False stories about opposing leaders' competence, integrity, or private conduct spread through the informal network until backing those leaders looks gullible and the change their fall allows looks natural.
An example
Over one spring at a regional bank, the chief financial officer heard three versions of the same story about himself. A branch director asked whether it was true he had been talking to a competitor about a job. A treasury analyst mentioned, carefully, that people were saying the bank's last two acquisitions had been his idea and his mistake. An assistant on the executive floor had heard he was drinking at lunch. None of it was true, and each telling used nearly the same words. Meanwhile a group around the head of retail banking was making the case for a new operating model that would fold finance into a shared-services unit. At the April executive meeting, two colleagues who had backed him on the last budget sat with their arms folded and kept silent. The operating-model proposal went forward to the chief executive with no objection from anyone but him.
Why it works
The stories go after the incumbents and leave the plan alone. Each claim strips something from the case for staying loyal: a leader thought to be job hunting offers no protection, and one thought to have bungled acquisitions offers no judgment worth deferring to. So the incumbents' side looks worse, and standing next to them gets costlier, because supporters risk looking gullible or complicit. The change gets a lift by contrast, with nobody arguing for it. It depends on an active, trusted grapevine, on falsehoods plausible enough to survive a first hearing, and on the author staying invisible. A claim traced to an interested party usually collapses and can swing sympathy back to the target.
The thinking behind it
Leon Festinger Festinger's A Theory of Social Comparison Processes (1954) holds that people judge their opinions by comparing them with others, especially people like themselves, when no objective standard exists. Almost nobody can check a rumor about an executive's private conduct, so employees settle what they believe by what colleagues seem to believe. A campaign that reaches many peers supplies that comparison, which is also why one traced plant, shown to the same colleagues, can reset it.
Cass R. Sunstein In Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation (1999), Sunstein describes a self-reinforcing process in which a belief gains plausibility the more it is repeated in public discussion, partly because people learn from what others seem to believe and partly because they adjust what they say to stay accepted. Planted stories about a leader spread the same way inside a company, and whoever seeds them plays the part he calls the availability entrepreneur.
Carl I. Hovland Hovland and Weiss, in The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness (1951), found that a message from an untrustworthy source persuaded far less at first, but weeks later the gap had largely closed, because people kept the content and stopped connecting it to the source. That sleeper effect explains why a smear outlives suspicion about its origin, and why the defense ties every correction to the traced source and moves quickly.
Warning signs
The same unsourced claim about a leader reaches several people who have no connection to one another, in almost identical wording. The claims touch competence, integrity, or private conduct, and none comes with a date, a document, or a name. Confusion grows about what is true at the top. Allies of the target go quiet in meetings without saying why. Whoever stands to gain from the target's fall never repeats the story and is often the most sympathetic person in the room about it.
How to defend yourself
Out-whispering the campaign rarely works. Trace it.
- Ask every person who repeats a claim where they heard it, and write down the answer with the date. Follow the chain back as far as it goes.
- Compare notes with two or three people you trust who heard their own versions. Near-identical wording across unconnected people is evidence of a common source.
- Answer specific claims with specific facts, in person, to the people whose support matters most: the chair, your direct peers, your own team.
- Take a traced plant to the chief executive or the chair, with your record of who said what and when.
A single planted item tied to an interested party discredits everything else from the same source, and the backlash tends to land on the author.
How a leader shuts it down
Let it be known that adverse claims about executives get raised openly, with a name attached, and act on that when a story reaches you: ask for the source before you ask about the claim. Thank the people who bring rumors to you and help trace them. A leader who listens to unsourced stories about a peer has become the campaign's audience.