What do you do with hearsay and rumors? You collect them. I tell people quite often things like, “Why do you know that?” or, “Who told you that?” And they’ll tell me, “Oh, I heard it third hand,” or sometimes people will say, “Well, I do know something, but I didn’t observe it directly. It’s a rumor so I don’t want to tell you, I don’t want to spread rumors.”And I always encourage people to tell me by saying something like, “Hey, stop. You just did something really, really important and I want you to keep doing it. You told me that you know something and that it’s third hand and rumors can be really important to me.” So if I consistently hear the same rumor over and over and over, and nobody can get to the root cause for me, that tells me one thing. But if I consistently hear the rumor over and over and over, and it leads me to get to the root cause, that was super, super helpful. So I always encourage people to continue to tell me rumors, but tell me that they are rumors so that I know how to handle that data.
