Little White Lies: Lying LIke a Boss
We all tell the odd little white lie from time to time, but this is generally considered okay – told to spare someone’s feelings and largely considered to be a well-intentioned untruth. What we don’t accept is a malicious or spiteful lie, told to purposefully hurt an individual or to stir unnecessary bad feelings between two or more parties.
There are also certain people from whom we won’t tolerate lying: our bosses, for instance, are the exact kind of person we don’t want to see telling lies, instead wanting to develop trusting, supporting relationships with our managers. Of course, in some instances, it is necessary for CEOs to only offer half-truths to employees: think of the economic crisis for one, which posed an interesting problem for communication channels between CEOs and staff.
For example, at the height of the economic crisis, a SHRM poll of 494 HR professionals found that 23 percent of respondents had had to deal with an increased number of eavesdropping incidents since the recession began. Examples included employees lingering outside conference rooms or near closed-doors, trying to catch wind of possible layoffs or terminations and more than half of respondents (54 percent) reported an increase in gossip and rumors regarding downsizings and layoffs.
As such, experts at the time encouraged organisations to ramp up communications with their employees, the theory being that the more transparent you are, the more trusting your staff will be. However, the flipside is the idea that greater communication only breeds the opposite reaction. Imagine, for instance, that staff within a struggling company is fully aware of how bad things really are, and it becomes easy to imagine a shift from unease to outright panic.
Of course, the difference lies between being knowingly deceptive and withholding confidential or potentially damaging information. Now, according to researchers David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina, there’s a surefire way to tell when your boss is being deceptive. In what is being described as a “nifty piece of forensic analysis”, 30,000 conference calls between 2003 and 2007 were analysed to ascertain whether particular “tells” during the call were associated with earnings that were later “materially restated”.
The findings suggested that “deceptive bosses” tend to make more references to general knowledge (as in ‘as you know…’), and refer less to shareholder value, which the authors suggest could be an effort to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, at least according to a report in The Economist. In addition, deceptive leaders also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”, in other words choosing to describe something as “fantastic” instead of just “good” – the end goal being to sound more persuasive.
The answer is for management to be open enough that employees understand the situation they are in, thereby building trust and easing the gravitational pull of gossiping. In short, be honest with your staff, don’t be knowingly deceptive, and don’t let those little while lies grow into uncontrollable, malicious rumours or gossip.
Find out more about managing through change, check out all leadership videos on MeetTheBoss.tv, which includes discussions on how to create innovative products and meet the needs of your consumer, while operating in an open and people-first environment.
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