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Leadership Insight: A Culture of Tattling

Guest post by: Tim Schneider

Article Overview: When we were all five years old, we couldn’t wait to tell on someone. Our job as little kids was to make sure than someone was held accountable for their buffoonery and with a little luck, it made us look good along the way. Unfortunately, that same behavior at age five can become pervasive and very destructive in the modern working environment. Team members telling on each other. Supervisors and leaders that validate the behavior. The creation of a culture of tattling.

Leadership Insight: A Culture of Tattling

When we were all five years old, we couldn’t wait to tell on someone. Our job as little kids was to make sure than someone was held accountable for their buffoonery and with a little luck, it made us look good along the way.

Unfortunately, that same behavior at age five can become pervasive and very destructive in the modern working environment. Team members telling on each other. Supervisors and leaders that validate the behavior. The creation of a culture of tattling.

Equally unfortunate is the impact that a culture of tattling has on team members. Overall work performance is diminished, morale suffers and team members are more concerned about seeking cover and protection than doing the right thing or taking risks. This type of culture element can be about as damaging as any that exist.

Recently, I had the opportunity to witness an ugly episode of tattling behavior play out between two professional level adult males. Perfectly normal professional male one engaged in some borderline behavior over the past weekend that may have cast some doubts on his credibility and he may have used some poor judgment. Perfectly normal professional male two thought it was perfectly appropriate to contact perfectly normal professional male one’s boss about the event.

To the credit of perfectly normal professional male one, he redirected the dialog back to perfectly normal professional male two and took his boss out of the equation. The boss was perfectly happy to be left out of this little disagreement and conflict but this type of resolution happens way too infrequently.

Most often what occurs in a tattling equation is a line level team member brings a complaint or issue to the attention of a leader type. Believing their role is to always fix everything and feeling the ego fulfillment of fixing issues, the leader immediately validates the concern and moves into action. In and of itself, this one interaction does not create a culture of tattling but as this scenario is repeated over and over, telling on other team members becomes the norm and even rewarded. Those that tell on others are validated and become confidants of the leader while those that don’t form the outsiders.

The other dynamic to worry about in the tattling culture is one upping. This occurs that after being told on, a team member retaliates by telling on the original snitch. This can unfold into quite a lengthy game that can span months, years and careers.

The importance of all of this is to engage the right skills and behaviors to make sure that disagreements and conflicts are resolved but done at the appropriate levels and by the appropriate parties.

To avoid the culture of tattling, effective leaders must:

1. Avoid the need to jump into every conflict and solve issues at their level. Park your ego and let peer level team members work things out.

2. Encourage team members to resolve disagreements between each other. If an impasse is reached, they both need to come to you and express both sides of the story openly.

3. Create an environment in which collaborative conflict resolution is encouraged through continued dialog, trust and respect.

4. Assertively redirect attempts by team members to tell on one another by using phrases such as “have you talked to Liz about that already?” or “I am not going to get in the middle of this until you have spoken to Barry about it.”

5. Clearly define your expectations to team members about conflict resolution and your desire to not engage any tattling behaviors.

6. Provide opportunities to air out differences and work through conflicts in a private setting.

7. Don’t encourage or allow team members to send flaming emails about conflicts with copies to every executive in the building.

There will be times that telling on a team member is absolutely necessary. When safety, security or ethics are involved there really is no choice but to inform the leader but the 99% of the rest of attempts to tattle, there are alternatives. Leaders must be resolute in not allowing a culture of tattling to get a foothold in their working environment.

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Article Tags: accountability, culture, feedback, leadership, management, tattling



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