Lies We Tell in Leadership, Part 1: Self-Deception
Lies We Tell in Leadership, Part 1: Self-Deception
Liar, liar, pants on fire! Deceits and frauds to which we aspire!
Let’s take our first adventure into the subterranean world of Leadership Land. Our first stop: Liar’s Lair.
What was your gut reaction when you read the title and subtitle of this post? Was it something like:
Who, me? I don’t lie. I’m a good person because my parents raised me to be better than that. Criminals, dastardly despots, movie villains, and politicians are liars, but I’m none of those.
Let’s suspend the automatic association between “liar” and “bad | wrong | evil” for the duration of this article. You’ll get more out of this reading if you refrain from thinking “lying = bad, honesty = good.”
To prepare your mind, consider that:
Liars can still be good people. Think of researchers using placebos in drug testing, or the heroes who shelter refugees from oppressive governments.
Honest people can still be bad. Think of terrorists who legitimately believe they’re doing the right thing by blowing up regular people trying to live their lives.
If you thought that you’re an honest person, you’re not alone. And you’re probably wrong.
Homo sapiens auto-decepticon
As a species, we have a marvelous capacity for self-deception. Our brains are hardwired with visual, aural, and cognitive blind spots that lead to all kinds of errors in judgment. We can collectively believe that we’re individually better than average. We could probably delude ourselves into the paradoxical belief that we’re more humble than average, too!
You know how everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac, and everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot? If you take this study with a pathetically-small sample size from 37 years ago and generalize its findings, then 80% of Swedes and Americans believe they’re above-average drivers.
Remember the last time you got into an argument with a family member, and you were so. damn. frustrated. at how they stubbornly refused to see the logic that you clearly laid out for them? You probably believed that the argument arose because you cared about their welfare, and that you wanted them to make informed life choices…but your true motivation was to win an argument so you could revel in your self-righteousness (you were “trapped in the box”).
Open the news, and 80% of it is bad, drives you mad, or makes you sad. This injustice cannot stand! You are honor-bound to right the wrongs in the world! So you rant about the sad/bad/mad stuff to your friends and post about it on social media. Somehow, you deceived yourself into believing that “being informed” and impotently talking about the latest outrage is what upstanding citizens do to make the world a better place. In truth, you were more interested in virtue-signaling than in the grueling, risky, expensive work of world-fixing.
has a great post about why reading the news is bad for you.Hop on Substack, and some jerk on the internet is claiming that you’re a liar. How dare this empty suit make such snide insinuations! You’re a contributing member of society and a valuable member of your community! You’re fundamentally a good person! Yet, if the results of this survey can be generalized to your workplace, more than 90% of people (at all levels of the hierarchy) tell lies at least once a month. Sure, someone out there will legitimately be Saint Sincereus the True…but it ain’t us. We count ourselves among the scoundrels who inhabit the dark corners of Liar’s Lair, but hey – at least we’re honest about how much we lie, rather than lying about our honesty.
Fake It ‘Till You Make a Reality-Distortion Field
The most insidious lies are the ones we genuinely believe to be true. The more we repeat the lie, the deeper it becomes ingrained in our minds. Here are five common lies that we often mistake for truths.
“I understand.”
Our apparent motivation: To make the other person feel heard.
Why it’s a lie: We usually listen to respond, not to understand.
We listen so we can dissect the other person’s argument and crush them under our superior reasoning skills once it’s our turn to speak (if we wait for our turn at all1).
We listen so we can launch into a 12-step plan to solve the other person’s problem, then pat ourselves on the back for doing good work. We assume our interlocutor is seeking informational support when they could be seeking emotional support first and foremost.
How to escape from Liar’s Lair: First seek to understand, then be understood. Practice active listening. Resist the temptation – with every fiber of your being – to reveal your analysis until you can express the other person’s thoughts and sing their soulsong as clearly as they can. Only when they feel understood will they be willing to understand you.
“This is for your own good.”
Our apparent motivation: To tell the other person we have their best interests at heart.
Why it’s a lie: Robbing someone of their autonomy and dismissing them in a single sentence reveals that we’re more interested in ourselves than the other person.
At best, we’re saying “I have more important things to do than explain to you. Do as I say, not as I do.”
At worst, we’re saying “I’m on a power trip, and you will obey me whether you like it or not.”
How to escape from Liar’s Lair: Don’t use this phrase. Ever.
Sure, we need to set boundaries for those we lead, whether child or adult. But there are better ways to do this that don’t involve choking the entire zip code with the smell of paternalism.
“The organization cares about you.”
Our apparent motivation: To make employees feel valued.
Why it’s a lie: The organization is an abstract construct, devoid of emotion. You may genuinely care about the people you work with, but the organization certainly doesn’t. In large organizations (500+ people) where many of our colleagues are strangers, we fall into an old trap:
One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic.
The people who believe this lie are the ones most likely to be caught off-guard by mass layoffs or when the employer-employee relationship suddenly turns adversarial. They are the ones most surprised to discover that they’re turkeys at someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner.
How to escape from Liar’s Lair: You can rephrase it to “I care about you.” Better yet, you can show, rather than tell. You can train your people so well that they can leave you, but treat them so well they won’t want to. When an economic storm blows in and the human resources department begins sharpening the layoff axe, you and your flock will be better prepared.
“I have it under control.”
Our apparent motivation: To signal that we’re capable of containing a crisis, or to tell someone that we’ve already done so.
Why it’s a lie: If we were truly in control, then we wouldn’t be in a situation where we have to say this.
How to escape from Liar’s Lair: We don’t advocate any change in external behavior. It’s important to radiate confidence when the brown stuff strikes the rotating blades. When disaster strikes, all eyes turn to you, seeking guidance and a call for decisive action.
What’s important is not a change in behavior, but a change in mindset to guard against self-deceit. If we start believing our own claims of omnipotence, we cross the line from confidence → arrogance.
“I know what I'm doing.”
Our apparent motivation: To express confidence and competence.
Why it’s a lie: If you’re reading Adventures in Leadership Land and other self-help extracurriculars, we assume you’re an overachiever who’s more competent than average. Yet, our world contains more knowledge than a human being can possibly learn in a lifetime. Much of what we think we know is questionable (at best) or totally bogus (at worst). Future humans will scoff at our misguided views in the same way we look at spontaneous generation and phrenology today.
Even if we could somehow learn everything there is to know, we are still at the mercy of the Random Number Deities. We can make high-quality decisions that turn out badly, or make atrocious decisions that still turn out well. The Fog of Uncertainty is ever-present in the aboveground of Leadership Land. Deep beneath Leadership Land is the Unknowable Abyss, containing the mysteries of the universe and the hidden agendas of eight billion people.2
How to escape from Liar’s Lair: Like the previous sub-section, we’re advocating for a change in mindset, not for changes in your external behavior. We believe this self-delusional lie is the most harmful of the bunch, because what you don’t see, don’t hear, and don’t know is more likely to harm you.
By focusing on how much we know, we lose sight of what we don’t know. We begin confusing “absence of evidence” with “evidence of absence.” We begin falling for the McNamara fallacy. We begin flexing what we know as a badge of honor, engaging in more status-seeking than truth-seeking.
In public, it’s prudent to express confidence and competence. In private, it’s prudent to fixate on our weaknesses and unknowledge.
The Amorality of Liar’s Lair
You probably assumed that when we called you a liar, we’re also implying you’re a bad person, and you chew with your mouth open, and you drop-kick puppies into oncoming traffic. This is incorrect.
Likewise, if we called you an honest person, you might also think we’re implying that you’re good, upstanding, and virtuous. This is also incorrect. You could honestly believe that humanity is an infestation upon the earth, that the best thing for the world is a mass extinction, and that you are the harbinger of the downfall of Homo sapiens auto-decepticon.
Liar’s Lair is an amoral place. In our Temple of Trust post, we wrote that integrity is amoral. So is honesty – it’s neither good nor evil, neither right nor wrong. It is simply a subjective measure of deceit.
Interrupting is a near-universal signal that someone is listening to respond, rather than listening to understand. Why show respect when what you have to say is so much more important? Why listen to them babble when your time is so much more important?
Interrupting with a clarifying question might be tolerable, depending on the other people in the conversation.
Plus all the agendas of an unknowable number of other life-forms that can disrupt our worlds, like:
Pathogens that cause infectious diseases
Pests that can ruin crops and cause famines
Extraterrestrials that may be hostile and have superior technology
All of the above, plus eight billion humans from another dimension