Our view of the CXO’s life is very glamorous. It would appear all they do is attend board meetings, press interviews, give inspirational speeches, pose with celebrities, inaugurate new facilities, and so on.

The reality is they deal with a lot of boring stuff internally. One of these is to keep tabs on what’s happening within their organisation. This involves lots of one-to-one conversations with colleagues. And often these forums are misused by people with access to the C-suite.

“So, what else is happening” kind of generic question becomes an invitation to give information that could be untrue or not qualified. Every day we hear bits and pieces from colleagues that border around the truth but also get magnified in our imaginary mind. Sometimes we are the origin of fake news and many times we are the vector to our unsuspecting colleagues.

True or False

Let’s list the news we get from our dear colleagues.

“ There will be single-digit hikes this year or no hikes at all.”

“VP of Finance is having an affair with her Finance analyst and that’s caused an unrest in the finance department.”

“The CTO is unhappy with the budget allocated and is directly in touch with corporate Hq in the US to enhance it.”

“The marketing head wants to sack the PR Agency but is helpless becoz the agency was recommended by the CEO.”

“The meetings of the M & A head suggests we will be acquired by somebody soon. ”

As a leader, some of the fake news may affect you depending on your mental make-up. Every bit of information that comes from a colleague can seem true even if it sounds hard to believe. It’s only natural for leaders to get distracted and sometimes spend time qualifying it to quell it. After all, the job of the CXOs is to make decisions to take the organisation ahead. If he or she is swayed due to false information it will affect the decision making speed and direction.

Probably, some of the seemingly damaging rumours need to be resolved in the larger interest. Some say they only look at the larger picture and will ignore this gossipy stuff. However, qualifying or clarifying helps to stay clear of a potentially vicious atmosphere or for their team to participate better.

Wild goose chase

Once my HR Head mentioned that the legal head was resigning as he was going to form his own firm. In addition, our CFO had also invested in it and the new prospects that we rejected would be redirected there.

I was naturally worried about the distraction it must be causing the larger team. I trusted my CFO but also had to verify what the HR had told me. After sitting over this information for a week, I mustered the courage to ask my CFO about this. He assured me there was nothing like this and was also obviously hurt by the nature of this false news.

As it turned out later, the legal head went overseas to join another company. This left us laughing over the rumour that wasted two weeks of organisation leadership time.

In another instance, my assistant hurriedly called me. She said, “It seems like our IT Head has threatened to assault one of his team members”. I was travelling and took the next flight and came back and met the duo. Both denied any disagreement. Once again, I felt like a fool that somebody was having fun at my cost.

The cure

In large organisations, you can’t help but face unpleasant rumours from time to time. Addressing each of these is tiring, time-consuming and sometimes when you try to clarify, that itself can cause further distrust. Some leaders try to delegate this. Some actually wade in, depending on the situation. It’s likely that their listening posts are their direct reportees who may also be up against each other in different contexts. Some of the smarter CEOs have multiple channel connects to constantly be in touch with the reality.

Consequently, CEOs who believe prevention is better than cure do the basic stuff repeatedly well. Bringing the team together often, keeping the transparency culture going, frequent townhalls, communicating the news when it’s hot rather than waiting for it to spread, are some of the obvious things one can do to prevent rumours and false news.

Certainly, when a divergent set of people work together, the competitive atmosphere, or sheer imaginative human minds can cause fake news. The challenge for the leader is to keep refreshing the channels he chooses to listen and act.

Many a time the channel itself is a give-away. With experience we know some information is coloured by the carrier’s bias. When we watch TimesNow, NDTV, Republic, India Today, we also know how to process them based on their past with us. Some are news, many are coloured by opinions.

Which fake news derailed you the most recently?

Kamal Karanth is Co-Founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing firm

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