A colleague suddenly stopped coming to work. Do we deserve to know why?

A colleague who is part of a small project team (that includes me) suddenly stopped turning up to work. The remaining team members asked a supervisor what was happening. We were told our colleague was taking some personal leave and that we should continue the project without them.

A few people in the project became agitated. They started talking about how we should get to the bottom of what had happened. I said I thought this was a bad idea and that it was not our place. One team member argued that because we were now going to have to work harder to complete the project on time, we deserved to find out what was going on. Isn’t that a silly rationale?

I think your discomfort is very well-founded. The reason for your colleague’s absence became none of your business the moment you were told about the personal leave, and were offered no elaboration. Your supervisor’s reticence spoke volumes. But it seems some in your project group didn’t take the very obvious hint.

Although you and your associates’ curiosity – and worry – is understandable, the urgent need to delve into someone’s private life is not. From what you’ve told me in your full email, at least one co-worker is treating this like some kind of scandal – almost like they’re a tabloid reporter on a mission to get the scoop. This attitude strikes me as neither helpful nor healthy.

The problem, if it’s not entirely obvious, is that anything could have happened to the colleague now on leave: an illness or death in the family, a serious medical diagnosis, a sudden and acute health problem or accident, or any number of other awful things. Even if it isn’t something as life-changing as that, the mere possibility is enough.

Treating the uncertainty surrounding this person’s sudden leave as entertainment – something to breathlessly theorise on and dig into – is, frankly, crass. And I suspect the person pushing hardest to “solve the mystery” knows that.

To me, this sounds like a personal matter being sensitively handled by your organisation’s decision makers.

They are presumably trying to paint over their own crudeness with a layer of “logic”. But the rationale they have come up with is concealing nothing. The claim that a revelation is “owed”′ to the people still in the project team because their jobs are now more onerous is a stretch to put it extremely mildly. You called it “silly”; I’d call it puerile.

I’m being quite harsh, I know. And I don’t want to sound holier than thou. Most of us indulge in a little bit of workplace gossip from time to time. I’m sure many people reading this can think of a time they overstepped the mark with an ungracious remark about an absent peer. I certainly can. But what you’ve described strikes me as something that goes way beyond idle griping or speculation.

Ultimately, I think it all comes down to a fairly simple principle: the privacy and wishes of the person suddenly taking leave have to trump the inquisitiveness of their colleagues. Only under the most specific and unusual circumstances would this fail to hold true.

But even if you want to argue that the team has a right to know, why is there such urgency? The fact is that, in all likelihood, some kind of answer will eventually become available.

It might not come straight away, and it might not be as salacious as some want it to be, but even if this colleague never returns to their role, it would be out of the ordinary for leaders (or others close to this colleague) to remain totally silent on the matter. And if they did, as I alluded to earlier, there is probably a good reason for it.

To me, this sounds like a personal matter being sensitively handled by your organisation’s decision makers. They should be applauded for it, not undermined by juvenile machinations and whispering campaigns.