It’s always better to tell someone than to just ignore them and hope they go away.
I’ve been ghosted. Have you? Don’t know what that is? It’s when someone just totally ignores you, walks away, and does not explain anything to you rather than paying you the courtesy of saying they’re not interested, won’t do what you discussed, or, plainly, just don’t like you.
The idea is that it’s easier to just walk away than deal with it. In some cases, like if someone is being abusive or violent, perhaps it is not such a bad idea to just ghost them to protect yourself. But the phrase isn’t generally used in such contexts. It’s usually reserved for more mundane situations. Go out on a date, don’t like the person, just ignore them whenever they reach out (or just don’t show up when you’ve agreed to meet them again). Have a job interview you don’t want to go to or aren’t interested in – or got the job you interviewed for but decide you’ll take another offer after you’ve already accepted this one? Just don’t show up and don’t bother saying anything to them.
The two instances I’ve faced in the past couple of years were none of these, but equally confusing. I had someone reach out about me helping their sales organization by sharing some of my relationship concepts through a training. We got down the road, had next steps, and then I stopped hearing from them or getting responses. (I did get a group email from them about something else eventually, so I know they’re still alive and doing the same work at least!).
The other was in working with an editor on my second book. He missed his self-imposed deadline to get my edited draft back to me by over a month, and returned only a partially-edited manuscript at that point. The edits were not particularly thoughtful or helpful (mostly just, “This is great!” Or, “I love this point!” Both nice to read, but neither helps my book get better). He promised to get the second half done within a week. Three weeks later, still nothing. I emailed and heard nothing back. I texted, and heard nothing. A mutual friend reached out, and he responded, but didn’t address the situation. And I should mention I had paid him 50% of his total fee to secure his services.
A few weeks went by, and I just left it with a message just hoping he was ok, and that I was concerned about him. A week after that, he wrote back, and explained how ashamed he was for how poor a job he had done, and felt he was too far gone to be able to come back from failing me, so he was just going to ignore me, and that was wrong. He said he would finish the work (he said he was actually almost done), and get it right back to me, and wouldn’t expect the rest of his fee. As you can guess, I never heard from him again. I did hear from our friend that he did the same thing to someone else he knew around the same time.
The thing is, it may seem easier in the moment to just ghost someone you don’t want to face. It may feel hard to say, “I failed.” It may be scary – I know people who would have been physically harmed for failure as a child, so they get very scared to admit it as adults and prefer avoiding the situation (if they even would try in the first place). If you commit to something and change your mind or want to do something else instead, like the job examples, you may not want to deal with it or may fear someone being upset with you. I get that.
We find people ghost in other, less explicit ways. Managers can be afraid to give direct feedback to underperforming or problem employees, and make everyone else deal with it rather than fixing the issue. Maybe they don’t want to hurt the underperformer’s feelings. I understand that. However, that short-term potential pain (which you can lessen by delivering the feedback well and being helpful in working on making things better) is far less than the long-term pain of someone being generally incompetent and unable to hold down a job for something they could have remedied long ago with the right guidance. I’ve written about this before, and have seen too many managers fail their employees because of this.
But while it seems easier, I can assure you it isn’t.
Let’s look at the job interview/offer situation. If you ghost the recruiter or hiring manager, can you ever expect them to consider you again? You may not think that matters, but I have news for you – people who hire you may also be job searching at some point, just like you are now. That means they may end up somewhere else you want to work. Do you think they’ll support your application knowing how you handled this one? I’ll give you a hint about the answer – they won’t.
I once had a star performer on one of my teams, and her manager brought in the woman’s sister to fill a vacancy. I’m not generally one for hiring siblings, and probably wouldn’t have approved the move if it was brought to me, but I can also understand why the decision was made. Our employee was amazing at her job, but also just as a human being in terms of her values and style. Her sister seemed to be cut from the same cloth, unsurprisingly. Her sister did training for two days after accepting the job offer, and then just never showed up on her third day. She didn’t respond to calls, texts or emails. Our employee was mortified and embarrassed. We assured her she didn’t need to be, and life went on.
The sister ended up applying for another role about a year later on the same team. She said in her cover letter how she had handled the situation poorly, learned her lesson, and would do better this time. Needless to say, she did not even get an interview (though she was told as much rather than being ghosted in return).
Having been in the C-Suite, as soon as my title changed on LinkedIn, I got flooded with messages from people trying to sell me things. Someone on my Sales team told me to just ignore them, and eventually they’ll go away. I never felt good about that, and would always send a note back saying that it wasn’t something we’d be interested in. Some of them would write back and try again anyway, but most would stop (some would thank me for letting them know). The few cases in which I listened to his advice as someone who did exactly what they were doing for his job, they would still chase me. I would get at least three or four more messages from them if I didn’t respond than if I did. While I could ignore those messages, too, it was less effort and aggravations or me to send a quick, “No,” to them. Here, ghosting would cost me more nuisance in my day than respecting them enough to tell them it wasn’t for me.
As an example of how people move around, as a consultant, I served a new CEO of a company and his leadership team. Some of the work went extremely well, but the Partner I worked for did some things that really upset the CEO by making him look bad in front of his Board, and strained my relationship with him via guilt-by-association. I worked very hard to repair my relationship with him by addressing head on what my Partner had done, and how to support him to work through it. Since moving on from that project, I’ve run into that CEO three more times in other roles he’s taken in other organizations. He could easily have shut down the deals I was working on, but didn’t because of the work I put in to address things head on.
I also had two job offers I was weighing, and accepted the one I really wanted. Due to some complicating family developments, I couldn’t take that job in the end (it required a relocation we couldn’t do), so I had to call my new boss-to-be to rescind my acceptance. This was a guy I had been watching in the industry, thought the world of, and we were both really excited to work together. He went on vacation thinking I was joining his team, and he could stop his search for this critical role reporting to him. I actually had to tell him while he was still on vacation, just to make it even more daunting of a situation to have to give bad news in.
The way I went about it, being up front, honest, disappointment for how my actions impacted him, and concerned about leaving this as our last interaction rang true. I could have just told the recruiter the news (even just with a quick email), but I realized I needed to bite the bullet and tell the big boss, no matter how much harder that would have been to do.
Fast forward a year, after working in the job I took reluctantly that was miserable and I wished I could leave, he called me about a potential opening on his team. And he’s done that again in the next job he took, and has supported me with numerous connections and moments of brilliant advice throughout my career.
What if I ghosted him? What if I just hid in the corner after that CEO and my Partner got into it, just finished my work, and never said anything? Clearly, I would pay a much bigger price than any discomfort that might have come in a 15 minute conversation.
And what about the editor who ghosted me? Clearly, I’ll never refer any business to him, whereas I have referred multiple authors to my other editor who ended up jumping in to turn around a great edit and get my book back on schedule.
What about my employee’s sister? She could have gotten that job she wanted when she was really ready to take it rather than ensuring he never even gets considered.
Ultimately, to me, ghosting someone is about not respecting them. And that respect is on a very basic level – respecting their existence. It’s not about their authority or level in an organization, their ability to make or break your career, etc. It’s just about respect them enough as a human being to let them know why your answer is, “No.” You don’t need to leave them guessing, or make them waste their time chasing you for no reason. Just tell them the truth.
Ghosting has apparently become a thing. It doesn’t have to be. If you choose to be mature, honest, clear and demonstrate the most basic level of respect, we can eradicate this behavior entirely.
_________________________________________________________
This article is inspired by my new book, The 50 75 100 Solution: Build Better Relationships, available in all major formats including paperback, audiobook, Kindle, Apple Books and more.
