Once, after a conversation with my boss about what I saw as some unpleasant truths about our employer, she said. “You’re on of those people who can’t tell a lie even if they want to, aren’t you?”
I said yes – but I was lying. I’m quite capable of telling believable lies when I feel the need. I prefer the truth, if for no other reason than telling the truth almost all the time makes my lies all the more believable.
But was that the right answer? Do you think that it’s better to have a workplace rep for total honesty, or be known as someone who can bend the truth when needed, say maybe to cover for or back up the boss or co-workers?
I would think that it would be better for my boss to think I am straight-up honest, yo, so that they don’t think I would evereverinmywholelife lie to them. Then again, I’m not in a position, or an industry, where I could see ever needing to cover up for a superior.
Yeah, I prefer that my boss thinks that I am utterly incapable of lying. Basically, I am utterly incapable of lying unless its to save my own ass. If its not my personal benefit, not going to do it.
Part of the reason is that I am very forgetful, so by keeping my lies limited in scope, I never have to worry about being caught in one. (Plus, even if its for my own benefit, I feel like a jerk for lying.)
Honesty is the best policy. Once you’ve established a reputation for telling the truth, THEN you can sneak in a little white lie now and then if required. Just learn to pick your words carefully.
Yeah, that’s what it says in my ethics policy :rolleyes:
I don’t lie, unless it’s one of those “white lies” to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. If you lie, people will find out. Yes, they will. Trust is a valuable currency and it’s better to treat it with care.
There are a lot of valuable currencies in the workplace, like reliability and precision and attention to detail. But if I fuck something up that maybe OUGHT to cost me some currency in one form or another, a really good lie just might make it FREE!
Let’s say a piece of equipment fails at the wrong time, and I was supposed to check it in advance but I blew it off. I might have even had a good reason for blowing it off, like someone had an emergency that I had to deal with, and I didn’t end up with the time to do the check. (Or maybe I just took a long lunch.)
If this happens, you have to ask yourself if lying is the right choice to make. It might not be, and in particular if you have a legitimate reason not to have fulfilled your responsibility. But, if you can claim that you DID check it, and your boss believes you, you don’t have to lose any of those valuable currencies.
Well, maybe you do if you have a “self respect” account, but that’s the least valuable workplace currency there is.
Answering ‘yes’ would be detrimental in sales or (some kinds of) law. Otherwise, tone of voice would indicate whether your boss thought it was a laudable quality or not.
“I can, but I generally chose not to. If everyone walks around here telling you exactly what you want to hear even when it’s utter bullshit, simply because you won’t hear the truth, then you deserve to fail. They may say that if a lie is repeated enough, it becomes the truth, but when the truth is quantifiable, such as in a business - whether or not we’re getting our job done or your department is meeting it’s goals, or whether or not your people hate working for you - the lies will eventually catch up to you.”
Yeah, I’d probably like to tell my boss something like, “I strongly prefer honesty, but I could tell a believable lie if it was absolutely necessary for some reason.” But it wouldn’t be true, so I couldn’t.
Frankly, and I’m being completely serious here, anyone who answers “yes” to that question is clearly lying. Who is incapable of lying, even though he wants to? That’s a dumb notion in the first place.
I’d like my boss to think I’m an honest person who doesn’t like lying and isn’t practiced at it.
However, he needs to know that I’m capable of discretion. In a negotiation, a vendor doesn’t need to know that we’re willing to pay more than their current offer. Likewise, employees don’t need to know that we’ve already determined who will get a promotion before it’s announced.
Situations like that don’t call for lying, but I need to be able to keep from giving off “tells” and letting information slip.
So I’d probably tell my boss that I don’t like to lie and don’t consider it a skill of mine. But I’m perfectly capable of discretion.
If my boss said that to me I’d start laughing my ass off and say "I guess you haven’t actually read any of the deployment ‘backout’ plans we’ve submitted, have you?
I would only lie if it were a situation where it would be detrimental to our working relationship…and most of my “lies” are lies by omission anyway…like I would tell my boss “such and such person wants to place this order,” and leave out the part, “despite the fact that your boss is a giant asshole.” or whatever.
I don’t think it’s good to have a reputation as a yes man, always agreeing with the boss…it’s good to show that you think about things independently and have your own opinion.
I’ve had similar things happen. “Well, on one hand, I did study under the Jesuits, you know. But on the other, don’t bother asking me any questions unless you’re willing to accept the answer, because I have this horrible custom of answering.”
I can’t remember the last time I lied, but I’ve been known to give Jesuitic answers or, ahem, rephrase things (1). The Bros and I have also been known to answer one of Mom’s questions with “Mom, are you sure you want to hear it?”; sometimes she backs up, sometimes she doesn’t. If she doesn’t, we reserve the right to tell her to stuff it when she gets angry about whatever the answer happens to be.
1: more often in what I’m asking than in what I’m answering, curiously enough - many people who won’t give me whatever if I ask straight out will do it after a liberal application of the “oh you’re so wise/strong/manly and I’m so weak/lost/little” brush; this includes times when I was asking coworkers to send work my way because mine was done and they had too much on their plates, and times when a client was having problems finding the data we needed to load in their system until I made puppy eyes and mewling noises.
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