For some reason, I find “lying” to be a total deal-breaker. When an employee, nominally reporting to me, lies to me, I have a very hard time trusting him or her again. I look for other instances of duplicity from that person (and I often find them).
This doesn’t seem to bother other people quite as much. When I had this particular employee of my organization lie to me (about hours worked last week), and continuing to lie under increasingly specific questions and after being confronted with various bits of evidence (when her story changed several times to keep up with these new developments), I felt she probably needs to be replaced. But my supervisor, after understanding the situation, felt she could continue to work and and be relied on to do a good job. (This wasn’t her first whopper told, by any means. Others have occured, but under different supervisors.) Now, I think he may be coming around to agreeing she must go, sooner rather than later, but I’m curious about the whole character issue.
When I’m lied to, and it’s blatant and deliberate, absent a tearful and total apology (which I may or may not find credible), I just can’t treat a person with anything other than suspicion. I view their characters as being irredeemably flawed. Is this just me? Can you work alongside someone whose essential truthfulness you harbor severe doubts about?
I shared a cubicle with a guy who I would hear flat-out lie on a regular basis. For example, he’d tell someone he’d already sent off some engineering drawings when they were sitting on his desk, not even packaged to go. Or the time he and I worked on a project together, but in his final report, my name never once appeared.
Any friendship I thought was there no longer existed. He’s not worth the effort to even write this, now that I think about it. For all his posturing, he was a fraud and I was, quite frankly, glad when he got another job in another state.
I think you’ll be hard pressed to find people who don’t find lying reprehensible. But it’s not quite a clear cut and dried issue. It depends on the relationship you have with the given individual (personal, professional, tangential) and the nature of the lie. Some lies are blatant and outragious while others are just a polite way of maintaining one’s privacy.
For example, on a first date one may not want to discuss prior sexual/dating history very openly. By the 12th date, most people will share much more details than they probably should.
Lying is part of the human social lexicon. It’s the context of the lie that makes it forgivable or not.
Yeah, for me it’s not always cut-and-dried; certain lies are understandable (if not exactly excusable) under the circumstances. I happen to be reading a book on Bill Clinton’s presidency, and I can understand perfectly why he lied about his affair. I’m not saying lies shouldn’t be addressed, but in that situation I don’t think it should have led to his impeachment, and, similarly, I wouldn’t necessarily think that any falsehoods in the workplace should automatically lead to being fired. It just depends on the egregiousness of the lie, the revelance to the workplace and/or social situation, etc.
Context, yeah – but pseud has made it clear what the context was: An employee was lying about the number of hours she worked. That’s not social dishonesty (“no, really, I love your new haircut!”), it’s theft. Or at least attempted theft.
Dealbreaker for me, in interpersonal relationships (aside from haircut commentary and the like), and absolutely grounds for firing in an employee.
I’m not so concerned about lies as I am about trust. Yes, one begets the other, but again, there are lies and then there are lies.
I can’t see lying about a project at work–that’s way different than lying to get out of a dreaded social event, for example.
But when it comes to relationships and intimacy–lying is not acceptable. Certainly, one does not have to share things from one’s past (total honesty could be very hurtful, afterall) but spending emotional or sexual energy outside of the home in a committed relationship/marriage is a dealbreaker for me. There is no trust in such situations.
Hm. I think character trumps them all, personally. But then, I reckon anyone with the courage to be honest irrespective of the absence of gain is bright enough to have the perspective and insight required for a good sense of humor, and is sure enough of who they are to be kind by default. These qualities certainly don’t always go together, but an obvious lack of one would strongly suggest an absence of character.
OP: Sack the bitch. There are plenty of honest people looking for work and they’re pretty easy to find…
It’s a strange culture I’m in. One of my co-workers (who wants the woman sacked, btw, as much as I do) observed today that my biggest problem in convincing the Powers That Be that Now is the time to do so is the principle that no one wants to make the final decision that costs someone their livelihood.
Me: “But there’s an unemployed person out there somewhere who’s WAY more qualified and she now has that person’s job and income and…”
Co-worker (miserably): “I know. But you need to convince the person who’s making the call of that. And you can’t.”
Character is very important to me. I find that people who lack character (liers) are also lacking things like a work ethic, compassion, courage, and a conscience.
Lying about hours worked is horrible. How does she sleep at night?
No. And I’ve been in that position, except I was the subordinate, and the liar was my boss. In addition to lying about her time worked, she also didn’t have a clue what her job was, let alone how to do it. When called on her poor performance, she tried to place blame on me, saying I wouldn’t share information with her, which was bullshit. I defended myself against her allegations (which she tried to intimidate me from doing), and she ended up demoted and moved out of my business unit. Then some months later she transferred out of the division altogether. I found out recently that she was still pulling the same bullshit, and was basically told that she needed to leave (either by transfer or resignation), or that they were going to fire her. Which is bullshit too - she should have been fired, rather than allowed to continue to get away with being a complete fuck up, and becoming someone else’s problem in the company via a transfer. That’s probably how we got her in the first place.
Yeah, character’s important to me. It bothers me when people lie, at least when they lie to gain some advantage at someone else’s expense.
It bothered me some when my ex-girlfriend once lied about her children’s ages to get a discount at a restaurant—and in retrospect it maybe should have bothered me even more. (If they’ll lie to other people, they’ll lie to you.)
And in a recent thread, I was, I’ll admit, a bit shocked to read a Doper’s suggestion that another Doper buy a box set, keep the one disc that he needed to replace, and return the rest of the set to the store claiming that that one disc had been missing. Practical objections aside, this just struck me as something that I could never think of doing.
