A friend of mine who works for a large financial institution told me that he and his team are trying to change the way they talk on conference calls and Zoom meetings.
The usual give-and-take banter they’d engage in as meetings got going or over a turkey wrap had become, thanks to a few bad financial quarters and some major corporate restructuring, kind of negative. Pessimistic. Sharply critical of others. Maybe even a little snippy. Gossipy. Personal.
I’m not sure how they noticed that because I’m not sure I would notice that. All of those things — pessimism, gossip, small-minded sniping — are pretty much encoded in the DNA of people who work in the entertainment industry. It’s what we call “room tone,” the ambient background soundtrack that’s always there. It’s like living next to Niagara Falls: After a while, you don’t even notice the noise.
At any given moment in any office in Hollywood, half of the workday is spent hashing and rehashing other people’s failures, or, slightly more frequently, trying to twist and re-frame someone else’s moderate successes into abject defeats.
I assumed, until I talked to my friend in finance, that this kind of thing was specific to the entertainment industry. But apparently, it goes way beyond Hollywood and your local middle school.
But my friend and his colleagues weren’t happy with this development, so they decided to try something. Before making a comment or a nasty observation, they agreed to ask themselves three questions: Is what I’m about to say true? Is it kind? And is it necessary?
So far, my friend reports, the results have been interesting. These days, when they gather for a lunchtime Zoom, they mostly eat together in complete silence. Conference calls last a few minutes at the most. No one says anything to anyone until the meeting formally begins. There is zero banter.
No one, it seems, can think of anything to say that is true, kind, and necessary. And since they can’t check all three boxes, they just sit there on screen, chewing quietly.
Once or twice, someone will look up and start to say something — “Hey! Did you guys hear that…” — and then stop suddenly. Across the speaker’s face will be the realization that what she or he was about to say wasn’t going to be true and kind and necessary, so everyone goes back to their Sweetgreen bowl in dejected silence.
It’s the all-or-nothing standard that’s the problem. The “true and kind” criteria, my friend told me, are a breeze to meet. It’s easy to think of something both true and kind, or at least true and neutral, to say about a colleague or a new business strategy from the C-suite.
What’s harder, what, in fact, is almost impossible, is to say something that is “necessary” because, he told me, in the world of finance, not much really needs to be said. Most of it is already there, on paper or in the PowerPoint deck, or so obvious to everyone that it doesn’t need to be said aloud.
We tell each other all sorts of unnecessary things, all day, every day, in pretty much every business. If you really pay attention to the memos and emails that come across your computer screen, you’ll be struck by how pointless most of the sentences are.
So, why do we do it? Two reasons come to mind: First, it’s like a dog wagging its tail. It’s a signal to the other members of the pack that we’re all friendly here and all on the same team. A few minutes at the top of the Zoom gathering moaning and carping about the stupidity or incompetence of people outside of the pack just reinforces the closeness of the team. It’s toxic, sure, but it’s very unifying.
And second, once we’ve all said a few nasty things about certain co-workers, we’ve created a circle of trust among the others in the conversation. Workplaces and schools and family units and any collection of human beings are notoriously bad places to talk trash about someone. It almost always gets back to them. But by engaging in a few minutes of nasty backbiting, by creating an unsafe space, in a way, everyone on the team has something potentially incriminating on everyone else. Mutually assured destruction works, as the Cold War taught us.
So, here’s the paradox: If we try hard, we can be more truthful and more kind, but there’s no way we can limit ourselves to the necessary. In other words, we all have the capacity to be nicer, but none of us seem to be able to shut up, and that’s what keeps an economy going.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
