“To Be Honest With You…”
Today I want to muse awhile about a pet peeve of mine that may seem innocuous, but has implications for organizational health.
Ever hear someone say “Trust Me,” or “To Be Honest With You…?” These are phrases that some of us say out of habit and I believe we should actively work to jettison them from our vocabulary.
When I hear someone repeat one of these phrases, the first thing that comes to mind is: “so are you lying to me the rest of the time?” My ability to trust individuals who overuse these phrases is challenged, and in a workplace where balancing trust with accountability is paramount, we don’t need to be injecting language into conversations that immediately makes us question the veracity of what our colleagues say.
It’s a well known fact that on an average day, the average human lies about something. I lie. We all lie at some point in our lives—some much more than others. Most of the time, we’re consciously aware that we’ve told a lie, but in some cases, lying is driven by the subconscious and we’re not even aware we’re doing it.
In a recent (2021) study published in Communication Monographs, researchers found that the majority of survey respondents (75%) told between zero and two lies per day - a much better rate than they were expecting to find. By their estimates, 7 percent of total communication contained a lie, and almost 90% of all lies were classified as “little white lies.” A little white lie is a lie about a small or unimportant matter that someone tells to avoid hurting another person.
The authors also found that we lie to avoid others, protect ourselves, impress others, protect someone else, and to gain personally. We tell the most lies to friends, followed by family, and colleagues.
As I discuss in my first book, Balancing Act, trust is the bedrock of business performance; so one small, but meaningful thing we can do to promote more organizational trust is to remove the phrase “to be honest with you” from our lexicon. Trust me, balancing trust with accountability in an organization is extraordinarily difficult—the language we use is an important part of the trust/accountability equation (pun intended).
Since lying is an ingrained component of the human experience, it should be obvious to the modern leader that trust must be balanced with appropriate accountability structures. Trust cannot flourish without accountability.
I’ll leave you with this. Trust is like a ladder. Even a little white lie at the office can send relationships between individuals and/or teams careening right back down to the bottom rung of the ladder. I can directly attest that you’ll live a happier life by adhering to this simple axiom—speak the truth. There’s far too much emotional waste, pain, anxiety, and heartache associated with constantly navigating around the untruths that we generate. Again, lying is part of the human condition and completely eliminating it from our lives is just not feasible. We can, however, work hard to consciously minimize it and cease the use of colloquialisms that make people doubt us from the get-go.
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Fun fact, the study I’m referring to was authored by Kim Serota (Rochester University - Michigan), Timothy Levine (UAB), and Tony Docan-Morgan (UW-La Crosse) - my undergraduate alma mater. Way to go, Tony!
