To Tell the Truth, Some Employers Expect Workers to Lie Once in a While

Whether telling the truth is good or bad for your career may depend on who your employer is.

Some employers say they will tolerate lying up to a point, others say it has no place in their business.

“Let’s be honest. We lie, and our colleagues lie to us,” said Mark Cuban, president of Broadcast.com Inc. in Dallas. “That’s how human beings operate.”

Responding to a query on workplace honesty by Fast Company magazine, Cuban wrote, “I can live with [employees who] need to tell a little white lie once in a while.

“I don’t need perfect people,” he explained. “I need successful people--people who can think for themselves and get the job done.”

One area, however, in which “absolute truth is mandatory,” Cuban told the magazine, is customer service, for which it’s imperative to “never tell me even a little white lie.”

Cuban also prefers candor about the general condition of his company. “If we’re honest about the big things, the little things will take care of themselves, even if that means telling an occasional white lie,” he said.

Lying in some businesses is expected, said Chuck House, vice president of computer component manufacturer Dialogic Corp., in Parsippany, N.J.

“The further up I was promoted [at a previous employer], the less my former colleagues trusted me. I was one of ‘them,’ and ‘they’ never tell the truth. And in fact, my fellow ‘thems’ expected me to become less candid and more polished--to be realistic about ‘the compromises we make at this level.’

“What everyone wants to know is, ‘Can I tell the truth without jeopardizing my career?’ ” House said. His personal answer: “Come to work each day willing to be fired.”

Jack Stack, president and chief executive of SRC Holdings Corp., of Springfield, Mo., said that years ago, when he was employed at a big manufacturing company, “it was an unwritten rule [that] plant managers never told the truth.”

In Stack’s own operation, truth is important. He believes that “much of the deceit” in business today comes from information hoarding. SRC has an “open book” management policy that makes data available to all so that employees do not use information “as a weapon against colleagues rather than as a way to solve problems,” Stack said.

Jerry Hirshberg, president of Nissan Design International Inc. in San Diego, told Reuters, “People worry about how the boss will react if they speak the truth.”

“Many of the best ideas are communicated through whispers--in the hallway meetings that happen after the official meeting,” he said, and those are precisely the ideas that “companies are most hungry for.”

Robert Rodin, president and chief executive of Marshall Industries, an electronics distributor in El Monte, said, “When it comes to truth, you get what you pay for.”

When “salespeople get bonuses tied to individual quotas and division managers get promotions based on quarterly” profit and loss statements, chief executives may be “shocked when they discover that their people manipulate results to make those numbers,” Rodin said.

To prevent such abuses, six years ago Marshall “eliminated all promos, contests, commissions, incentives and management by objective,” Rodin said. Changing the system, he believes, encourages both honesty and better performance.

Though people lie all the time at work, said clinical psychologist Brad Blanton, “it’s critical that the people whom you really know and work with know what you really think, feel and have done.”

Blanton, president of Radical Honesty Network of Stanley, Va., said: “Workers are learning to resist the compromising situations that appear to be presented by the demands of work. More and more of them are willing to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.”

Whether such candor is expected--or even appreciated--all depends on where you work.