They Will Make It Up
Here is how people find out.
A job posting, seen at the gym before coffee. A LinkedIn update from a former colleague that is one sentence too specific. A text from a friend at another company: did you hear? A rumor passed at ten o’clock at night, from someone who heard from someone, that a team is being dissolved. An office door that is closed more often than it used to be. A calendar hold with no title.
People find out. They always find out. The only question is whether they find out from you.
Leaders hold information close for different reasons. Some are pacing a rollout thoughtfully, staging what’s known so the team isn’t hit with everything at once. That’s leadership. That’s care.
But that’s not what this piece is about.
This is about the other pattern. The one where information is held not because of timing and thoughtful leadership, but because the culture has decided that information is something to be managed, metered, protected from the people it affects most. Where “we’re not ready to announce” stretches into weeks. Where withholding becomes the default, and telling becomes the exception.
That is not pacing, it’s gatekeeping.
When leaders stop communicating, people don’t stop needing an answer. They make one up. And the made-up answer is always worse than the real answer would have been.
I’ve started describing it this way to the leaders I work with. It’s like being parents. This is what we think the kids need to know. And this is what they don’t need to know. Except the kids are adults. They have colleagues. They have LinkedIn. They have phones that ring at ten o’clock at night. The information gets through. It just gets through distorted, through the wrong people, at the wrong time, with no one to make sense of it.
And while all of that is happening, employee engagement is increasingly out of reach.
Leaders who are withholding think they are containing costs and minimizing risk. TBut a nervous system in the dark doesn’t wait patiently. It looks for threat. Your nervous system can’t tell the difference between a cheetah and an announcement about a reorg. Uncertainty without information reads as danger. People can’t think clearly in danger. They can’t collaborate, plan, execute, or care about their work. They can only scan for what’s coming.
I’m not suggesting full transparency all the time. The solution is not telling your team everything the moment you know it. It is not dumping every half-formed conversation, every uncertain scenario, every anxious thought into their inboxes. A team flooded with unfiltered information is just as dysregulated as one starved of it.
What works is neither hoarding nor dumping. It’s cadence.
It is a simple practice I teach in my SHIFT framework.
Every week, tell your team three things.
Here is what I know. Here is what I don’t know. Here is what I am doing to find out.
That’s it. That is the whole practice.
It sounds simple. In environments where leaders are used to holding information like currency, it’s a big shift. It doesn’t require you to breach confidentiality or require you to have answers you don’t have. It only requires you to name the space where the answers will come from. And to take responsibility for getting them.
When you name it, the rumor loop weakens, because the made-up answer has to compete with a real one. A real one with a cadence. A real one that comes back next week, and the week after.
The leaders I watch withholding information are not being strategic. They are being scared. Scared of getting it wrong. Scared of saying too much. Scared of the conversation itself. And the cost of that fear shows up in every rumor, every ten pm phone call, every person who stopped working last Tuesday because they’re trying to figure out what’s coming for them.
You don’t have to know everything to lead through change. You have to be willing to name what you know, what you don’t, and what you’re doing about it.
The rest is just trust, asked for out loud.
If you’re a leader noticing your own nervous system going offline in moments like these, the reactivity, the avoidance, the urge to control what you can’t, Regulated Mind at Work is a 21-day audio course, two minutes a day. The first seven days are free. [link]s system going offline in moments like these, the reactivity, the avoidance, the urge to control what you can’t, Regulated Mind at Work is a 21-day audio course, two minutes a day. Try the first week free.
