like uh you know i don't know one person removed from you can influence your you know healthier unhealthy behaviors more than almost anything else so there is some

39:13research uh but it'd be really interesting to look at like you know how does it actually play out in a workplace because i would think that there's some centralization of people who happen to always be in the know of things and and go to it then be the people that people go to to say okay what's going on what do you what do you know um but that's yeah that's just a hypothesis on my end yeah that makes sense that sort of you could apply those kind of i've kind of forgotten about those those network those are super popular for a while those sort of network analysis approaches you can apply those to your workplace organizations and sort of understand who these sort of hub people are that are you know

39:49really transmitting a lot of information that would be kind of fun to do yeah yeah new research project for us well before i get to my next question i just want to i want to highlight that you know this this topic of gossip that we're discussing today was actually one that uh was part of our pr efforts in 2025 working with um our our team over at hopscotch our pr firm that i work with so i know they're listening so so hello hopscotch team i know you're gonna hear this but um uh as part of that allison you wrote a piece

40:19on gossip last year and one of the key things you highlighted was constructive gossip versus destructive gossip so in practice how can leaders tell the difference between the two before it starts to erode or damage trust yeah it's it's a really good question and i it's one of these there's no like black and white or hard and fast rule for understanding this because the nature of gossip just changes all the time uh so my response to that is that one gossip is going to happen full stop there's there's nothing you can do

40:57about it and if you try like as a leader you try to control that flow of information it will backfire right anytime there have been efforts to say you can't speak about this in the workplace people are going to find other ways to share that information uh and so doing so is just it's a futile effort um um so for the leader i think it is more about how you create the space where people feel open and uh

41:27you know have that psychological safety maybe have new mechanisms for providing feedback either directly to their their manager or leader or to hr or someplace where they you know they need to talk about information i think encouraging opening open sharing is is really good um but to the question around you know being able to tell the difference between constructive and destructive i think that's really hard to do in isolation it is more of an aggregate kind of trying to keep your uh you know ear to the ground and say okay what are people saying what are people thinking figuring out ways to find

41:59information that people aren't going to tell you directly because as a leader people aren't going to come and give you direct feedback about how much they dislike you right so you may need to find other ways to kind of collect some of that information and solicit feedback to be able to keep tabs on it i also think that um there's probably a tipping point where if you're able to kind of listen and be open to that information you can maybe judge okay this is tipping into destructive and this is ruining morale or you know making people you know affecting people's mental health for example um you know how

42:33you address that is a different question but i think it's it's really trying to keep a little bit of a finger on the pulse without trying to control it too much yeah i think that's really interesting like the sort of the effective information share on say things like engagement you know maybe give you an indicator of this is if this was constructive or destructive um alison it seems to me that some the motive of the sender right sort of plays a role here whether it's constructive or destructive but

43:03is it really sort of just um a guessing game to determine what was the sender of the message's motive or are there other kind of clues that we can pick up from the sender to understand if this is sort of constructive or destructive oh that's that's a great question and honestly i don't know that i i could even try to answer that um what what i think of when you ask that question is really like the context clues and i think it's something you know we're in a mostly remote work environment at hogan and there

43:37is a a part of things where you know decisions get made or you might hear something indirectly about something that somebody's working on that you didn't know about and it is kind of a natural assumption to be like oh well why didn't they talk to me about this i can't believe they didn't let me know and i think we you know ourselves as leaders you have to kind of stop and pause and say okay there's probably more context to this decisions or you know information wasn't shared necessarily to hurt me or make my life harder uh so let's dig in a little bit and kind of be open to understanding

44:09what the context was or what the you know what factors led into making a decision or uh you know tackling some sort of project that sort of thing you know your your previous discussion here allison uh you know about sort of just information sharing or attempts to control right how gossip is communicated makes me think about sort of authoritarian states as well and right attempts to control the media i suspect uh at least i mean some people might say i live in an authoritarian state i'm just

44:41naive to notice it but uh i suspect that those sort of attempts to control the media just result in alternative communication patterns where information is shared but it's through sort of non-official kind of channels uh because i think people just due to the reasons we talked about earlier have this you know basic desire to want to know accurate information or at least to the best of their ability what's the truth right and i think yeah to some extent that's what this is about so does that happen i mean based on your experience in working in mass communication to what extent do

45:15uh these attempts to control gossip really just lead to um other kinds of channels developing yeah for sure uh it makes me think of a bunch of different things like one actually i recently had an interesting conversation with a co-worker we were attending a conference uh last year and there was a presentation by a former ceo of reddit and part of the conversation was talking about how more and more people are using reddit for search these days because they're no longer trusting ai or um you know google to provide

45:51the the most accurate results because it's all you know funded by advertising and and traffic and things like that um and so people are naturally looking for more reputable sources of information uh increasingly i think the big media uh channels i guess i mean new york times and washington post and i think that have a lot of funding by some of these billionaires there's a lot more skepticism and and

46:22distrust is feeling like they're not sharing all of the information or they're selectively choosing information i mean just recently we had the the um with like cbs burying a i think it was cbs burying a story uh that really should not have been buried um so yeah absolutely i think that that happens i think what one of the things that makes it difficult though is where do you go and a lot of like social networks depend on critical mass people being on it right so i could say okay i'm done with tick tock it's on by oracle now i'm gonna find something else but but where do i go because you need to have

46:57other people that you can interact with on these social platforms um and so it's it's harder and harder to find that but um i think it will continue people may be figuring out other more analog ways to communicate that they feel like it's a little bit more trustworthy you know this is the second time in a pretty short time frame now i've heard something about google and it's really consistent with my experience which is that uh i think i heard someone say well when you google search something you probably want to skip the first three results because those are all paid advertisement

47:29things and so you want to go to like the fourth result on a google search and you know you sort of you sort of just confirmed that that same thing there so uh yeah that's such a good point i mean it used to be right this is the place you would go to find information but now um it seems like it's the place uh where you know you might not exactly get the information you're looking for so yeah this this does leave people in this unique position of you know trying to find what what is that reliable source of information so where do you go these days uh you know that's a that's a great question i

48:06feel i feel like i'm searching for for something new i you know from a social standpoint i'm a big tick tock user but i feel like the the quality of content is going down and it's it's increasingly just ads ad after ad after ad uh and that's kind of the trend with all of these these things and i actually i feel like i shouldn't even say this out loud but i i ended my new york times subscription because i was getting so frustrated with the lack of information coming from them and some of the opinion pieces on new york times have been very questionable uh of late and so i i don't feel like

48:41i have a really good source of information i do find myself on reddit more and more i was never really a big reddit user but you can you know get some interesting takes on things it's full of conspiracy theories to be fair but but what is it these days um so you know i've just been kind of looking for something that aggregates across a number of media sources because i don't know that you you can like really trust one uh source these days how about you guys uh i was about to say i i once you brought this up i've noticed myself going to reddit more and more here lately more more so than i did

49:14you know maybe a year ago but i i would say in the past six months that is something that i've relied on quite a bit whenever i'm trying to just get information about whatever xyz thing is so reddit's kind of what i'm going to these days yeah i have i have to admit for myself i've found myself relying more and more on ai sorts of sources to to try to get you know to try to get to answers to the things that i'm looking for um it's not always the best choice for all the reasons that we know about ai but

49:50sometimes i go you know what this might at least help me get to some consensus uh rather than a variety of of mixed opinions yeah i think there's this the assumption that it you know because it has access to all of the data in the world supposedly that you have it's going to kind of fall into like whatever is the the best aggregate average answer so to speak um but you got to be skeptical of that and i say that with my marketing background google has spent uh you know the last decade plus figuring out how to

50:26optimize content and companies know exactly how to position content on their their websites to appear in the searches and now now all of those searches are changing because people are using gemini that's like you're curating the information and they're not clicking on the links anymore well companies who have spent a lot of time building out their content then they tend to be a little bit higher on the you know gemini curation if you will but it's still engineered on the back end because it's whether or not companies have have provided the necessary information to you know get hit by

50:58that algorithm um so you still can't totally trust it and you don't think you can really trust reddit either because there's algorithms behind that with what you know what's being shared but it's you think about if you're trying to find like a product recommendation or you know best service and right yeah it's like you you almost can't trust anything is you don't know what's you know sponsored or what's not or what's you know an influencer getting paid behind the scenes that sort of thing so it's it's really hard these days well allison i i will i do want to tell one quick little story because you mentioned earlier about leaders kind of you know creating a kind of a safe

51:33place for you know their team to to be able to engage and be able to you know talk about these things i remember there was one time i don't remember what the what you were you what information you were delivering to us it was whenever you were in your role as marketing director and we had it was we were all remote at that point and you know still are but you you kind of called us together for like a happy hour to kind of you know deliver some information and i remember you and and this is

52:03not flattery because you're the new ceo you know i'm a straight shooter i'll tell you how it is no matter what i'll say right here yes but um but um there was a point once you kind of got done and and you you you told us whatever it was and again i don't remember what i do remember about it is you said okay guys i'm gonna drop off the call and let you all just kind of talk this out amongst yourselves so you all can can discuss this and not have to think about me being here and have to monitor what

52:35you're saying and you actually just hopped off the call and the rest of us were able to to sit there and just kind of talk it out and i i just it was just one of those times when i'm like i really you know really kind of appreciate that because i'm not sure that it ever happened before you know in my career so uh that was that was a really cool thing that you did so i don't you know there's your your your flattery for the day well i'm as you know i'm very low recognition so i'm very uncomfortable with that but actually that does mean a lot to me because i i remember that i also don't remember

53:09the context i don't remember what was being discussed and i am somebody who enjoys a little bit of gossip so it was a little bit hard to to get out of there but fully recognize that you're not going to say the same things around your manager or leader than you that you will with your peers and so that's that yeah i'm glad that that that worked at that point yeah yeah i think it worked and it worked well so okay so back to that article that you wrote last year um in it you also mentioned that gossip provides leaders with insight into organizational health so what signals or takeaways

53:44should leaders look for in workplace gossip that might not show up in let's say engagement surveys

53:53yeah i mean i can i think it comes back to having the right listening mechanisms in place and it might not be formal listening mechanisms it might be just kind of having uh some managers who are able to deliver news to you know i'm saying this from the position of you know an executive at the company and you know ryan i think you can probably relate to this as well that uh there's a lot of things that don't necessarily make it to us but there are oftentimes a couple of key people who are able to deliver news and they're not you know so afraid of that and so i think that can be a really valuable

54:26mechanism um i think when you are able to detect that gossip is running rampant and might be having an impact on morale that's how you know that the internal communication processes aren't working right like people don't necessarily need to gossip uh as much i would say if the if they're getting the information that they need but if there's just you know rumors kind of abound and information being spread all over the place where it's like wait where did that even come from uh then that's really a sign to go back and say okay i think we need to put in some some different processes to get

54:59information out to to the troops so to speak yeah i mean that that makes a lot of sense to me and i do think that i think that's you know pretty um you know pretty good advice i think for leaders is to think about you know who do i have who are people that you know i can trust to bring me to bring me information because i mean i think there's an old story about uh well there's stories about a number of presidents of the united states who said you know they had so much more difficult time knowing what was really going on once they became became the president right once you become a leader in

55:34an organization people are less likely to tell you information that perhaps you you most need to know and so i think that's a good point to try to find these allies these ones that you can trust who can really can you bring you that critical information um yeah and i think it's it's a good point too because you know engagement surveys may not tell the whole tale as well because you know for for all the reasons that people know about engagement surveys uh people may um sort of uh color things a little

56:05too brightly so i yeah so i think you know that's probably the best insight i would say is to try to find those people inside your organization who you can trust to bring you information but it's very tricky to be those people too um i would say because they have to have the trust of other people

56:24to not you know right yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah so i don't know what do you think about you know those sort of people that are in the middle those sort of people who are bringing information what you know what what is the makeup psychologically for those people that they can make them you know capable of doing that yeah oh that's that's a big question of what you know what is their psychological makeup but i do think of you know i think two examples that we have uh of you know some internal employees who might be more vocal or willing to stick their neck out to share information and

56:59sometimes it's just like their ability to be the messenger and deliver the message in the right tone um and that's not necessarily something that you can like plan for or train but i think there are some people who are able to just kind of say what needs to be said in a way that's not going to get anyone in trouble i think it's also really important for uh us as leaders to be careful in how we treat information like if you're overly punitive i mean sometimes uh some sort of uh reaction is necessary but sometimes if it's just kind of information gathering being really careful

57:33to not be punitive because as soon as you you give that impression that you're not open to receiving that information and then people are going to shut down and not not share that information either so uh yeah it's it's a interesting and probably a nuanced question to figure out who can be those sort of nodes of communication for you yeah i think you're also right about that because you know you may say hey i'm going to use this information as a leader for you know some objective but as soon as you do that you may be you know cutting off your source of information all of a sudden to go okay well i'm never you know what i mean i'm never going to tell that person

58:06anything again right so um so yeah you have to use some some sort of um you know discernment in terms of how to best use that information so that you know you might continue to still get that information in the future yeah absolutely well allison this has been an awesome conversation but i do have one last question before we let you go and it's similar to you know what we normally you know end our our episodes with and that's if you were advising a leadership team what advice would you give

58:39them to ensure gossip stays a strategic asset rather than a liability um yeah some of that i think i've i've spoken to already but worth repeating uh maybe a couple of new ideas here is that i mean one i think probably a first step is to determine for an organization like what kind of behavior is tolerated and what isn't right like it's very easy for rumors to just spread and reputations to be damaged and that sort of thing so being clear on uh you know if there's any sort of information that might be

59:15um you know a form of harassment for example just being really clear that here here is the disciplinary action that can happen if you engage in this type of behavior a lot of companies have that uh already by probably some communication around that can also help uh otherwise like i said i think it's really about those listening mechanisms and having uh trusted people trusted you know ways to provide information whether that's you know anonymous uh like a suggestion box or an idea box or something

59:45or an email box where you can have some sort of anonymity um i think those things can always help creating the space for people to share information and you know what it kind of takes time i think is developing a reputation with people to show that you are you're not going to be punitive in response to that so that's you know it's spending taking the time to build trust and you know invite feedback show that you're able to listen to the feedback and you know act on it that sort of thing um so you know some things i think are easier to implement than others and just really takes time

1:00:17and relationship building um but kind of keeping your personal feelings out of it and just really being able to um be open to what you're hearing and and react appropriately is is key well i mean i think that's great advice and um i just want to say that i really appreciate you taking some time out to come on here today allison to share some of this wisdom with uh with our audience um and hopefully they can use that uh in their own careers and in their own the daily lives and and for those who are working in the

1:00:51consulting world can use that to to help advise their clients around these topics in the future as well so um yeah thanks so much for coming on today yeah thanks thanks to you guys yeah allison this has been great i think our audience is going to love it and uh also good to hear from the from the new ceo so i i think uh you know for those out there uh we hope you enjoy this and kind of get a glimpse that what where where hogan's heading and we'll be uh you'll be you'll be seeing more of us and we'll be sure to bring allison back onto the podcast in the future to you know talk about whatever it is

1:01:25that's going on in the world of personality so allison thank you for joining us thank you guys

1:01:33and that does it for the science of personality podcast episode 141 be sure to join us in two weeks for another fun and informative episode cheers everybody this has been the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments you can access all episodes on our website thescienceofpersonality.com or on the streaming service of your choice see you next time

1:02:08you