Why People lie at Work—and What to do about it
When you’re a leader, you rely on your team members to tell you the truth. This is what allows you to make thoughtful decisions and feel confident that you know what’s going on. Occasionally, however, you might be faced with an employee bending the truth or lying to you. This is one of the toughest managerial situations to face.
We’re taught as children that lying is devious and wrong. We're likely to feel hurt when other people don’t share the truth, and angry that they were able to manipulate and take advantage of us. But once you’ve gone through the normal stages of hurt and anger, what can you do about the situation?
Instead of losing faith in your team members and your ability to manage them, try to understand why these employees are choosing to lie in the first place. Here are the three most likely reasons, based on what I've seen across decades of consulting:
Fear of triggering conflict
Some employees are afraid that other people will have a negative reaction to the truth and are fearful of creating a bad outcome by speaking up. For example, I worked with a vice president who was setting up a new business division and would fudge his numbers because the unit wasn't hitting the targets set by leadership. He didn’t want to let his bosses down or “make trouble,” as he put it.
As a leader, it’s your job to provide your fearful employees with the psychological safety that will
encourage them to tell the truth. This doesn’t mean that there are no consequences for bad behavior. But you need to underscore that by being honest, your employees are helping you do your job, and that they’re making your job much harder when they aren’t being truthful. You should make it clear to them that you’d always rather hear the truth—even when it’s not the answer you'd like to hear. To create such an environment, you can use language like, “I need to be able to count on you and your data,” or “It helps me do my job when I know what’s true, even if it’s bad news.”
Not wanting to expose their inadequacies
Sometimes employees are in over their heads and don’t know how to extricate themselves from a difficult situation. They try to mask their own incompetence, often because they simply can’t figure out why they’re failing and don't know how to fix the situation. In such cases, it’s not enough to call out the lying, because a person's underlying incompetence will still be present. one option is to see if there are structural changes that can be made to reduce the likelihood that your employee will mess up; doing so may eliminate or at least diminish the need for lying. For instance, you might extend the deadline on a certain project so that the individual assigned to it has a higher chance of getting the details right, or you could provide employees with training and coaching so that they can effectively deliver without needing to bend the truth.
A talented, but somewhat disorganized, senior director at a nonprofit organization I advised made several errors that affected the scheduling and publicity for several programs and events. He then lied to his colleagues about the mistakes so he wouldn’t be blamed. Upon finding out about this, the leadership team restructured his responsibilities so that he was no longer the point person for event notifications, and his lying significantly diminished.
Trying to serve their own ends
Some employees have personal goals, like advancing their careers, that they believe they can’t achieve through high-quality work alone. These employees can be even trickier to deal with because their lying may lead them to undermine and manipulate their colleagues. And pointing out their lies often only pushes them to “lie better” in order to achieve their desired results.
At an organization I worked with, a senior administrator used passive voice, oblique language and gaslighting to convey untrue information about her teammates. Her colleagues eventually caught on and stopped collaborating with her. However, the administrator continued to create a fog of mistruth, accusing others of refusing to cooperate with her.
In such situations, there are no helpful structural changes that can be made to reduce the liar’s perceived need to lie. For this reason, I coached the administrator's boss to draw a clear line about the inappropriate behavior and its consequences: “It’s not acceptable for you to damage your colleagues’ reputations. I want to know your concerns, but you need to understand that if you keep setting people up, I won’t be able to trust you even when there are other aspects of your work that are so good.”
It’s important to document the lying employee’s behavior and your feedback so that you at least have a private record. If you’re dealing with someone who often lies, it may be an ingrained habit that’s hard for the liar to break. This person may temporarily suspend the habit but revert to lying as a coping mechanism as soon as a highpressure situation arises. In these cases, you may have to let the lying employee go, especially if the inaccurate information is disrupting relationships or decision-making.
You can’t afford to have your employees think that you’re willing to tolerate a culture of lying— this will only lead to strife, faulty operations and increased turnover. But if you can quickly catch mistruths, correct them and lay out the correct behavioral norms, you may be able to train a liar to behave better. Doing so will not only salvage your relationship with the lying employee; it will also make it clear to your team that you can keep everyone safe and productive.