Leaders Who Gossip: How One Toxic Habit Destroys Your Effectiveness

Why Leaders Fall into the Gossip Trap

Leaders engage in negative gossip for several compelling but ultimately destructive reasons. Sharing criticism of others creates a false sense of intimacy and insider status—”I’m telling you something private” feels like building trust. There’s also an ego component: criticizing others temporarily elevates the speaker by comparison. Some leaders use gossip as a misguided political strategy, attempting to manage perceptions or build alliances. Others simply lack the self-awareness to recognize the pattern, often mimicking behavior they observed in previous leaders.

The Ripple Effects of Destructive Comments

For the Leader

This habit systematically erodes trust. Even when people appear to engage with gossip, they’re making mental notes: “If they talk about others this way to me, they’ll talk about me this way to others.” It damages credibility and professional reputation, sometimes irreparably. Teams become hesitant to be open or vulnerable, which stifles honest communication and problem-solving.

For the Organization

The broader impacts include:

• A toxic culture where people feel unsafe.
• Decreased collaboration as people become more guarded.
• Talent loss as high performers seek healthier environments.
• Wasted time and energy on unproductive dynamics.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies, where criticized individuals become defensive or adversarial.

Perhaps most destructively, this behavior prevents leaders from developing genuine influence. Real leadership authority comes from consistently demonstrating integrity, fairness, and the courage to address issues directly and constructively rather than through back channels.

Measuring the Impact: A Large-Scale Study

To quantify these effects, we conducted a comprehensive 360-degree assessment of 181 leaders over an 18 to 24-month period. Each leader was evaluated by approximately 15 raters, including their manager, peers, direct reports, and others. The assessment measured 31 different leadership behaviors using a 5-point scale ranging from “significant strength” to “needs significant improvement.”

The key item we focused on was: “Discourages destructive comments about other people and groups.”

The Results: A Dramatic Pattern

When we compared overall leadership effectiveness ratings across quartiles with the results on the behavior of discouraging destructive comments about other groups and individuals, the results were striking. Each quartile showed a significant increase in overall effectiveness ratings (an average of all 31 behaviors measured). Leaders who scored in the bottom quartile on discouraging destructive comments were viewed as substantially less effective across nearly every dimension.

In fact, when we analyzed the data using t-values to compare the bottom and top quartiles, we found that 29 of the 31 leadership behaviors measured showed significant differences. The eight core competencies we examined all demonstrated highly significant gaps between the bottom and top quartiles, revealing the outsized impact of this single behavior.

This “boomerang effect” was unmistakable: leaders who made destructive comments about others suffered severe damage to perceptions of their own effectiveness.

The Power of Awareness: Leaders Can Change

The post-test data revealed something equally important: the power of feedback to drive change. Among leaders who received pre-test data showing them in the bottom quartile for making destructive comments, 16% improved dramatically—moving from the bottom quartile to the top quartile.

These leaders experienced remarkable transformations:

• Their ratings on discouraging destructive comments jumped from the 7th percentile to the 88th percentile.
• Their overall leadership effectiveness rating soared from the 29th percentile to the 78th percentile.

This represents a massive shift in perceived effectiveness from changing just one behavior. Even smaller improvements had substantial positive impacts. The data clearly shows that helping leaders recognize their problematic behaviors provides powerful motivation for change.

Conclusion

This research provides compelling evidence that leadership gossip and destructive comments are not minor interpersonal missteps—they are career-limiting behaviors that systematically undermine a leader’s effectiveness across virtually every dimension of leadership. The data reveals three critical insights:

First, the damage is pervasive. Leaders who engage in destructive comments aren’t just hurting their reputation in one area; they’re viewed as less effective in 29 of 31 measured individual behaviors. This single toxic habit creates a halo effect that colors how others perceive everything about their leadership.

Second, the penalty is severe. Moving from the bottom quartile to the top quartile on this one behavior correlates with a 49-percentile jump in overall leadership effectiveness. Few leadership development interventions can claim such a dramatic impact from addressing a single behavior.

Third, change is possible—and it works. The 16% of leaders who made the journey from bottom to top quartile prove that with awareness and commitment, leaders can break this destructive pattern and transform their effectiveness. Even modest improvements yielded meaningful gains.

Fourth, change need not take years.  Changing the perceptions of others has a predictable lag in time, but the leader’s behavior can change in weeks and months.

For leaders committed to excellence, the path forward is clear: make it a personal standard to never speak negatively about others behind their backs. Address issues directly, constructively, and with courage. Model the culture of trust and psychological safety you want to create. The data shows that this single commitment may be one of the highest leverage changes a leader can make.

One tactic to enhance this changed behavior is to find opportunities to praise and pass on kudos about others. Moving from critic to cheerleader helps to firmly establish the new optimum behavior.

Your team is watching. Your peers are watching. What they see in how you speak about others shapes everything they believe about your character—and your effectiveness as a leader.

-Joe Folkman

At Zenger Folkman, our mission is simple: help leaders become more effective—faster—through research-backed development. If you’re early in your leadership journey, I encourage you to explore our newest leadership research and resources. To stay in the loop, sign up for our newsletter, and if you enjoy learning in bite-sized conversations, listen to The 90th Percentile: An Unconventional Leadership Podcast where we share evidence-based insights you can apply immediately.