Lying at Work
I don’t lie at work. However, I don’t lie less than I used to.
Weird eh? If you’re my manager, stop panicking. I’m certain I do not lie by your definition, but it took me a while to figure out the difference between what I believe is the common definition of truth in an organization, and the definition I was operating under. Learning this helped my career, and has saved me a fair amount of psychic stress when dealing with collaborators and stakeholders.
I used to think telling the truth meant something like this :
Respond to queries honestly without obfuscation, and make sure my interlocutor understands all relevant context.
If you have decent social skills, you've already seen the problem. All relevant context? Elliot, you're a crazy hippie who thinks reality is literally made of connotation, did you ever shut up?
No, no I did not.
As I moved into positions where communication become the more important thing, I did manage to decode the unhelpfully obfuscated feedback I was getting from frustrated colleagues. I worked through my own moral panic around “hiding” context from people who might need to know it, and eventually landed on a more useful definition.
Answer direct questions honestly without obfuscation, and make sure my interlocutor understands important relevant context.
Only a one word diff, but this radically changes the game. Suddenly I need to make judgment calls, trade-offs. What is important for this person to understand, what would just add noise? Are there things which might technically be helpful, but the communication cost outweighs the potential benefits of establishing the context? This is obviously harder to do, and a skill you must develop.
Notice how this involves taking on some amount of responsibility. It’s on me to decide what context is important and what isn’t. This takes decision burden from the interlocutor and places it onto my shoulders. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s part of why they pay us.
I still believe that you need to be proactive in communicating context. Simply answering questions put to you without attempting to explore the dynamic space of why the person is talking to you and what they need out of the conversation is lazy, and abdicates responsibility in the other direction.
A frustrating part of this is that, for some reason, the need to develop this skill tends to go unspoken and unacknowledged. I suppose people are uncomfortable giving people feedback on conversational abilities, as it’s not a “technical” domain. Perhaps other folks just understand this more intuitively that I do.
Whatever the case, figuring this out helped me a bunch, maybe it will help you as well.