Does your team love a little drama? Do you? Whether you do or you don’t, it’s worth understanding why we’re seeing so much petty, personal, and pernicious behavior lately. Workplace drama is not a new phenomenon, but it feels all the more costly in today’s work world, where the expectations are high and energy is running low. Let’s consider why your team might love drama so much.

What Counts as Drama

Cy Wakeman is the expert I think of first when I think of workplace drama. Wakeman has been studying and advising on the topic for years. Her definition of drama includes “anything that creates… emotional waste, mentally wasteful thought processes, or unproductive behaviors that keep leaders or their teams from delivering the highest level of results.”

Based on that definition, drama includes gossiping, blaming, defending, meddling, complaining, and anything else Wakeman refers to as “arguing with reality.” She tallies those behaviors up to include 2.5 hours a day per person. Zoinks!

Why is Drama Rewarding?

If we’re spending even a quarter of that much time on drama, it must be giving us something in return. But what??

Drama is Stimulating

Here, we’re dealing with a sad reality: drama is often more interesting than your work tasks. As social creatures, we humans love to get a juicy piece of information about someone else that helps us assess their standing in the group. This kind of information is stimulating, salient, and satisfying—even if we don’t like to admit it. Gossip activates our dopaminergic system and gives a little shot of energy in what otherwise might be a monotonous day.

Given that drama is scratching an itch for stimulation, one way to curtail it is to rekindle the excitement around your work. Talk about what you’re trying to accomplish, share your successes, and bring in the voice of the customer. Having something challenging and worthwhile to work on won’t eliminate drama, but it should relegate it to fewer hours in the week.

Drama Gets Attention

Because drama is stimulating, it’s a great way to attract attention from colleagues. For various reasons, some of us will try to get time in the spotlight even if it’s for less-than-admirable reasons. Your colleagues might be playing the victim in hopes you’ll defend them, or complaining about a teammate in hopes you’ll side with them. Mostly, they just want you to notice them. Alternatively, they might be showing you that they aren’t being acknowledged for their contributions or feeling lonely and isolated. Regardless of whether the motive is pure or not, doling out drama is an effective way of attracting eyeballs.

For those who use drama to attract attention, the alternative is to ask questions that allow the person to share and be rewarded for constructive, useful, and realistic ideas and contributions rather than destructive, demoralizing, or distracting ones. Ask them to share what they’re excited about or what they’re looking forward to, and lavish a little love on them for sharing some good news for a change.

Shared Grievance Creates Bonds

Another reason your team might love to dish a little drama is that it strengthens the social bonds among you. Conspiring and commiserating can increase the sense of intimacy among you and, in the process, bolster trust. The more you share private information or say things you wouldn’t want others to hear, the more vulnerable you become to one another. The more vulnerable, the higher the trust.

To dampen the drama, form bonds based on other factors. One of the simplest forms of that is highlighting positive things you all have in common. Another approach is to call out people’s complementary skills and ideas and how they add up to a strong team.

Drama Obscures Harder Problems

You know what else drama is great for: creating smoke and mirrors to distract from more vexing, uncomfortable, and important problems. If your colleague is busy talking about how other people haven’t done what they should do, why the timelines are completely unreasonable, or how the boss is just out to get them, it means they don’t have to think about what it would take for them to live up to their accountabilities.

If you’re ready to cut through the fog and get to the issues your organization needs you to solve, you’ll have to acknowledge their emotional reactions and then help them process them into something more useful. What would it take to move that forward? How might you get the other department to do their part? How else might you interpret the boss’s comments? Invalidating people’s emotional reactions can amplify them, but dragging the drama into the daylight can encourage others to move through it, rather than hanging out there.

Another Way to Get Sucked into Drama

And one more thought. Sometimes it’s not that drama is rewarding, it’s just that it spreads whether you want it to or not. I’ve written extensively on emotional contagion and the unconscious passing of one person’s emotional state to those around them. If you’re surrounded by colleagues who love to gossip, complain, or promote conspiracy theories about one another, you might be inadvertently sucked into the vortex.

Before you get frustrated with all the drama on your team. And before you dive headfirst into dishing the dirt, consider what purpose the drama is serving for you and for others, and see if you can meet the need more positively and constructively.

Additional Resources

Are you lending support to a teammate or just enabling gossip?

Productive Versus Unproductive Conflict Resolution

From HBR: How to Tell the Difference Between Venting and Gossip

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