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| Jane Genova |
There’s an obsessive involvement with external professional networks—LinkedIn, Reddit, Fishbowl, Glassdoor, Blind and more. But what really influences your daily office life and can determine cooperation from the team, branding, raises, promotions, demotions, Proposals to Improve Performance and terminations are the internal grapevines. Yes, plural. As executive search firm Transearch points out, they create “the other culture”—the informal one. That’s where the real action is. Your career depends on how well you understand that turbulent force field and navigate it.
Heard it through the grapevine
“Grapevines” are the informal communications networks within organizations.
Their power comes partly from being “subversive,” since they operate outside formal structures. Because they’re not tethered to policies, approval channels or hierarchy, they activate spontaneously and have reach. The Society for Human Resource Management found that 70 percent of organizational communications happens in grapevines.
The other sources of their power, documents the research team headed by Jitendra Mishra, is that they’re 80 percent accurate and 80 percent of the content focuses on individuals, not the organization. That focus on the people, not policies, makes the gossip—and that’s what grapevines are—juicy. Incidentally, thought leader Joseph Epstein goes to great lengths in his book “Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit” to dignify the reputation of that form of communication. For instance, gossip establishes and reinforces social norms. If a grapevine is mocking how the new guy touts his Hampton getaway, obviously the ethos is not to flaunt wealth.
How gossip flows and what to watch out for
Gossip in the office takes myriad forms. But it falls into four patterns:
Single strand chain. One person tells another who tells another and so on. The longer the strand the more likely there’ll be distortions. You’ll have to be alert to how your promotion, for example, winds up being assessed at the end of the strand.
Gossip chain. An employee blasts to everyone they encounter the subject matter. That could be slow-moving. Therefore, it could be a while before you learn what’s being said about you or your team in that particular grapevine.
Probability chain. The transmittal is random. There’s no set pattern. For those rumors you might not happen to be in the loop.
Cluster chain. Chatter is on a strictly selective basis. Three executives in the organization may be discussing you and those conversations could shape decisions about your career.
Seven Best Practices
Whatever your role or rank in the office, you have to know how the grapevines affect you and have strategies in place to influence the content. It’s naïve and dangerous to ignore the grapevines. Best practices for typical situations include:
At the top, paying more attention. Back in 2019, studies by the American Management Association discovered that the higher up in the organization someone is, the less likely they are to make it their business to monitor what’s going on in grapevines. That has been changing because of employee internal activism. But maybe you’re still not receiving enough intel. In these chaotic times gossip goes into overdrive.
A current tactic for leadership is to create bonds with the informal leaders in the organization as well as the biggest talkers. Most welcome the outreach and attention. A second is to have loyalists be your ears. A third is to be visible and approachable. Reports of what’s being said will come to you. Having access to that intel makes others feel important and they’ll let you know they have it.
For the rank-and-file, developing networks of listeners to pool intel and share. Since everyone has to be up-to-date on what’s being said or, even more relevant, what’s not being said, such an arrangement is mutually beneficial. An added function should be to get third parties in there to smoothly clear up distortions.
Being concerned about internal branding. Work is a social context. Much of how your performance is perceived is shaped by what others talk about. That flows up to the decision-makers and can also determine team relationships.
Of course, you get that ball rolling by leveraging the fundamentals of internal self-promotion: being visible, enthusiastically discussing aspects of the solutions you developed which are so important to the organization and having informal leaders know you value their opinions. But the big bangs come from what third parties insert into the grapevines about you.
Changing what’s accepted. You’re among those resenting being contacted on weekends about routine work matters. Remember gossip is about norms. To get attention for a right-to-disconnect policy the focus in grapevines can be to single out for vilification those who go along with the off-duty interruptions. How grapevines operate is that the ones being censured are pushed to find out fast what’s being said. They could decide they have to back off. The C-suite gets the message. On a formal basis there could be a review of that practice.
Accepting feedback. You’re new in a supervisory position. A loyalist informs you that the chatter is about your being a micromanager. The team keeps on saying how the previous manager left them alone. You have the opportunity to modify your style early in the game. But you don’t have to cave. You can explain to the team that you have to figure out what standard ways of doing things are no longer productive.
Doing a mea culpa. You made a whopper of an interactional mistake. A co-worker with a sick child has been coming in late and not focusing enough when there. You commented on that. Oh, boy, the grapevines lit up. Many in the office are distancing themselves. You ask a trusted co-worker what’s up. This requires direct action. You “confide” to the biggest talkers how you regret mouthing off. You were wrong, you admit. You apologize to the parent. You lay low. Soon enough the grapevines move on to other situations.
Uncovering what your superiors say about you. The formal behavior of most organizations is indirect. The odds are you won’t find out how superiors assess you until the performance review – or the day you’re demoted or terminated. Meanwhile, there could be chatter about you, positive and negative, by several executives in those cluster chains.
How can you find out what is being said? If you’ve developed trusted allies throughout the organization some may have pipelines to the upper layers. Ask them to dig around for you. That might sound far-fetched. How would anything leak through? The reality, though, is that leaking is standard and frequent.
RTO during 2025
During this year, ResumeBuilder.com projects that 87 percent of employers will be back to five-days-a-week in the office. Grapevines primarily will be operating in-person. That can ramp up the activity exponentially.
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Career Coach Jane Genova provides end-to-end services, ranging from diagnosis of challenges and fix-it strategies to preparation of resumes/cover letters/LinkedIn profiles and how to gain control of an interview. She specializes in over-50 work issues. Her edge is a background in marketing communications. For a confidential complimentary consultation please text/phone 203-468-8579 or email janegenova374@gmail.com. Remote and in-person.
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