Employees everywhere are doing it. Some are doing it dozens of times a day. Most have it done to them once every eight minutes. Sometimes it's done face-to-face. Other times it's done behind the back. It's done out of habit. It's done out of pure malice.
Employees everywhere are lying through their teeth.
An Epidemic of Deception
Millions of North Americans are sick and tired of wondering "Am I being lied to?" And for good reason. Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report coined the term "truthiness" to describe the ever-increasing tendency for people to express concepts or facts that they wish to be true, rather than concepts or facts that they know to be true. More and more, we're on the receiving end of the "truth improved" and "truthful hyperbole." Who knows what to believe today?
Believe this: When deception reaches epidemic proportions in society, no one and no place is safe. As in any epidemic, everyone is at risk of being taken advantage of and having their trust betrayed. And it can happen anywhere, including the workplace.
A Bumper Crop of Lies
The workplace isn't just a location where people come together in the common pursuit of commerce and profits. It's also a Petri dish for growing a deadly crop of big, bald-faced lies. Any competitive environment where performance dictates success and advancement is a potential breeding ground for mendacity.
Now, it's not that any one particular workplace is full of especially conniving or devious people. Deception simply comes naturally to all creation:
- Birds will fake injury to lead predators away from nesting young.
- Octopi walk on two tentacles, strutting all gnarly on the sea floor, pretending to be algae (or Jessica Alba's hairdo in Sin City) to escape their enemies.
- Pint-sized male green frogs lower the pitch of their croaks to sound bigger than they are and scare off rivals. (Hey, it beats working out at the gym!)
- Wolves dress in sheep's clothing.
Nature's deceivers are rewarded by longer life -- which means more opportunities to reproduce. And while lying may no longer be necessary for human beings to procreate (though it can help in many cases), the spinning of a last-minute yarn to avoid responsibility for not completing a critical project has certainly preserved the quality of many an employee's work life.
Need a Boost in Performance?
Lies, you see, have become the performance-enhancing drugs for the competition known as life.
Think I'm lying? Well, here's an analogy. Consider an elite cyclist who's set to race in the pinnacle of his sport: the Tour de France. If ever there was a competition that's rife with doping, the Tour is it. In 2006, Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich and a number of other star riders sat on the sidelines instead of their bike seats after being implicated in a doping investigation. Floyd Landis, the eventual winner, was himself pinned beneath a media microscope when an abnormal epitestosterone-to-testosterone ratio was uncovered in one of two post-podium urine tests. The jury's still out in Landis' case, but these sorry examples represent only those riders who were "unlucky" enough to get caught. Others in the field undoubtedly doped away and managed -- through luck or better planning -- to dupe the testers.
So, here's our elite cyclist, hitherto clean and sober, preparing to partake in a competition he knows is biased toward dopers. And our hero wants to win. Badly. So badly, in fact, he can already taste the fame, glory and fabulous endorsements that come with wearing the yellow jersey on the podium. What do you think he'll do? To dope or not to dope?
If he's human and wants the win badly enough, he'll opt for doping and its boost in performance. Unless he's blessed with one-in-a-billion genetics, he must dope to have any hope of winning. Racing clean in a field of dirty competitors means he'll be lagging the peloton before the race even starts.
The Place Where the Rubber Meets the Road
It's no different for employees competing in the workplace. Performance matters. It might not be the ticket to fame, glory and fabulous endorsements, but workplace performance is certainly the ticket to advancement, promotions and a bigger paycheck. Poor performance, on the other hand, comes with another set of "rewards." For most employees, it means stagnation, demotion and an eventual pink slip.
Any competitive environment that is characterized by deception -- whether the deception comes in the form of blood doping or bald-faced lies -- forces every competitor to use dishonesty if they want to win. A single liar in the workplace, hidden among the cubicles, can be the catalyst that triggers a chain reaction of fibbing, embellishments and wholesale fabrications. Hitherto honest employees, sensing a cheater in their midst, are compelled to "sweeten" their own efforts and accomplishments, lest they be left "lagging the peloton" when it comes time for management's quarterly performance reviews.
Sweetening performance, however, isn't the only byproduct of the competitive workplace environment. When the imperative to perform is so high, fibs to cover up shortcomings or mistakes are sure to follow. Deception becomes a Teflon coating, assuring negative perceptions don't stick. After all, everyone else is doing it, right?
Operating a business today is challenging enough without facing the daunting task of sifting fact from fiction among your prospective and existing employees or co-workers. And employees deserve to compete against each other on a level playing field, free of the performance-enhancing drugs of deception.
It behooves (there's a word you don't see often) everyone -- regardless of their position in the office hierarchy -- to promote an atmosphere of openness and honesty. And everyone can do just that once they understand the reasons why we lie so easily and so often in the workplace. That, however, is the subject of another article.
Stay tuned for "Understanding Why We Lie in the Workplace … Or How The Dog Ate My Profit-and-Loss Statements."
