It’s 8 p.m. and the file which must be validated by the boss this evening before being presented to the committee tomorrow is still blocked by a member of the team. The N + 1 is tense and we urgently try to reread the third part on which the colleague has been struggling for two weeks. However, he disappeared from circulation. Volatilized for 2 hours after this last reassuring email: “I still have a few corrections, you will have it in 10 minutes”. Since then, nothing. He preferred to telework to finish in peace and we can’t even chase him in the corridors. The boss is beside himself, we’ll have to stick to this part after a crazy day. We meet a lucky guy who is returning home and we tell him about his bad luck. “Ah? He set you up? Lying is his thing. Didn’t you know? He’s going to invent a crazy scenario for you. But don’t expect anything tonight, and make up for lost time because otherwise you’ll be fired “. How could I have been fooled to this extent? Lies and nonsense/That a child wouldn’t believe/But the nights are my churches/And in my dreams I believe in them, described, lucid in another domain, Patricia Kaas. For Jean-Pierre Mercier, creator of Challenge-Action (training and consulting company), a liar is one of the worst colleagues you can have and is a particularly toxic element within a company.
Allergic to liars, Jean-Pierre Mercier highlights two qualities to detect them: intuition and logic. The first requires listening to your inner voice, your feelings, almost your spontaneous primary instinct, linked to your reptilian brain in survival mode. “You have to be wary when something doesn’t ring, when there’s something weird, even if you can’t identify what’s wrong,” he says. By being on the lookout, logic follows or precedes intuition: you must apply your own methodology to avoid getting caught up in the liar’s fairy tale. “Remain vigilant, out of step”. Avoid succumbing to the seduction of the perfect colleague with solutions and a flirtatious smile for everything. Check why there is a gap on his CV and why he suddenly changed career direction.
Real liars have a genius for crafting a story that matches the cognitive biases of the person being lied to. They will never reveal their true nature head-on, preferring to conceal it. “A liar lies all the time,” asserts Jean-Pierre Mercier. So it’s better to avoid the terrible casting error.
When a manager is convinced that his colleague is a liar, you need to talk to him. He does not have a choice. The first step is to prepare well for this discussion, remain logical, present the facts well. If absences are criticized, prove them, date them. Document yourself with facts. Then, make contact “in a positive climate”, insists the expert. “We must not wake him up.” Either we attack with: “I noticed that you are late”, or we open the debate. It is rather this solution that the expert recommends: “gain his trust to let him get stuck”. We put forward the figures, the absences, the facts. This is the most delicate moment of the discussion where the liar may explode with anger or burst into tears. He can also bounce back very quickly and act as a diversion. But the real liar will never confess and will victimize himself by the accusatory inversion: “what exactly are you looking for? Why are you doing this to me?”.
Difficult in these conditions to keep calm. The solution ? “We part with them, they are wounds,” says Jean-Pierre Mercier definitively. When they lie at the highest levels of the company, they put the company at risk. If the figures are false, because liars protect and promote themselves, we can imagine that the resulting decisions will have a disastrous economic and social impact on all teams. Morally, it’s not better: protecting a liar means harming those who are doing their job correctly. However, the manager must not make a mistake: anyone who does not keep his promises or does not tell the truth, weighing the pros and cons to protect someone for example, opts for venial sin. Likewise, the confabulator or the one who hides his incompetence with kindness can be removed. “We have to get them to admit their weakness and help them to structure themselves… We all commit little lies so as not to do any harm,” concludes Jean-Pierre Mercier. So, in the company as elsewhere, is it better to lie than to slander?