I get a lot of questions here at the Business of Management, and many of them have broad appeal to managers at just about every level. So, I’ve started a new Business of Management blog feature: Hey Management Guy! If you have a question about a workforce management practice (stupid or otherwise), just post it at the bottom of this blog item or e-mail it here to me at jhollon@workforce.com. I’ll pick out the best queries and answer them here each month.

Hey Management Guy! My company has a problem with employees who don’t know how to keep their mouths shut. Management is constantly hearing about internal information that has been passed along to competitors, vendors and, worst of all, the media. How can we get workers to understand that what happens inside should stay inside?

—Cathy from Cupertino, California

Cathy:

This is a new question about a very old problem that just about every organization struggles with. In fact, The Management Guy remembers working at a newspaper where the bald baboon of an editor was driven absolutely bonkers by internal information getting leaked to the competition. So he sent a nasty and threatening memo to the staff warning of dire consequences for anyone caught doing so. Of course, his nasty memo got faxed to the competition no more than 10 minutes after he sent it out—from the fax machine right outside his office, no less.

This illustrates a critical point: For better or worse, workers respond to the tone set by the managers above them. No organization likes internal information getting leaked, but if you want it to stop, you need the top managers to treat everyone like adults and give them a business case for why they need to stop.

In fact, there is another Cupertino company that is struggling with this very problem: Yahoo. New CEO Carol Bartz recently sent out a memo venting about a lot of things, but specifically griping about someone “forwarding her first company-wide email to some blogs,” according to The Wall Street Journal. She wrote that the person who did that should step forward and resign, but failing that, “maybe we should have a weekly bounty on such people. I will throw in the first thousand dollars.”

I know Carol Bartz has a lot to deal with at Yahoo given the mess she was left by founder Jerry Yang (a people-challenged executive if there ever was one), but putting a bounty on the heads of workers who leak internal information is really old school and reminiscent of Nixon’s attempt to plug leaks in the White House by forming the “plumbers” unit. We all know how well that turned out.

I’d advise your executives—and other execs, like Carol Bartz—to resist the urge to punish or offer a bounty on the heads of blabbermouths. Instead, spend a little time educating the workforce on the dangers of leaking internal business information. Talk to them about company secrets and why they need to remain secret. And most of all, ask for their help in knowing the information boundaries. I guarantee that if you do this instead of playing “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” you’ll have a lot fewer leaks and a lot more employees willing to help you make it happen.

—The Management Guy

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