I had the good fortune to sit through a meeting on leadership yesterday and found this practice very interesting: The next time that someone comes up to you and starts talking about something that a peer or manager did – respond with the following:

‘What did they say when you told them that?’

Too often, we have great feedback about a situation that we could be sharing with our peer or manager – but we don’t. We share it with someone else, which is called gossip and does not help anyone. In fact, it creates an environment of distrust.

A great approach.