The Supervisor declared, “My team members are on a need to know basis. I’ll tell them what they need to know when I want them to know it.”
When change is in the air, the longer you keep people in the dark, the more their imagination will gravitate toward the worse case scenarios. If you allow them to come to their conclusions without the facts, you create an environment of confusion based on misperceptions and fear.
Communicate the truth. Bring your people up to a proper level of understanding, and you will begin to eliminate the potential of gossip. If you don’t keep them up on the information that is important and relevant to them, they will be suspicious of your silence. The conversations will begin to take a low road approach on morale and eventually take its toll on productivity.
Colin Powell once said, “It is best to get the facts out as soon as possible, even when new facts contradict the old. Untidy truth is better than smooth lies that unravel in the end anyway.”