Episode 017: Gossip - The Enemy of Unity

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Glad to be here again today. My name is Josh Turley. I'm one of your hosts. Joined with me again Steve Salzgiver, Jeff Jenkins.

Hello.

Hello.

How are we?

Glad to be here.

Good. Fantastic.

Awesome. Gathered around again, another episode. This one's going to be fun. They're all fun. We have a lot of fun doing these, but this one in particular, uh, it's about gossip. Not something that we typically talk about in fleet, uh, but you know, and how gossip, what it is, what it looks like. We've all been part of organizations where There's been gossip in the culture, you know, how do we handle it? Why is it bad? Right? So it's gonna be a fun little topic that we have today.

And we've all done it.

We've all done it.

Yeah, everyone's guilty, right?

Like, we're all totally guilty of this, so don't take this the wrong way, like, oh, those guys are so high and mighty. No, we're practitioners and we need medicine at the same time.

So yeah, if you're listening, you've been a gossip, stop it, right?

Just kidding. Just yesterday, Jeff was in my office.

Got my hand slapped.

All right. So for us, and one of the reasons we talk about this topic, I guess first let's just define what it is, right? So the way I define gossip whenever I'm talking to new employees, new candidates coming on board with RTA, is that when you are talking to somebody about a problem that they cannot solve for you, that's gossip. Right? If you're talking to somebody, typically you hear like the high school term, well, you know, so-and-so was doing this, and you know, you're talking to somebody about somebody else. We all know that form of gossip, right? When you're talking behind somebody's back, talking smack, whatever. But then it also can kind of take this form of venting where you're just venting about a problem you're having, and you're telling somebody who has no bearing or no influence on the problem, can't solve it for you. But you're just dumping, right? And so for us, we roll these all up and those are all forms of gossip that we just, we try to stamp out here at RTA. And one of the reasons is that we believe it's one of the biggest threats to team unity is to have gossip in your culture. We got this idea, you know, Dave Ramsey talks about this a lot at his company. In fact, it's one of their core values is no gossip. But it's for this reason is that it's a huge threat to the team continuity, to how the teams interact with each other. The respect and love that you guys have for one another, nothing destroys it faster than knowing that somebody's talking behind about you behind your back and they don't have the courage to come talk to you straight up. So we're going to talk a little bit about gossip today.

And it's especially damaging if the leadership is gossiping. It's times 10 detrimental, right? So Yeah.

And if you notice every organization I've been, you've always got like two predominant people or two predominant groups. One of those people is the gossip, right? Or one of the groups is the gossip and the other person is the one who gets people gossiping and venting to them because they allow it.

The enabler.

The enabler. Yes. So you've got those two different people, right? So it's how do you address those people that are especially bad? Within the organization and how do you change that and get it better?

It's also gossip's evil cousin, rumor. Rumor. I heard a rumor.

Right.

Spreading that through the organization. Did you hear about this?

Totally unfounded. And again, you're taking a problem or a concern or something to somebody who can't do anything about it. Right. We were listening to, who were we talking to? We were at EntreLeadership and John Delony was giving a speech about bricks, bricks in your bag, right?

Yep.

And a lot of times we don't realize that we all have these bricks and these burdens that we carry around. When we're gossiping, when we're venting to somebody else, we're literally taking a brick out of our own backpack and just putting it in theirs. Like, hey, I'm not miserable enough, so here you go ahead and carry this brick for me too. Right?

Well, but you're not giving it to them. You still have that brick. You're making a copy of it and put it in their bag. Putting it in their bag. Right? Because you're not getting rid of it because you're a part of the problem as well.

You still carry it on.

Yeah.

You know, because most likely I'm not just giving that shit to somebody else, right? I'm keeping it and then I'm passing it around to other people and not just one.

Well, then how often do we hear that? Well, I'm venting just because I needed to let off some steam, or I needed to just process it.

All the time. You call somebody on it and that's usually the response you get. Well, I'm just venting because I'm so frustrated.

But then at the end of the vent session, are they any less frustrated? No, they're still mad about it because the problem has never been solved. Right. And that's the issue is that you're taking it to somebody who can't solve the problem for you and all they can do is just listen. You know, and I'll be honest, like, if you need somebody like that, there's a literal profession designed around it. It's called therapy.

Got one, right?

Like, go to it, do it that way. They— you pay them to take your bricks from you, right? And instead of going to your coworker because they're, you know, they're trained on how to handle it and how to help you process it and help you solve and change your mindset. Versus a coworker who doesn't have that kind of training. We used to have somebody, you know, we had one of those enablers here. She's wonderful, but everybody would just go to her and she was up front and they would go and they would just dump. And one person would go up there and talk about so-and-so. Did you hear about so-and-so in the sales department? What nasty things they're doing? And man, those guys are just terrible. Well, then the sales guy would come up and he, you hear about those darn programmers? They're always messing with us and doing something. And then the guys in tech support, man, I just wish everybody would get along. This poor lady up front is just getting dumped on all day, right? And it's like a 5-minute rotation. They come up, you know, one person comes up, spends 5 minutes up there, the other person comes up. She, you know, she was a wonderful lady, but man, I couldn't imagine going home at the end of the day and like how she must have just thought ill. Like she just knew everybody's secrets and everybody's baggage and and how terrible each of us were because that's all she ever heard was all the negatives that were coming around the office. And that's the kind of thing you don't realize what kind of damage you're doing.

Well, I mean, gossip destroys trust, which is one of the 5 dysfunctions, right?

Yeah.

I mean, if you can't trust your coworkers, you can't get along with your coworkers, you can't be a team.

Right.

And I remember working in a place where our leadership gossiped. And we were all remote workers, and you never knew what the leader was going to say about you. You always found out kind of in the back channels, you know.

And well, isn't that a terrible way to say it? Did you hear what, you know, what your boss said about you the other day to me?

Yeah, it was like, really? You know, last time I talked to him, I thought I was doing good.

Yeah.

So, and that's exactly it, is it's, you know, not having the courage to be direct, right? And you say it through the back channels because it doesn't take any courage to talk about somebody to somebody else. And then it just trickles through and then you're just, well, if you really felt that way about me, but yet to my face you're saying this whole different persona, you just get disenfranchised with it and you say, this isn't for me.

But it happens so often sometimes that people just forget. They don't even take it serious anymore. They don't even look at it as a criticism anymore.

Yeah. And you're really naive if you think that someone coming to you gossiping about someone else is not going to do the same thing about you.

Exactly. Amen.

Right. And that's the big thing, right? Is you like, oh, well, you know, so-and-so—

Everybody likes to come to me. I love it.

So-and-so's a piece of crap because, you know, this other person said something about him. But I promise you, they're not stopping there. If they're gossiping about one person, they're gossiping about you at some point in time as well.

So one of the rules with gossip, one of the ways we try to address it head-on is we kind of set this ground rule that, look, if you have a negative, if you have a problem, right, like we want to deal with that problem. You hand the negatives up, right? So if you've got a problem with something happening at work, you got a problem with a coworker, you know, one, we want you to try to address it directly with that coworker. Sometimes you're not comfortable with it, or you've tried and it's just not going anywhere. You don't go to your teammates, though, and say, "Man, I hate working with that guy, Steve. He is just terrible. Jeff, do you know what Steve did the other day?" No, you go to your manager, and you hand it up and say, "You know, I'm having a really hard time with Steve. How do I help?" "how do I do this?" Right? And you hand that negative up, and then the manager helps you address that problem. Now, if your problem's with your manager, then you go up another level, right? Or you go to HR, or you go to, you know, somebody else that can help you with the solution. But you don't go to that manager's peer. And you don't go to, you know, that manager's manager's manager and try to get them fired or something. You know, like, you want to go and hand it up to somebody that can solve the problem. We never hand gossip or negatives down and around, right? If you're handing it to somebody that can't handle it, it's the wrong person.

Well, and the most important part, first of all, is trying to resolve it yourself, right? I mean, I think that's where a lot of people just, they don't like confrontation, very non-confrontational. They don't want to go and address a topic that may be a little sticky because it makes them uncomfortable. But the best way to nip it in the bud, the best way to stop it is actually to address something head on. And I get it, you're not comfortable. Okay, go to your manager and then maybe your manager will pull you all in a room together, right? Because the problem also with going to a manager is that you go to a manager and then the manager talks to that person, the person, you know, they may lie about it, deny it, whatever else, and then nothing's really resolved, right? So he said, she said. The best way to actually stop all this, get everybody in a room together and let's talk about it.

Yep.

Because you're gonna get the truth out and you're gonna find out what the, the root cause of that issue is and you're able to address it right there. But when you dance around with different people, you're never gonna hit it head on.

Right.

You know, it's kind of interesting too. I, I've worked in several different states and the diff— a different way that people interact with each other. Like I've worked up in the Northeast, people are right in your face. They, they have no qualms about telling you if you got a problem. I've worked down in the Southeast where, bless your heart, you know, they'll, they wouldn't tell you what was wrong with you. That's good work right there. Yeah. No matter what. And so you have to understand the context of where you are, you know, and You know, and most people, like Jeff said, are pretty open to, you know, hearing a little bit of feedback.

They want to.

Yeah, I mean, if you're upsetting somebody, chances are you probably don't even know it.

Now, if they don't want to hear it, they're probably just insecure and they have their own—

Exactly.

And it's not about you, it's about them. Yeah. But for most everybody else, you know, if they're bothering you, they want to know it if they don't know it already. You know, we talk about this, this idea of directly dealing with it. If you can imagine if you went to your boss, right? You just, you didn't talk. Maybe I had a problem with Steve, but I didn't talk to Steve and I go straight to his boss and then his boss pulls him in. Well, how's he going to feel about me, right? Oh man, that Josh, he's a total narc, right? Like, you know, walk around like, hey Josh, you know, snitches get stitches, right? Like, it's just one of those things that you just, you want to deal with it head on. You try it and if it doesn't work, then you go to the manager. And like you said, you want to pull them all in together and talk about it.

I hate that term narc though, right? Like, I don't want to get anybody in trouble. I don't want to tell on somebody. Guess what? You can't have a cohesive unit if everyone's not on the same page, right? Right. It's all about getting better. It's about getting better. It has nothing to do with telling on somebody. It's like, hey, let's address this so we can all work together. Because if Steve's saying something about me and I'm upset about it, it doesn't do me any good talking to anybody else about it because it doesn't resolve my conflict with—

that reminds me of managers I've work for where they, they don't get everybody together to get it all out in the open, but they'll, they'll go out and they'll put like a memo on the wall that says, don't do this anymore.

Oh my God, I hate that, you know.

And blanket statement, 90% of the people go out and look at it and say, well, who's doing that, right? And the guy, and the guy that's doing it, they don't even realize it's them doing it, so they never even pay attention.

I had my accounting manager at the trucking company I ran, that was her whole thing. If you went to talk to her about somebody specifically and be like, hey, you got to address this, you got to, you got to talk to this person, she would never address straight on with that person. She would send an email out to her whole team saying, hey guys, just want to let you know this isn't okay.

This is what we should do. As a reminder.

And everybody like, and it was just like, you know, you're white gloving everybody and hey, I'm going to pat you on the head. Are you okay? It's like, no, listen, the problem's with one person.

Exactly. Right.

Let's address that one person and stop it with them. Let's not pussyfoot around the whole situation.

Well, and I think the thing there too, when the boss brings the person in, there are probably multiple people in the department who have a problem with that one person.

Yes.

Right? So you talk about it's not really being a narc or telling on somebody. It's you helping that person. We have a saying here at RTA, and this is one of the ways we combat gossip, is that we speak the kind truth. Right? We speak with clear, caring candor. We care about Steve. So we talk about Steve, right, to Steve. We don't talk about him with somebody else because he needs to hear it. Otherwise, he'll never improve. We talk about the last act of cowardice, right? This is a Lencioni saying, is that usually a manager's last act of cowardice is to fire somebody because they haven't done their job in coaching and speaking those kind truths. And probably they're guilty of gossip and venting. Oh man, I just don't know how to handle Jeff today.

Right?

And instead of talking to Jeff and dealing with the problem, They go to Steve and, man, Steve, I just don't know what to do here. Can you do something for me on this? And how do I do this? Because I am just— what it is, is it's cowardice.

Well, it comes back to people's confidence in themselves and it comes back to— I mean, we've had issues even here where people are— they don't like conflict and they withdraw from the rest of the team.

Yeah.

Not necessarily gossip related, but people just become cowards and they don't want to engage in that kind of that conflict dialogue that's necessary to be a healthy functioning team.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, now obviously too, right? How you address that makes a big difference too, because if there's personal attacks or there's yelling and there's screaming, like, right? Yeah. If you've got that when you go to somebody and try and get engagement, of course you're never going to want to talk to 'em, right? I don't want to deal with that shit. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to completely ignore it because it never gets us anywhere. So it's not only how you address it, it's how you receive it. And you've got to be on a mature level when you're having those conversations.

And you got to be humble. I mean, like both parties have to be humble about it is to recognize where you need to improve, but then saying it in a way that's done with, we talk about caring candor, is it's done out of a place of kindness and caring, not out of a place of vindictiveness or trying to score points or being right. Those are all things that all fly out the window. If you really want to deal with gossip, you have to get rid of those and really try to build up people and come from a place of good intent, right? And call that out too. I think that's one of the best things to do for a manager. When you set that, when you have one of these meetings, set the tone right away. Hey, this is going to get a little bit uncomfortable because we're going to have to address something that nobody likes talking about, but we're doing it because We really care about you. We really value you as a member of the team, and we want you to keep being here for as long as possible. And we think this is something that you probably just don't even know you're doing, and we want to help you get better. Are you open to that? Right? Just set the tone. Nobody's getting fired today, right? You set the tone right up front and then move from there.

You know, that could be anything. I remember in my management career, I had a guy with bad body odor. Something simple like that, right? Super simple. And every one of the employees just complained about him constantly, you know? And I finally had to pull the guy aside and say, you know, I don't, you know, you don't have a lot, you don't have a lot of, you have an issue here and your employees are complaining about it and I can help you do, you know, talk to him about hygiene and everything else. And, you know, I mean, it could be something simple like that where, and the guy, you know, maybe he didn't pay attention to that. And it's like, maybe it wasn't even an issue to him, you know.

And so one of the things that we talk about is this fundamental attribution bias, right? Which is where, you know, you blame all the negative things that happen to you on your environment, right? You're late for work, you cut somebody off, it's all about, oh, sorry, I didn't see you, there was this crazy thing that happened at home, right? But somebody else is late to work or somebody else cuts you off It's because they're a bad person, right? So negatives in your life are only on— you blame on the environment, but negatives in somebody else's life you blame on their character. And we misalign the blame on where things are at. And that's what happens with gossip is sometimes they don't even know they're doing it, but because of fundamental, fundamental attribution bias, you just don't want to deal with it because you assume, well, Steve's doing that just because he's a jerk, right? When in reality Steve has no clue that he's coming off that way and saying something in a way that you don't like.

Well, and people get away with it for so long and don't ever have it addressed that it just becomes second nature to them, which I think is probably the bigger deal, right? You just have no one— no one's ever addressed it. You've never hit it head on. So it's okay. Like, I had this lady worked at my company. She'd been there for 30 years. And guess what? She was the cancer. She was the gossip. And she didn't even recognize it because she'd been doing it for 30 years.

Well, and you've probably seen it at a lot of different companies, right? If you've ever worked for more than one company, you've seen it at company after company after company. So when somebody comes to you and your organization and you've got a no-gossip culture, like, that's really— you have to almost, um, untrain somebody.

Yes.

Right? And desensitize them to it and like, hey, we don't do that here. Right?

I remember—

Brandon says that.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I remember a situation in my career where I was the 5th fleet manager in 5 years. And I came out of a staff meeting one day and I heard the assistant fleet manager tell everyone, "Just ignore him, he'll be gone soon. We don't need to do anything he says." And it was not really a form of gossip per se, but I mean, that just permeates through your whole organization. And I remember myself thinking, "All right, I'm gonna stick this out. This is not gonna happen." I'm gonna be here more than a year. How long were you there? Actually, I was there 12 years.

Ah, there you go.

And that person was only there 2 years longer or less. They didn't last 2 years because they couldn't quit that. So eventually we had to displace them and move them to a job that they were better at.

So Jeff, you talked a little bit about the enabler, right? And so in that case, we have somebody telling to a whole group of people. But we see it one-on-one. We see it in group settings. If you're that person who's the enabler, maybe not the gossiper, one of the things we talk about here is like, you've got to shut that down. You have a moral imperative to say, hey, I can't help you with this and you're wasting my time and my energy. Right? Like, I know we've had conversations like that in the past. Uh, you know, like they have just as much a part to play in this as the person doing the gossiping and the venting.

Well, they do. And a lot of times it's like, you know, they're friends or, you know, a new person comes up and meets you and wants to, you know, get a relationship going. And so that's how they do it. They break into it with asking about other people or gossiping and they bond over gossip.

Yeah.

Right.

It just sets a whole bad precedent and I get it. It's uncomfortable, right? Someone comes to me and starts bitching about somebody else. It's uncomfortable to say, listen, I don't want to hear that. Right. It's, it's time or place. No, not, I'm not interested. It's difficult, but if you allow it once, you're gonna allow it twice, 3 times, 4 times, and then it's gonna be a routine. And it's just not bringing that person down, eventually it's gonna bring you down as well.

Yeah.

So if you're a manager, you know gossip is bad, you know you got venting in your organization, how do you address it? How do you start the process of getting the mindset to shift?

Well, if you haven't ever addressed it before, one, you've gotta address it company-wide. You've got to start with everybody and make sure everyone understands, hey, you know, we're— there's too much gossip going on, right? We've got to stop this.

It probably even starts with you.

Well, it does. You got to stop. If you're doing it yourself, you got to stop, right?

And odds are, if it's happening in the organization, you're—

you're part of the problem. Absolutely right. And you've got to call each other out, right? You've got to create the culture and the environment to where you can call each other out when that's happening, right? If everyone's so afraid of you that they can't come to you saying, hey, listen, you're part of the problem, you're a gossip, it's never going to go anywhere.

Well, and I think that's why it's important to go over your core values periodically, so that people understand that this is not going to be tolerated. This is how we treat people. I know people, and as a CEO, you've had to go over in our staff meetings and people say, oh, I have to hear this again. But the fact of the matter is you're going to constantly need to hear it because we are human, we err, we slip. We go backwards, you know? And so I think that's what's important is setting those expectations and having the standards set.

Well, then reinforced, right? Like you're just constantly reinforcing it. So you address it, you talked about doing it company-wide, and then just anytime that it comes up, you just, you talk about it right then and there. You don't wait because if you're waiting, you're waiting too long and then the moment's lost and the power of the moment's gone, right? We have a saying, it's not about what you preach, it's about what you tolerate. You can do a company-wide meeting, but then if you don't address it, then it's just going to keep permeating. And so you have to start, hey guys, we've got a problem here, it's affecting morale. Nobody likes talking to anybody because they know they're just going to go talk to somebody else later. So we've got to fix this, right? I don't want anybody coming into my office talking about somebody else. Unless they've already tried approaching it with themselves, right? If I hear gossip or venting in the office, hey, can he help you with that problem? Oh, well, who can help you with that? Why don't you go talk to your manager about that, right? If somebody's coming into your office, what have you done to solve it, right? Just not waiting, you know, striking while the iron's hot because that's when it's most moldable. And pretty soon it'll get to the point that people are like, you know what, I'm not gonna, I'm I'm not going to do that around here. And they recognize how important it is to have that. And then they start policing themselves. And when somebody starts gossiping, oh man, I can't help you with this and you're wasting my time. I got to move on. Why don't you go talk to your manager about that?

That's a huge issue. Think about the loss of productivity, the lack of respect for people. I mean, it's just like you said up front, it's a cancer.

Well, it is. And we all know people that we know we can't say things to. Yeah, right. Because it's going to get around, it'll gossip, but you know what I'm saying? I mean, everyone— that's what's funny is like everybody knows who the gossips are. It doesn't take much to figure it out.

Well, you know, because you've heard, hey, guess what? I heard you talk to so-and-so about this, right? Yeah. And it's always the same so-and-so, you know. Well, how did you hear about that? Well, so-and-so told me. Yeah, but they shouldn't have, you know. And that's the problem. So, uh, any last thoughts as we end this wonderful topic on gossip and venting and how destructive it is?

Well, I, I would just say that, you know, I've been managing people for 20 years and I still catch myself sometimes doing it to where I have to stop. So it's not something that is ever, you're gonna perfect. You're gonna have to always recognize for yourself when you're doing it and you may not even notice it. Someone may come in and be like, "Hey, did you see what Joe did the other day?" And you're like, "Yeah, he's a dick." And you're like, "Oh crap, I shouldn't have said that." It's like, "Sorry, I should never have said—" You've got to catch yourself, you've got to apologize, and you've got to make sure that everyone knows that you're also on board with the no gossip policy.

And I think it's especially important as we become more mobile in the workforce, because a lot of people that work remotely or work from home, they don't have that socialization. Of, you know, camaraderie all the time in the office. Any kind of gossip can destroy a person that's—

oh yeah, because everything they're overhearing is negative. Exactly.

Yep.

You know, then all they'll ever have is a negative opinion of their co-workers, and who wants to work at a place like that? Exactly. So, all right, well, uh, enjoy the rest of your week. Thanks for listening today. As always, go tag us on social media, share the podcast with your friends on your networks. Shout out to some of the, our listeners who've been posting up on some of the NAPA boards and community boards. We love it. Keep spreading the good word and we will see you next week.

Wham, bam. Thank you, ma'am.

Ignore any bad gossip about our podcast.

Boom. Done. Later.

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