How to Deal with Liars at Work

Ever know people who lie at work?

My son is doing a favor for some neighbors. They called our house after 8 pm on Sunday night and asked if one of our boys could babysit — all week. They wanted a babysitter for their 6th grade son from 8:30 am to 5 pm. Any of you who have teenage boys know that they don’t always get up at the crack of dawn. But Stephen, my 14-year-old, agreed to do it as a favor. No good deed goes unpunished.

Yesterday, when the parents came home, the kid told his parents — in front of my wife — that my son told him not to watch a bad TV program “because he wanted to sleep.” It was a stone cold lie. Made up whole cloth. And why? Because he was told “no” in a neighborhood filled with Self Esteem Movement Kids whose parents never tell them “no.”

Here’s what I suggested: Talk to the parents. Tell them what happened. Suggest that you don’t like your reputation being questioned. (Stephen has a 2nd Degree Black Belt, and is as disciplined and determined as anyone I’ve ever seen.) And talk to the kid. If that doesn’t work, walk away. (I once worked with the worst kind of little troll in a big consulting firm, and I should have walked away long before I offered to pay a rat a quarter to chew the warts off her face.)

How to Deal with Liars at Work
Yeah, that little story is a teeny little neighborhood drama. But what happens when you work with a dangerous liar at work? What happens if it happens to you? I say don’t let it go. Here are three things to do:

Talk to the liar immediately. I was going to say “confront” the liar, but my conflict resolution friends probably wouldn’t like that phrase. But you get the point. Ask, “Why the lie?” Get underneath the issue. Find out. Fast.
Clear up any confusion post-haste. Did you ever see the movie The American President with Michael Douglas? There’s a long section of the movie where the president doesn’t respond to spurious accusations against him and it nearly takes him down. Don’t do it. Truth triumphs and lies hide in dark little corners, afraid of the light. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there’s a reason that “fight fire with fire” is an axiom. It’s because it’s true.
Above all things, behave ethically. There’s a certain confidence in knowing that you wouldn’t be ashamed to tell your grandmother about what you’ve done. If you behave as an upstanding citizen, then you have much less to lose when the liars ply their trade. Good triumphs and liars have to go home and live with themselves.

That’s writing down the bones on liars in the workplace. It was five minutes of me reacting. What do you do with liars in the workplace? What’s the best strategy you’ve found?

UPDATE: I had to laugh as I was going through my Google Reader a few minutes ago. Bob Sutton posted the Latest Tips for Surviving Workplace A**holes. The Professor, as always, nails it.

New Employee Orientation Comic Book

What happens when you combine employee orientation and a great cartoonist? You get a visual representation of the day.

Austin Kleon is a talented visual artist who’s started a new job and suffered through new employee orientation:

Today I started my new job (!!!) as Electronic Publishing Specialist for UT’s Law school. (That’s a fancy title for web designer.) It’s a great gig, everybody in the department is awesome, and I’m genuinely excited about it.[...]

The only bummer today was sitting through UT’s 4 hour orientation session. Like I told my new bosses, it was “15 minutes of readin’, 4 hours of sittin’.” Luckily, they provided free stationary.

Here’s the first panel of what he drew. Click on over to see the whole set. There’s some real learning there. New employee orientation comic book anyone?

New Employee Orientation

Final Voting for My Bad Boss

I wake up every day and give thanks that I’m my own boss. I’m not really cut out to “work for” the glowing icons of The Peter Principle. (Someday I’ll write a story about when one said “You’re no D***ie Sl***y,” referring to a consultant in another region, to one of my top-performing colleagues when she was talking to him about billing and selling the most work in an entire consulting region. Brutal and Stupid. Not a great combo.)

The final voting for My Bad Boss runs from August 14-21. Here’s the story that’s in the lead:

Cancer Can’t Stop This Boss
My story starts with me being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. I am in my early thirties and have not worked since March of this year. I also have three young children under the age of 8, and a wife who cannot work due to my condition. I think you get the idea.

In the industry I work in, disability benefits are available but only equal about one-half of what I normally would be making. These benefits are formulated from a day to day basis for days you have received no other compensation for. Needless to say, every day claimed is extremely important in the basic task of feeding my family and keeping the lights on.

I have been an employee for about 10 years and as such, I have built up some paid time off. I sent paperwork in to take some of my time off, to help pay the bills, but when the paycheck came, I was short on several days. This was compounded when I did not claim disability benefits on the days I thought I was being paid for. As an end result, I lost out on my vacation days AND DISABILITY BENEFITS. Talk about getting hit where it hurts.

My boss threw away the paperwork I sent in and then lied about ever receiving it knowing that filing a grievance for the time I should have received would take months if not years to resolve. Its hard enough just trying to stay alive, let alone trying to pull knifes out of not only my back, but the backs of my wife and children too.

Got anything to top that? And if you do, I will personally go and ninja kick your boss in the neck for you.

NB to HR: Make this right. There are the rules, and there’s what’s right. And if you don’t do anything else this year, GET YOUR PEOPLE TO SIGN UP FOR DISABILITY INSURANCE. Enough with the ridiculous training classes and quarterly meetings. Do something that matters. Get people to sign up for LTD. What are you waiting for? (To make this easy, within a week I’ll post a communication kit that you can use. Free.)

What To Do When Someone Tells a Racist Joke

Carmen Van Kerckhove at Race in the Workplace wrote a powerful post called “How to respond to a racist joke at work.” Please go over and read it. I think her “play dumb” strategy is just inspired.