How Gossip Can Help You Earn Trust Among Your Coworkers – And The Relationship with Black Holes

Gossip and Trust… those two don’t get along very well, do they?

Well… they could if you threw a black hole into the equation.

Let’s backtrack to less astrophysical situations.

It’s common wisdom that Gossip is Trust’s arch enemy. Essentially, there’s no possible Trust when Gossip is involved.

To make matters worse, Gossip – which has Santa’s superpower to be in billions of places at the same time- works in every workplace of this world -maybe except for mime artists, lighthouse keepers and manning Thunderbird 5-.

Let me take it a step further and logically prove to you how trust in the workplace is impossible.

With Gossip there’s no Trust

Gossip is in every workplace

Therefore:

Trust in the workplace is impossible

Now, going against all formal logic, I hereby debunk this fallacy and refute myself:

Trust in the workplace is possible, in spite of Gossip

Gossip starts with one person telling another person something about a third person… and you know how it goes. Give it some brewing time and Gossip shows up.

Now, what if you could avoid becoming part of the problem by being right at the middle of it?

Here’s when the black hole comes handy: you need to become the black hole -not literally, of course-.

An informational black hole, where every bit of Gossip that touches you disappears from existence as you swallow it.

This will create a positive reinforcement loop. People tell you things, you don’t tell, people realize you haven’t told, people trusts you.

Simple as that.

Now, what can you do with all that intel about your work environment? Well, there’s certainly some gain but we’ll focus on the altruistic side of things.

Black holes are not as black as you may think

Nothing escapes a black hole, that’s a given.

False.

There’s actually something called Hawking Radiation. It’s the only known thing to go out instead of inside of a black hole, and it doesn’t do it in large quantities.

If you choose to become a workplace wormhole, something has to go too. Just as you suck information, you will give away a little bit of it.

Say that Lenny is telling Homer that Carl takes siestas in Sector 7G. Then Homer goes to Carl and tells him that if he got caught sleeping he would risk getting fired.

You are just giving the gossipee a heads up without volunteering any information about the current gossip in the plant. You will earn both the gossiper  and victim’s trust. Two birds with one stone.

In case you are one of those irrecoverable gossipers and see no way -or desire- to stop, do yourself and others a favor and become a black hole. You will still get the high of knowing stuff about others, but doing harm to no one.

Article by Fernando

The guy in charge of this blog - husband, Psychologist, former Manager, Blogger, Job Coach, Recruiter and Information Junkie. Yes, I am all that.

Fernando has written 254 awesome articles for us at FT Careers

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