Episode #314: Killing Rumours And Misconceptions

Staffing is a subject that gets a lot of attention from those within and without the organisation. Those outside see staff movements as a bellwether of how the company is travelling. High turnover indicates disruption and uncertainty about the future. Rapid high turnover indicates real trouble within the ranks. When executives arrive in Japan, they often discover a lot of deadwood and they get about cleaning them out. They are wholly focused on internal issues. The outside perspective hasn’t been a consideration in their minds. They have forgotten about their competitors and how they will try to use this information to damage the firm. They think they can operate in a vacuum.

Japan being such a risk averse culture, unscrupulous rivals have a field day playing up your instability and therefore heightened risk as a business partner. I remember running ads for sales staff when I was in Osaka. I merrily ran the ads looking to expand the sales team. Now I knew that, but interestingly our rivals took that as a sign of weakness not strength.

Japan loves secrets and rumours. With everyone living on top of each other for centuries, keeping secrets is almost impossible and salacious talk and spreading rumours are up there with dining out and shopping as national sports. It was made to look as if we were in chaos and there was high turnover in the ranks. Our customers began to ask probing questions about our stability. No doubt they were doing this after they had been briefed by our competitors on what a mess we were and how we were not a suitable supplier anymore.

That negative fallout from the ads never occurred to me in a million years because I was upbeat, focused on the positive, the expansion, the growth. After that near death experience with our customers, I made sure that every ad thereafter had the explanation that we were hiring because we were expanding. What was the additional costs of including those few vital words in the ads – nothing. It was only my ignorance and single focus that allowed our rivals to seek a way in.

The same issues can arise from within. Whenever there is an organisational change, do people start high fiving each other, celebrating the new structure as a way to steal a march on the competitors? No, they are concerned about losing their jobs, or having someone invade their turf, lose face, or being dragged kicking and screaming out of their comfort zone.

This is a great breeding ground for rumours. The formal explanation of what and why this is happening never seems to outpace the rumours. The top executives are all on board with the changes, because they thought of them, but for everyone else, this is new. In the vacuum, the rumour mill kicks into high gear. The impact is that everyone forgets about the customer, the competitors and concerns themselves with their own best interests and imagining all the bad things that are about to unfold.

We have to make sure that every person is spoken to directly and so quash the rumours and misinformation before THEY can gain momentum. Yes, this takes time. But the focus on the customer and the competitor is where we want people concentrating, rather than on what is going on inside the firm. They need to get back to work and the sooner their fears and concerns can be addressed, the faster they can do that.

When people quit, the assumption is there is something wrong in the company. Key people departing is especially unnerving for a lot of people, who immediately jump to all sorts of misconceptions about what this means for their own security or the stability of the enterprise. Sending out a blanket email heaping praise on the departing is guaranteed to set up the vacuum, allowing it to weave its magic spell of impending doom for the survivors.

We need to tell each person, one by one, what is really going on and assure them that everything will be okay. We will find a great replacement, we can carry on in the departing person’s absence, it is not the end of the world. This is time consuming, but it is the best way to ensure that the official version is the only version floating around.

Action Steps:

1. When you have turnover whether it is positive or negative, be aware of external perceptions about the change – that perception will always be a negative one, so prepare to counter it
2. Whenever a vacuum in information appears, it will be filled with rumours and misinformation, so you have to grab hold of the narrative and control it
3. Internally, make sure every single person is spoken to directly and don’t imagine for one second that a blanket email will do the trick –it won’t