What Gossip Really Is

Gossip is complaining about a person or situation with someone who cannot influence or resolve it.

It may sound like sharing, humour, or “blowing off steam”, but more often than not it removes agency and replaces it with commentary. It impacts a workable cultural context.

Every piece of gossip hides an unspoken complaint.
Every complaint contains energy that could create alignment.
But when that energy is displaced sideways, it corrodes coherence.

Gossip converts leadership capital into entropy.

A Systems View of Gossip

When gossip circulates, it tells you something about the system itself:

• Unclear authority. People don’t know where to take their concerns.
• Incomplete promises. Agreements have been made but not fulfilled.
• Low psychological safety. Speaking truth feels risky.
• Cultural avoidance. Discomfort is avoided rather than transformed.

From a systems perspective, gossip is a diagnostic — not a disease. It reveals where communication loops are broken, where trust has thinned, and where leadership attention is required.

As Peter Senge wrote in The Fifth Discipline (1990), “When a system is in distress, its conversations will tell you before its results will.” Gossip is one of those conversations.

How Leaders Transform Gossip

Generative leaders treat gossip as compost — raw material for growth. They turn complaint into commitment through three clear moves:

1. Identify the complaint. Ask, “What’s missing that, if present, would make this situation work?”
2. Make a request. Direct the energy toward the person who can act.
3. Complete the loop. If you can’t or won’t act, declare completion and release it.

This simple practice reintroduces authorship. It turns passive commentary into active responsibility — what John Searle (1979) described as a speech act that changes the world rather than describing it.

The Developmental Dimension

At early stages of development, gossip serves belonging — it builds identity through shared opinion. But at later stages, mature adults and leaders use language generatively: to align, to clarify, to design futures together.

Robert Kegan (1994) described this as moving from being “subject to” one’s emotions to making them “object” — seeing them as material to work with. Gossip ends when awareness begins.

The mark of advanced leadership is the capacity to hear dissatisfaction without defensiveness and to convert it into structural improvement.

The Culture Test

You can tell the maturity of a culture by how it handles gossip.

Immature cultures deny or punish it.
Reactive cultures justify it as “venting”.
Generative cultures listen to it as data and then act to restore alignment.

In these organisations, leaders model direct speech, encourage clean feedback, and establish transparent promise protocols — clear agreements about who says what to whom, by when, and why.

That structure doesn’t suppress emotion; it channels it into constructive flow. It creates what Amy Edmondson (2019) calls psychological safety — where candour is both safe and expected.

Leadership Practice

Next time gossip appears, don’t shut it down — transform it.
Ask:

• What truth is trying to emerge here?
• Who needs to hear it directly?
• What request or action would restore alignment?

Then speak it cleanly. Not as commentary, but as authorship.

Why It Matters

Language is the architecture of culture. Every word either builds coherence or erodes it. Gossip diminishes trust and slows decisions. Generative speech strengthens commitment and accelerates performance.

Great leaders don’t avoid gossip. They convert it into trust, alignment, and clarity.

Because every organisation rises — or falls — on the quality of its conversations.

References

• Searle, J. R. (1979). Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press.
• Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.
• Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology. Shambhala.
• Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. Doubleday.
• Senge, P. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday.
• Edmondson, A. (2019). The Fearless Organization. Wiley.