The Grapevine & Gossip

Video Transcript

"Now I want to talk about something else which is called the grapevine and this is something that also exists in corporate cultures and work cultures and can even exist in social circles that's a little bit different than gossip. We tend to say I heard it through the grapevine and we associate that with gossip, but the grapevine is actually a little bit different, but I want to caution you about the grapevine. What happens in a grapevine is information is passed along down the grapevine. You could think of that in a hierarchy structure. The president tells the vice president. The vice president tells the manager. The manager tells the worker and on down it goes. Well what you have to be careful of with the grapevine is the information can get changed along the way. So when you are participating in a grapevine what you want to do is you always want to double verify that the information is correct, and always, always assume that what you say in grapevine communication can and will be said to other people. Sometimes in a gossip-type situation we can assume or expect that no one's going to know what we said, but in a grapevine situation know that the information that you are passing on will become common knowledge. So you have to be very careful what you say in grapevine communication."