I was recently interviewing a senior executive as part of the design of our new Business Simulation, Leading Strategic Execution™. During our hour-long dialogue the executive shared several interesting observations about the behaviors he sees people exhibiting in today’s evolving work environment.
“Too many people stretch the truth these days. They exaggerate their accomplishments, sales achievements, how much capacity is really available, and levels of experience they have in their careers, etc. Part of being a leader in 2016 is building contingency plans for when the truth comes out and people have let you down.”
I started thinking his powerful statement and it really struck me how true this is and what it means to business leadership and overall leading people.
I think we have arrived at this place of poor interpersonal dynamics and leadership because we don’t have the time to either fact check or give each other feedback to hold our colleagues accountable. The unfortunate realization is that we have all just come to expect and accept distortions of the truth and the only question to review is “what is the magnitude of the deception?”
Which brings me to the ultimate question and point of this blog; what is the difference (if any) between exaggeration and lying, and what does that mean from a Business Leadership perspective?
The topic of “exaggeration in business” is murky and grey. Steve Jobs is now considered an all-time business guru and he was famous for being a huge exaggerator. Over the course of time and working with individuals, you build a mental scoreboard of people’s ability or inability to tell the truth and their levels of exaggeration. I guess it comes down to determining if there are any granules of truth in the exaggeration, as opposed to a pure lie that has no basis of truth whatsoever.
How many of us have recently heard this or something like this: “Oh my goodness, I have no idea what happened. I sent that email last Wednesday. It must have been caught in your junk mail or something.” Let’s be honest, important emails rarely just disappear or get caught in the junk folder. If something like this happens once or twice, maybe you think that it could possibly be true, but if there are patterns and you start to see things like this happen over and over, then you very well may have an employee with a problem.
As a business leader what do you do?
All of these are reasonable choices and every situation is different.
Here are three practical ideas to think about if you are faced with a similar scenario:
Use Trust as a competency for evaluating and working with people
Most organizations have a set of values that they live by in addition to the specific competencies of the jobs that make up the organization. These values typically include things like honesty and doing the right things, which is the opposite of exaggeration and lying. My suggestion is to evaluate people that you work with and include their trustworthiness as a key metric of the relationship. I believe that the less trustworthy a person is, the worse the business performance will be.
Have a Strategy for Managing Expectations
Earlier this week, I wrote a blog called “Leading Past the Anti-Sales Department.” In the blog, I shared a story of a Sales Professional who was pushing hard to execute a product leadership strategy by promising the customer that his company could deliver on something that had never been done before from a technical perspective. In other words, the sales person exaggerated what his company could do. My suggestion is that when dealing with customers, be truthful in terms of managing expectations. In this scenario, where the sales person committed to a solution that hadn’t been done before, it is imperative to share with the customer that you will do everything possible to deliver and manage their expectations. The closer the exaggerations are to the customer, the more you need to manage expectations.
Don’t Waste Your Time Coaching
I said this advice was practical! The most likely best practice, and what all of the so-called leadership experts will tell you, is to give the exaggerator/liar feedback and coaching to help them to understand the impacts of their bad behaviors and get them to change. Based on the experiences I have observed with clients, it seems like this is a waste of time. Think about it. How many times do you have to sit down with someone and say “Listen, you need to be a little bit more honest. Provide real data. Do not exaggerate or lie as much.” Three times? Four times? It should become clear very quickly that this is a fundamental behavioral flaw that most likely cannot be changed and will not be fixed in a business coaching environment. It is then up to you as a leader to figure out how to deal with it (see above).