Everyone loves honesty, and every says honesty matters
Words like “honesty” and “integrity” appear in more than two thirds of corporate “values”, 76% of staff say the honesty of a business affects decisions on where to work, and “truthfulness” frequently comes out in the research as the quality we value in people more than any other. Yet we all lie, all the time (in fact, some people really lie all the time – as in, more than once every 20 minutes!). Less than 20% of staff trust their leaders are telling the truth.
I call this the “intent versus action gap”. No one wakes up in the morning and jumps out of bed excited to spend the day lying to everyone – quite the opposite – yet we find ourselves frequently being dishonest. This dishonesty erodes performance, slows down innovation and prevents change. It can also poison relationships.
But here’s the interesting thing: very rarely does misinformation, lying or deceit show up as someone spouting bald-faced porkies. The caricatures of the smooth-talking psychopath coldly and calculatingly misleading everyone, or the pathological liar doing it for fun are almost never real. Normally, it shows up hidden behind good intentions, noble aspirations or a simple lack of skill in making truth happen. But the effects can still be disastrous.
Well intentioned bad decisions
Much of the lying and dishonesty that goes on at work is well intentioned. Some of the most common lies you hear at work are, “you’re doing a great job”, “I think we’re on track” and “I’m doing fine”. Of course, these aren’t always lies – but they can be. When they are, they’re rarely told with the intention to be a bad person or cause harm.
We tell someone they’re doing a good job when they’re not because we’re worried that we will upset them or hurt their confidence. We say we think we are on track because we don’t want to cause panic or hurt morale. We say I’m fine because we don’t want to be a burden or to show weakness. It might seem strange to think of this as misinformation, but it is. By definition, lies are misinformation – they attempt to lead someone to believe something that isn’t true. These might be noble, pro-social lies – but that doesn’t make lies true. And the thing about truth is, it has a way of coming out. Take performance conversations, as an example.
The pressure on managers
Almost every manager has been in a position where they’ve held back negative feedback because they couldn’t find the right words in the moment or because they didn’t want to come across as cruel or unkind. And what is the almost inevitable result? What could have been a small feedback conversation “in the moment” festers, the feedback remains ungiven and the performance issue undressed, and eventually we wind in a bigger conversation that starts, “step into my office – we need to have a serious conversation”.
What makes that bigger conversation worse is not simply that the tone and content are more serious, it’s that often the person on the receiving end is surprised. “But you told me I was doing a good job”, they say, referencing that conversation where you did indeed say that, but were lying (albeit for the well-intentioned reason of not wanting to hurt their feelings). Now you’re not just navigating the challenge of a performance conversation, you’re trying to rebuild a relationship after being caught in a lie. And the poisoning begins.
What are you not telling me?
The other way misinformation shows up is by omission, rather than actively lying. For example, think about how leaders communicate to teams en masse: in all-of-team or all-of-company updates, there is often a tendency to be overly positive or selectively edit out or downplay bad news. The problem is, if people are hearing (true) bad news stories elsewhere, and leaders are silent about it or downplay it, it starts to seriously affect trust. “What are you not telling us?” is the question people can’t help but ask in their own heads. We could have a lively philosophical debate about whether omitting material information is a form of lying (personally, I think it is). But for HR leaders, that argument is less important than the reality that, like it or not, people feel like they’re being lied to when critical information is left out or unaddressed. You can choose not to share it, but you can’t choose for people not to care.
Making truth happen
The solution to this, of course, is to make truth happen. We know that truthful cultures tend to be higher performing, more innovative and more agile – but those benefits don’t accrue by merely “not lying”. Leaders need to actively go the extra step to make truth happen if they want to truly reap the rewards.
Dominic Thurbon is the author of To Be Honest: How making truth happen builds better businesses, lives and societies, and director and co-founder at Alchemy Labs Australia.
