The further in you get, the earlier you hear things. The reorganisation that is three weeks from being announced. The colleague who has already resigned. The project that will be stopped after the quarter. And then somebody on your team, who has noticed exactly as much as you would have noticed, asks you directly.
Two answers come to mind quickly and both are worse than they look.
The first is the flat denial. No idea, nothing I know of. It buys you an easy afternoon and costs you something you cannot rebuild. Two weeks later the announcement lands, they replay your sentence, and every reassurance you have ever given them gets quietly repriced. People do not forget being lied to about something that then happened.
The second is the hint. The look, the it depends, the careful pause. You have transferred all of the anxiety and none of the information, and now they are guessing at midnight with nothing they can act on. That is not discretion, it is the cost of discretion with none of the benefit.
There is a third answer and it is unglamorous. Say there is something you cannot discuss yet, say it plainly, and then say what you can. I am not able to talk about that at the moment. What I can tell you is that if anything changes that affects you, you will hear it from me as soon as I am allowed to say it. Then keep that promise, because the promise is the entire value of the sentence.
Decide the words before you need them. This question always arrives unexpectedly, in a corridor, and improvising is how people end up denying things.
And do the upward half, which almost nobody does. Go back to whoever told you and ask exactly what you may say, to whom, and when it becomes public. Most confidentiality is vaguer than it needs to be, and people who ask usually get a workable boundary instead of an imagined one.
Your usefulness to the people above you depends on being watertight. Your usefulness to the people beside you depends on their never having caught you saying something untrue. Both are available at once, and that narrow path is most of what being trusted at work means.
– Asael Shinder
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