Build a deception-free culture

Everyone lies, including your employees and it's costing businesses an enormous amount of money. What can you do to protect your business by putting in place measures to ensure that employees do not have to lie and if and when they lie they are exposed? Employees lie for many reasons; to cover up for their poor performance or lapses, to mask behavioural misalignment, to overcome internal competition and for petty advantages such as winning the boss over.

There's a pretty good probability that you have someone on your staff who will try to use lying and deception to demonstrate that his or her performance is superlative. These people are often masters at manipulation, and they may have been honing their skills from childhood.

You need to make sure you are looking at actual performance and not what is coming out of someone's mouth in terms of claims. Sometimes bad things happen in business. Mistakes happen. They've happened in all businesses in the past and will happen in all businesses in the future.

What you want, though, is to know when mistakes happen, so that you can fix them. When you punish people for mistakes or for informing you about the mistakes, their inclination is to lie about things and hide them from you. Sometimes this works out and they fix whatever happened on their own, but sometimes the problem gets worse.

Little white lies keep things calm and pleasant, but do too many of them and people stop believing you. When they stop believing you, they'll stop seeing the reason to be honest with you. You'll lose their trust and your own ability to sort out the truth.

It's useful to have some knowledge on how to spot a liar. However, the old adage that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing is certainly applicable here. While it's fun and useful to know the warning signs, it's also important to realize that it's easy to make mistakes.

The science of 'lie spotting' is a good weapon for trained law enforcement personnel and psychologists, but it can be a dangerous tool in the hands of amateurs. Lie spotting comes with experience, instinct and power of observation.

Honest culture

Watching and understanding the inherent behaviour of each person in different situations for a reasonable period will help acquire and build this skill to be accurate at most times. Developing the ability to read and interpret the body language of people is a talent most good leaders need.

Fairness in the workplace is the top prerequisite for creating a good place to work. You need honesty, respect, fair wages, appreciation, recognition for work well done, clear job descriptions and no favouritism.

In short, if you create a culture of caring, your employees are more likely to respond truthfully and in kind. While managers and business owners sometimes need to push people to give their best for the success of the business. Research shows that people resort to lying when they're stretched beyond the limit.

Setting unrealistic goals and impossibly high standards, continuously demanding faster and better results, setting constant deadlines and expecting unreasonable work hours can overwhelm people and force them to lie about their work to avoid problems and protect their jobs.

If this is your style of leadership, know the perils that come with it. But commitment to the job and loyalty to the organization are the least expectations from a performer and there is no excuse for non-delivery of performance at the agreed level. Some employees lie as a habit and we all have experience with such people.

Model truth every day

Remember that, as a leader, you are always in a glass house. People get their cues from you. Guard against espousing values that you don't honour, every day, in every action. For example, don't say, "Customers come first," then treat customers poorly when you're having a bad day. Everything counts when you are a leader.

Honesty is often not given the credit it deserves among employees. An honest employee's credibility and integrity speaks for itself, allowing that person increased opportunities and greater flexibility within the business, since the honest employee has proved his or herself.

Even if it seems as though lying will make life easier - especially in a situation where punishment could be a risk, or where a customer is upset - it will more frequently only make things more complicated. If you are an employee, remove lying from your system completely, from your list of dependencies and be determined to depend on your ability to deliver if you are serious about accelerated career progress.