Let’s face it, information is power and this includes the information you hold over the people you work with each day. When I first started off in corporate America, I was a gossip blood hound. I spent hours each week sitting in my boss’s office and whispering in low tones about the people around me, what they were saying, what they were doing and how that fit into the overall culture of deceit that I was spinning each day.

This technique was successful in ingratiating me to my immediate superiors but I did far more damage in the long run, damage which took me years to undo. See, when you betray the people around you by divulging things they tell you in confidence in order to secure trust from your higher ups; the one thing you’ve done is played your hand as a deceitful snitch artist to those you report to and, even worse, to yourself.

If you have to achieve success at the expense of others, then you building a castle of lies which will finally collapse on your head (sooner rather than later if you’re lucky).

I actually ended up getting a promotion that took me away from these bosses that I had spun my gossip web with and that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I went from being a frontline employee to being a member of the management team and when that happens, your access to the inner-workings of the frontline associates is usually clamped and split off.

This was a good thing for me because I had to really start performing on my own merit. Whenever I did come across a juicy piece of gossip, I made a conscious effort to keep it to myself, even when the will to divulge became overbearing. I did this because I finally broke down and read the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and this is one of the issues that Covey covers in the book.

So, trust me, even though you see momentary advantage in the barter of information to your immediate superiors, you will serve yourself much better in the long run if you become a gossip black hole, a soothsayer who everyone you work with feels they can come to and unload and know and trust that you will not betray them at the first sign of pleasing your master like a slobbering dog.

Keep in mind that most dogs finally die on the same ground they’ve begged from their entire lives.