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What to Do If You Get Caught in a Lie at Work
A small lie can be just as damaging as a big one
Maybe this rings a bell: It’s Sunday night, and you’re fully in the throes of dread over the coming Monday morning. Picturing your mess of an inbox makes your skin crawl. The prospect of spending another eight hours next to Kevin, your deskmate who reads all his emails out loud under his breath, makes you want to hide your head under a pillow and never come out. It would be so easy to email your boss with a believable-sounding illness — the flu? No, food poisoning sounds better — and just bliss out in your own three-day weekend.
We’ve all felt a similar temptation at some point. But acting on that impulse is a gamble, and not a good one: Though you may not know it by looking at certain world leaders, being caught in a professional lie can be devastating. It tarnishes relationships. It erodes trust. It can get you fired — even if what you did was more of a small fib than a whopper. One survey shows that 22% of employers have fired workers who lied about something relatively small: faking sick to take a day off.
Of course, most of us don’t think of ourselves as liars. And yet most of us lie anyway, often without realizing it. One 2002 study found that 60% of people pepper their daily conversations with small fibs, especially when they want to come across as competent or kind. Maybe you claim to read a book you’ve never heard of, or pay a colleague a false compliment on an idea you actually thought was okay at best.
And while those can feel like pretty harmless stretches of the truth, other research suggests that small lies, when discovered, can be just as harmful as more malicious ones. To the person who’s been lied to, betrayal is a binary thing: It happens or it doesn’t. And when it does, it stings, regardless of how big or small the lie.
At work, that sting can have especially far-reaching consequences, says Christian L. Hart, a psychology professor at Texas Woman’s University who studies lying behavior. Realizing a friend has lied may be painful, but personal relationships aren’t as easily destroyed by dishonesty; our emotional intimacy may motivate us to understand why the other person behaved badly. Work relationships, however, tend to be more transactional…
