Your team talks about you when you’re not in the room, and often they’re filling in a decision you never explained. These cliff notes give you 3 questions to sort noise from feedback, the 4 buckets with a script for each, what to say when someone tells you “people are saying,” and a 2-minute rumor check for your team meeting.
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Six pages for the moment you hear secondhand what your team is saying about you. Keep it handy for the next time it happens.
Megan Robbins and Alexander Karan at UC Riverside had 467 people wear a small recorder that captured short samples of their day. On average, people spent 52 minutes a day talking about someone who wasn’t in the room, and about three-quarters of that talk was neutral. Whether your team talks about you is settled. What they’re saying, and what it tells you, is up to you to read.
The catch: Sidney Rosen and Abraham Tesser’s MUM effect shows that people are reluctant to pass on bad news, so it gets softened on its way up or never arrives. How you react the first few times someone brings you something uncomfortable decides whether you hear the next thing.
The talk usually traces back to a decision that made sense to the manager and was never explained to anyone else.
Episode 337 walks through why teams talk about the boss, the 4 buckets, what to say when someone brings you what they heard, and the rumor check, in about 22 minutes.
Listen to Episode 337
