"What happened to you?"

The Almanac guide to trust in media

Imagine you have a coworker, Gray. You’ve worked with her long enough that you can’t remember exactly when you met, but you do remember how. Gray was recommended to you by a former colleague, since terminated by the company, as someone worth knowing due to her connections and insights into your gargantuan employer.

Although not an executive, Gray holds a position that affords her knowledge of entire sections of the company that are otherwise opaque to you, despite that you’re roughly peers. Even better, Gray is willing to share at least some of this information with you despite that you have little or nothing to offer in return.

Gray doesn’t work in your department, so you don’t see her every day. In fact, at your busiest times, you don’t see her for weeks. But when you do run into her again—in someone’s office or in a conference room waiting for a meeting to start—you’re reminded why you like catching up. Unlike some of the other people you work with (cough cough), Gray is a professional. She’s smart. She’s hardworking. And while it’s also true that she likes to advertise—at least one name is dropped at every interaction—she never holds your lack of connections against you. Conversation is easy, and you always walk away with the sense that a secret curtain was parted, if only for a moment.

Thanks to Gray, you knew to politely decline when asked to work on a risky but potentially lucrative product line extension that was later canceled. You knew to expect layoffs several years ago and to prepare accordingly (although thankfully you were spared). Also through her, you found out last year that one of the executives in your division was being investigated for financial impropriety, giving you the chance to distance yourself and keep your budget squeaky clean.

Your relationship with Gray seems uniformly positive, which is why you’re happy to see her promoted, even though it means you aren’t really peers anymore. After all, she’s clearly capable and puts in the work, even more than you. Why shouldn’t she be promoted?

You don’t suspect anything at all in fact, until, out of the blue, your former colleague emails you an article from a trade magazine.

“Have you seen this?”

Written by a stock market analyst, the article suggests the product line extension—the one you had been asked to work on—had been scuttled internally, that forces within the company had deliberately denied it resources and talent, and that as such, it never had any real chance of success, and that this was done for individual gain despite the negative impact on shareholder value.

As you read it, a sequence of events that you had experienced as the normal background noise in a company suddenly takes on a much more sinister flavor. You recall offhand jokes others made about the new product team being the best assembly of “special needs talent” the company could find. You remember shaking your head at several obvious missteps that made their way around the company in email chains. You realize that Gray now occupies the role of the man who was blamed and let go.

Still… it seems far fetched to suggest orchestration. Is anyone really that skilled? Maybe it really was your best interests and not hers that led to her recommendation. Perhaps she really was the best person for her new job. You can’t say otherwise, so you go on as you did before.

Months pass. You don’t see Gray as much, but when you’re able to reconnect, things are as they were. She tells you about some organizational changes in the works, and you’re able to bend her ear about a new idea you have and watch it get some traction among the senior staff.

The following year, sitting in the audience at the company’s annual all-employee meeting, you watch Gray take the stage and announce that the executive you knew to be under investigation has left the company “for health reasons” and that she is taking his place. As you listen to her praise him with polite euphemisms, where before she had nothing but recrimination, you get a strange feeling. You look around at the audience, attentively absorbing her words. Surely you’re not the only who thinks this is a little odd.

It isn’t that it’s a big lie. Maybe it isn’t even a lie at all. Maybe the guy really does have health problems. Rather, it’s how easily she’s delivering it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Gray repeats her explanation in the company newsletter, where she also details her vision for the department she now runs. When rumors surface in the press about the same kind of financial impropriety she had mentioned back when, Gray denies them publicly. On the pretense of restoring public confidence, she joins with several other executives to create a special Disinformation Committee dedicated to quelling such damaging rumors—which first requires uncovering their source.

When you finally talk to Gray again and ask how the new job is going, she explains in a wistful tone that she doesn’t have the freedom she had before but that her constraint is noble. She’s a steward of the enterprise now. People’s jobs depend on her, which is why she has to take rumors of impropriety seriously, even though that’s all they were.

That makes you pause. You can’t say it’s not true, but it does seem odd given her obvious intelligence and the detailed knowledge she had about so many other aspects of the company. And if it really was just a rumor, isn’t she just as guilty of spreading it? Why hasn’t she been dragged before the Disinformation Committee? Why does she get a pass?

As you say your goodbyes and walk away, you find yourself mentally holding her statements like a stinky diaper, not just her recent statements but everything from the past. The reason your relationship had been so refreshing was precisely because it wasn’t rumor. You can get that from anyone. Implicitly or not, she held out that she knew better.

Months later, in a meeting involving your department, you hear Gray omit relevant information from a report to senior staff, information that might lead a reasonable person to a different conclusion. As it happens, you agree with her conclusion, but not so strongly that you’re willing to lie for it, especially in this case, where it also happens to benefit her. So you speak up and tactfully fill the gap so that senior management can make an informed decision.

After the meeting, Gray says nothing, but you have to wonder: Have you made an enemy? Partly out of curiosity, partly out of self-preservation, you start paying much closer attention to everything she says, looking for anything you might be able to verify yourself—an effort made all the easier by the company’s fancy new intranet, designed to facilitate cross-department communication and collaboration.

You find a report she released several month back on a major product liability issue, and you download and analyze the data yourself. You find where she’s clashed with peers, and you reach out for their side of the story. Same when the department fails to clear a regulatory hurdle for the first time in its history and some of your coworkers are fired.

Slowly, a pattern emerges. Gray has a habit of omitting anything inconvenient to her cause. In cases where the outcome is beneficial, she has no trouble passing off innuendo as fact. When she makes a mistake, she buries it or else excuses herself for reasons she wouldn’t accept from her enemies—or you. And she does all of that a lot.

No one’s faultless, of course. We all get it wrong sometimes, even when we’re trying not to. And it’s not like the rest of us own up to our mistakes, even to our friends, let alone to the world. In that respect, Gray is no better or worse than anyone else—which is exactly why you don’t trust her more than anyone else. She’s just another opinion, albeit a polished and outspoken one.

Even if she means well—which is questionable, at least—good intentions can’t turn wrong data right. The fact that she’s willing to omit relevant information or confuse supposition with fact—for ANY reasons—means you can’t make responsible decisions based on anything she says. You never know which part of the story is just not true.

You might still listen to her opinion on the restaurant she tried over the weekend or the movie she saw. (She does occasionally have decent taste.) But anything involving your job or the direction of the company—anything of real value, anything that might impact someone’s life or future—is immediately suspect. It has to be.

But she doesn’t see it that way. She can’t. Gray has now picked up on your distrust, and from her tone and behavior, it’s clear she’s having trouble making sense of it. She thought you were one of the good guys. To her, nothing’s changed. She’s doing what she’s always done.

“What happened to you?” she finally asks.

And now you know she sees you as the enemy and it’s only a matter of time before she treats you accordingly.