Adults lying

[k3am]

I know we've talked about it in children - how do you handle adults lying to you? 

My direct report lies. It's (as far as I know) never about anything important, it doesn't effect business, but it does frustrate me and leads me to wonder what else she's lying about. 

We had an incident today. She lied about something completely unimportant. If she hadn't lied and just said "oh, sorry about that!" no one would care. If I call her on it, she'll just claim that her version of events is true and there's no way to prove one way or another. 

[waverly]

I am lucky that I haven't had to deal with lying from direct reports. Previous sketchy co-workers yes, but it wasn't my place to discipline them. Personal relationships are usually destroyed unless it was a white lie to be polite type thing. I had a "friend"/ co-worker who "organized" a bachelorette party for me, but it was all a lie. Like the restaurant had closed for over a month, and when I went down there and the restaurant was closed, I realized it was all a lie that she had never called them or invited anyone or anything. She might have planned to meet me there like she said, but I doubt it. I called her and she "lost" her phone temporarily packing moving boxes for a friend. She was also bizarro though, and had left suddenly and lied, and was lying to customers at work and forging documents.  She claimed her other friend went down there and found it closed too.  20 bucks she never invited other friend, but if she had then more lies. 


If this is the one that works from home with no idea what she does, and clearly doesn't work there then I imagine that there would soon be a performance improvement plan with an eye to letting her go or she might quit. Or is this someone else entirely? I guess depending on the person, I wouldn't necessarily assume it is not effecting business, so I might double check that.

[supertrooper1]

I work with a few people that have their own "versions of the truth". I work very hard to call them out every time I discover something false. These are people that get half the story and then run with it, creating all kinds of lies. And sadly, they usually spread the lies up the chain. So I make sure to notify everyone that they have told, what the actual truth is either by email or in person.

[covergirl82]

Thankfully no one on my immediate team lies, that I'm aware of. There are some people I work with on other teams who will sometimes say, "I can't recall," for something that I know they've worked on and should remember.

MIL has been known to lie. It's enough that we don't know when she's lying and when she's not. For example, when DH and I had just started dating, MIL talked about this guy "Matt" that she was dating. Long story short, DH caught her in a lie, and it turns out she was dating her second exH, a guy that DH hates. This guy was a bad influence on MIL and was abusive. She also lies about being sick when she just doesn't want to do something. There are other things we've bounced off of DH's aunt (MIL's sister, whom we generally see about once a week because we go to the same church), who says she was told something different by MIL, so then we figure out one of us (or both) was lied to. Basically, anything MIL tells us we take with a grain of salt because there's a chance she's lying. This is a big reason why I refused to let her babysit the kids when they were under age 6. At least at age 6 they were old enough to tell us if something unusual happened. Even now, MIL is our last-resort babysitter.

[sdlaura]

I work for a relatively small, privately owned company, and our chairman makes a huge deal out of truthfulness. There was an issue where someone missed a meeting and lied about not knowing about it, and the person was fired when it turned out that was a white lie.

[supertrooper1]

covergirl82, I've noticed that when my coworkers say that they can't recall, they really can't. I'm amazed at how many people have such short term memories.

sdlaura, That's amazing that they were fired for that. My agency should fire someone since integrity is a big thing, especially if we need to testify in court.

[mae0111]

I worked with a lot of liars over the years, and I had to handle each one differently.

One guy was compulsive, and he lied about very big things. I always had the proof to catch him in his lies, and he would often just stare at me while he gathered his thoughts, then offer some kind of excuse for his lies. Eventually my boss got sick of it because he was missing deadlines and screwing things up for the whole department, and he fired him.

Another guys was a friend, and had been for years. He lied in a big way to our new mutual boss, because his team screwed up and put my team in a very bad position. I went to our mutual boss (via email, because it was impossible to speak to him - he was never there), and explained my position while carefully avoiding implicating my friend or his team. Friend was afraid for his job because of the screw up, and I wanted to tread lightly. Friend lied and threw me under the bus in a meeting that I didn't attend, but of course it got back to me.

I ended up having a very heated confrontation with him, along the lines of "Read the email, stupid. If I ever hear again that you threw me under the bus when I wasn't there to defend myself, you and I are going to have big problems." I had to do it over the phone, he had me on speaker, his office was full of his subordinates, and I didn't care. He groveled in person the next day, but we were never friends again. I left shortly after that, and he never even said goodbye. That one hurt.

[waverly]

Yeah I think the one co-worker was compulsive. After she left we found at least 15 bags full of written customer applications that she never submitted or did 2-3 times because she forgot she had already done then and stashed them, and of course the evidence of fraud. I was kind of an innocent (still am a little). It took us 3 weeks to go through her work, and I feel like my jaw dropped every time we found another bag. We thought we had it all cleaned up, and then I found another one. The head boss had to come in and he was never there, and I was like found another one and dumped it on his desk. His desk was where we were sorting it all since it was the biggest table in the office.

[covergirl82]

supertrooper1, I agree, if something happened years ago, I generally don't expect someone to remember it, but I would if it happened within the last year. For some reason, the team I'm on is unofficially perceived as the Keepers of All HR-related Institutional Knowledge, so maybe because of that, I have higher expectations of others, lol.

[186momx]

We have clients that have lied in the past. We can normally catch them and call it out. If it becomes a habit we nicely tell them that they need to find a better accountant/client partnership.

[mustardseed2007]

I'm a lawyer...people lie to me all. the. time.

ha ha

[k3am]

I called her on it... just responded to her lie and said "that's weird, because I triple checked XYZ once coworker sent out the email about it."

She is adamant that she was telling the truth, but at least she knows she's on check?

[2chatter]

I manage out liars. I really don’t care about why. If they lie about work I don’t trust them. If I don’t trust them I will not give them high impact or high profile projects. I need a fully functional team. I have found people who lie generally have other performance gaps, and think lying is a comfort or coping mechanism
for them. It’s like a symptom of some wider work disease and I am not a work doctor. I’m a mentor, coach, cheerleader - but I cannot motivate someone who isn’t motivated. Liars lack motivation - they are lazy, or emotionally challenged, or stuck in some way - if they came to me and said “I want to change but I don’t know how” I would be all in, but that has never happened. I can’t fix the unwilling or the incapable and liars so far for me have been one or both. (The both instance was almost sad - like I feel like that guy needed a remedial life skills class).

[mommyatty]

My mother is a compulsive liar. Big things, small things. Things to make her look better. Things that let her be the victim. Things that make her look like a badass hero. My favorite is, after spending my entire life telling me how she could NEVER have been a SAHM because she would have been so bored, she told her now-husband that she stayed home with me. Um. I was THERE. My very first memories are being with my grandparents while Mommy and Daddy were at work.

As a result, I have exactly zero patience for lying. I don’t care how minor the lie is, if I catch you in it, I will never trust another word you say again. My team knows not to lie to me. Ever. My clients may try to get away with it once. They won’t try it twice.

[mustardseed2007]

Usually when someone lies to me it's because they've outright stolen something or are trying hard to screw me or my company over for their own personal gain. So yes, if you lie, you are fired or we won't do business with you. Or if we have to do business with you we do everything in our power to protect ourselves from he inevitable fuck over attempt.

There's also that other category of people who don't know the answer but just assert stuff (constantly) with lots of confidence and gusto. I don't know if I categorize that as lying so much (?) as being full of it. You have to watch those people as much or more than intentional liars.

[xctsclrx]

Ugh. I really hate dealing with liars. Sorry you have to. I would definitely call out if you have the proof every time.