Tattling, Negative Gossip, and Other Bad Feedback Techniques

Direct communication is needed for successful feedback, but tattling is different. It is more like reporting someone's wrongdoing. It can be malicious, meant to get someone in trouble, or to hurt their reputation.

Even when a power difference makes direct communication seem insurmountable in a workplace, tattling rarely helps.

Direct feedback in the context of a power difference can be hard and even risky. However, if there is no evidence of retaliation from the "wrongdoer," avoiding it is, well, avoiding.

Of course, this is not avoidance in the case of legitimate whistleblowing. Whistleblowing is meant to address serious conduct infractions and is not what I am discussing.

Tattling and Canceling

Tattling seems to reflect the phenomenon of cancel culture, in which opportunities for effective feedback are circumvented and replaced with "telling on" someone.

This is different than being conflict-avoidant, which is largely passive. Instead, workplace tattling is more like an active attempt to achieve interactional justice without facing the more rewarding challenges of confronting difficult conversations.

A more well-known phenomenon that closely resembles workplace tattling is negative gossip. Gossip is "the exchange of personal information in an evaluative way (negative or positive) about an absent third party." ¹

Gossip in the workplace is ubiquitous.³ I am not so naïve as to suggest that it will go away. Nonetheless, meanspirited canceling and negative gossip are hurtful and harmful to individuals and organizations.

In their book, The Cancelling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott point out that canceling "is just one symptom of a much larger problem: The use of tactics to "win." ²

They point out that there is an alternative: a solution orientation. This would include skipping the allure of tattling and, instead, choosing to find a way forward with direct feedback.

Tattling Isn't Feedback

Researchers have noted that feedback is most effective when it focuses on future change versus ruminating about a past grudge. Researchers increasingly see impactful feedback as requiring a learning orientation rather than one of accountability. The latter tends to be construed as blame.³

Common sense dictates that we should be "letting people know how they are doing."⁴ Since feedback works best when it "follows the natural cycle of work,"⁵ timeliness enables it to be actionable.

When feedback is delayed and provided to a third party, it chips away at trust.⁶ A "feedback-friendly" culture⁷ cannot take hold without an environment of trusting, open and direct communication. Tattling does not contribute to such a culture.

Leaders must model and actively encourage trust behaviors like direct feedback. Encouraging employees to act on the need for openness shapes organizational cultures. It sets the tone for what we expect work to look like throughout our lives.

Leaders' choices speak to a broader responsibility to discourage the tattletale approach. These choices impart valuable lessons on how we wish to be treated.

Tattling Hurts

Negative gossip and tattling are not helpful for the targets. They damage reputations⁹ and careers, often undeservedly. Once exposed, tattling causes emotional exhaustion and lowers work satisfaction for everyone involved.⁸

Even if there is relevant or potentially helpful information in the tattling, the emotional pain and embarrassment destroy any potential positive outcomes.⁹

Workplace Dynamics Essential Reads

Power and Privilege in Conflict of Interest Disclosures

Why Employees Hide Knowledge, and What Leaders Can Do About It

In some cases, the tattlers are indeed malicious and self-serving. This is especially likely if the message is:

1. framed as blame or characterization of the target (e.g., that person is aggressive and racist.) versus as objective information (e.g., we are unhappy with the way the meeting went.)
2. intended to exert power and influence (versus reflecting an intention to help)
3. not revealed to the target directly at all.¹⁰

When a tattler's gossip, rumor, and hearsay are accepted as truth, attempts to address it can be seen by the target as an accusation. Then, a target will likely experience damage to their esteem and feel "ganged up on" or demonized. ¹⁰

Doing the Hard Work of Direct Feedback

Whether we call it managing up, managing down, or even the ubiquitous "difficult conversations," direct feedback is a challenge. In organizations, the discomfort of delivering critical feedback is unavoidable.

Of course, there are circumstances in which a genuine, understandable fear of confrontation or an anxious propensity to avoid difficult conversations instigates tattling. However real these reasons might seem, they do not make tattling work, nor do they make it OK.

What is most unfortunate is when someone prefers not to tattle but still does because they see direct feedback as "too difficult." Recent research shows that sometimes we avoid confronting issues simply because we overestimate how scary these confrontations can be.¹²

The big challenge with difficult conversations entails managing the tension between honesty and benevolence.¹¹ Fortunately, when individuals think hard about the lasting impact of their words, they can see how honesty and benevolence can indeed coexist.

In my graduate-level interpersonal managerial skills course, my students and I work on the development of relationship mastery in order to become skilled at difficult conversations. Psychotherapist Esther Perel calls these essential business skills "relational intelligence":

“If you want to change the other, start by changing yourself. Relationships are actual feedback loops in which we make the other and the other defines us—back and forth."

So, what can a would-be tattletale do? There are a host of approaches to overcoming the allure of a "tattle-triangle" (i.e., the tattler, the tattle-ee, and the target).

A promising approach, shared by one of my students in our class, is the "clearing conversation" developed by the Conscious Leadership Group. It involves connecting with someone through dialogue after an incident that caused an issue or a disconnection.

In an organization, this approach can serve as a valuable tool for addressing everyday conflicts and trust-related, difficult feedback. It follows a detailed set of steps, including face-to-face discussions.

The principles of these kinds of conversations include:

1. Checking on your positive intent. Being sure you want to help versus wanting to "win" or get someone in trouble is an essential part of the process. It is natural to have emotional reactions elicit a desire to tattle, but we need to check these impulses in order to be effective.
2. Choosing trust. This begins with vulnerability and taking interpersonal risks. The most important conversations will be difficult, especially those that can provide a way forward for all.
3. Establishing and noticing psychological safety. All parties need to work to create a trusting environment. All must model openness and take notice of the modelling of others. For example, when someone has gone to lengths to model approachability, deciding it's too "difficult" might be a "you-thing."

When tensions and disagreements emerge among coworkers, open dialogues provide an opportunity to acknowledge and resolve an issue in a constructive way. And emerge they will.

Even when the organizational chart highlights a power difference, when we are super angry at the third party, and when we feel it will be easier to tattle, it is best to find another way.

Managing feedback is complex; like many things, the easy way is usually not the best way.