Ask a Manager: my employee lies to me about things he just said 30 seconds ago

[minoanmiss]

One of my employees, Paul, lies to me regularly about random things. When questioned, he immediately backtracks and acts like I misunderstood. For example, he will tell me that he completed X, Y, and Z reports, and I will say, “Oh, but I didn’t see your report on Z, will you please resend it?” and then he’ll say “I didn’t do the report on Z.” So I respond with, “But you just said you completed the Z report” and he will respond, “No, I didn’t say that.” Nowadays I usually end the interaction there, because I just don’t have the energy to go in circles arguing about what he did or did not say 30 seconds prior. I have done it on occasion and really pressed him on the things he has said, and it has gone absolutely nowhere. It really confuses me.

I should mention, maybe, that he is almost twice my age. I typically have no issue managing people older than I am, but the way he responds to me sometimes feels patronizing. For example, if I outline a project for him and explain what I would like him to do, he will say, “Oh, very good! Good for you for thinking of that.” So when I question him on things, a lot of the time he’ll answer with “Great question!” and then proceed to lie to me.

He just submitted a major report to me that is riddled with errors. I explained some of the mistakes, and he just gave me a blank look. I told him I would go through it thoroughly and we could discuss each item in detail next week, and he just smiled and said that was fine and he commended me for being thorough.

I have tried also to document some conversations via email, and he will always respond with his rebuttal, which includes things like “there are three sides to every story, and the truth is one.”

It feels like none of this is serious enough to start escalating to written warnings, etc. but I’m getting really frustrated because of the extra amount of time I spend every day coaxing the truth out of him. It is super weird. I don’t know how to handle it.

I wrote back and asked, “When you have pressed him on the lies in the past and it’s gone nowhere, what does that mean exactly? What happens when you’ve pressed him?”

What has happened in the past is he never answers the question, even when it is asked very directly (I think), and I know this is my failure, but I’ve just given up. Here’s an example conversation.

Me: “Hi Paul, did you complete Project X?”
Paul: “Yes.”
Me: “Will you send it to me via email please?”
Paul: “I already did.”
Me: “I don’t see it. Will you send it again?”
Paul: “Well, I’m not done with it yet.”
Me: “Didn’t you just say you completed it?”
Paul: “It is complete but there are a couple of other things I need to do.”
Me: “Okay, so it isn’t complete. Why did you say it was complete when it’s not?”
Paul: “I didn’t say it was, I just said there are three more things I need to do.”
Me: “But when I first asked you, you said it was complete and that you emailed it to me.”
Paul: “I didn’t email it to you because it’s not complete.”
Me: “But why did you say it was complete?”
Paul: “Because it is, I just need to do some additional things.”
Me: “If you still need to do some additional work, it isn’t complete. Why are you saying it is?”
Paul: “I always do my job on time. I am a dependable employee.”
Me: “I didn’t say you weren’t dependable. I am confused about why you said you completed something when you didn’t.”
Paul: “Well, it’s almost complete.”
Me: “Okay. Can you please send it to me before the end of the day?” <<<<< This is where I give up.
Paul: “You know I will, I have great integrity.”
Me: “Okay, thanks. We’ll regroup after you send it to me.”

Maybe this is not “really pressing” the issue but I feel frustrated asking the same thing over and over. I can sense that he is getting frustrated too and I realize he is just not going to give me straight answers (and eventually the conversation turns into how much integrity he says he has and how experienced he is and sometimes it devolves into how he thinks I’m such a great boss and so thorough and he really likes working with me, which I think is his way of attempting to change the subject via flattery). So I end the conversation because it’s not productive. But then the same situation happens again.

Recently he had an issue with a client and the long and short of it is he told this client that he was in a bad mood because the client was asking too much of him. We had this whole conversation with me explaining that this was an inappropriate and unacceptable thing to say to a client, and he still somehow never admitted to saying it and kept blaming the client. E.g.:

Me: “Paul, this was an unacceptable thing to say to a client. Please don’t say it again.”
Paul: “Well, I would never be inappropriate but he was just out of line.”
Me: “Why was he out of line?”
Paul: “He was asking me questions he knew the answer to. I already told him this information.”
Me: “It’s not wrong for a client to ask you questions. Why do you think that’s out of line?”
Paul: “It’s disrespectful. I have a lot of integrity. I am always professional. He was being very unprofessional asking me a question he knew the answer to.”
Me: “It is not unprofessional. Please do not speak to a client this way again.”
Paul: “I never would be unprofessional.”
Me: “Can we agree that you will not say things like this to clients in the future?”
Paul: “I don’t say things like this to clients.”
Me: “Ok. But you did this time, and we agree that it was unprofessional and that you will not do it again. Right?”
Paul: “I will work on my customer service training as you asked.”
Me: “Ok. Thank you.”

Whoa. This is serious enough to start escalating. In fact, it’s far past that point. This guy is flagrantly lying to you! Or if he doesn’t intend to, he’s such a bad communicator that you can’t take anything he says at face value. Either way, that’s a serious problem — so serious that I don’t see how you can keep him in the role if he doesn’t fix it immediately and permanently.

On top of that, he’s also submitting major reports riddled with errors, saying unacceptable things to clients, causing you to spend time every day pulling the truth out of him, and stonewalling you when you try to address any of this. (He’s also being a patronizing ass, but that’s not the biggest issue here.)

I am curious about why none of this feels big enough to you to act on! From the sounds of it, you should be thinking about firing him.

As for how to handle it in the moment, though, you’ve got to stop letting him draw you into whatever game he’s playing. You’re trying to reason him into acknowledging and respecting the truth, and then giving up in bafflement when he doesn’t. When you do that, he’s getting what he wants — he’s getting to rewrite reality. You can’t let that happen.

Ideally the conversations would go more like this:

You: “Hi Paul, did you complete Project X?”
Paul: “Yes.”
You: “Will you send it to me via email please?”
Paul: “I already did.”
You: “I don’t see it. Will you send it again?”
Paul: “Well, I’m not done with it yet.”
You: “Didn’t you just say you completed it?”
Paul: “It is complete but there are a couple of other things I need to do.”
You: “You just told me it was complete when it isn’t. I need to be able to rely on the info you give me to be accurate. Going forward, I need to know you won’t tell me something is complete if you have more to do on it, or say you sent it if you haven’t.”
Paul: “I always do my job on time. I am a dependable employee.”
You: “Right now you’re not being dependable because I can’t depend on what you tell me to be accurate. That’s very serious and I need it to change.”
Paul: “You know, I have great integrity.”
You: “What I need to hear is that you understand and this won’t happen again.”
Paul: (Who knows what he’ll say! Something about integrity, probably.)
You: “Let me know once you’ve emailed the report to me and we’ll take it from there.”

In other words, don’t let him control where the conversation goes. You need to control the agenda, and your agenda is to clearly state when something isn’t acceptable. Definitely don’t agree with him that he’s dependable when he’s not! In fact, it almost doesn’t matter what he says, given how bizarre his responses are; just stick to telling him what you need and how that’s different from what you’re getting.

However, you shouldn’t have more than a couple of conversations like that. If it keeps happening (and frankly, I’d argue you’re already there and you should skip straight to this step), you need to quickly move to a more serious response, whatever that looks like in your organization. In a lot of organizations that would be a formal improvement plan where you lay out what needs to change and by when, with a clear statement that you will need to let him go at the end of that time if the improvements aren’t made. Include a clear requirement that his answers about projects must be accurate and reliable. If your organization allows you to keep the timeline for seeing improvement short, do — a month, two at most. You’re going to know pretty quickly if he can change this or not. (Prediction: not.)

But also … what is going on with him? Is he deliberating manipulating you to avoid accountability? Is it not deliberate and he’s just an incredibly weird communicator with no regard for the truth? Do his conversations with other people look like this? There’s something creepy about his entire approach — the flagrant lies while smiling at you, the patronizing compliments, the misplaced self-reverence and claims that he has the very traits he just displayed an absence of. I’m getting serious “watch your back in the parking lot after you lay down the law with him” vibes, and I’d want HR and your boss in the loop very early on in this process.

Comments

[kellyblah]

I read this column earlier. I work with someone similar. I would rather walk across a riverbed of Lego than deal with assholes like this again. They KNOW what they are doing.

[minoanmiss]

WORD. I wanted to pat the heads of people saying "maybe it's dementia! maybe he had a stroke!" this guy knows what he's doing. I wish you all the luck and fortitude with dealing with your reality-warper-wannabee coworker.

Also, as a side note, it's interesting to see people worrying about firing employees. I thought that firing people, or at least dangling the threat over their heads, was one of the perks of being a manager.

[conuly]

If it is dementia or he has had a stroke then maaaaaaaaybe he and his family need a serious wake-up call as to exactly how bad the situation is. Because it doesn't get better.

[lemonsharks]

TBH I doubt the commentariat would be so quick to jump to/defend Paul as having "dementia," or "a stroke," if he were presented as having a woman's name, or an "ethnic" name, rather than a stereotypical Whiteguy™ name.

[minoanmiss]

I would not wager against you.

[conuly]

You're not wrong.

[adrian_turtle]

Responding to your side note, firing somebody can feel horrible. It might be worth going through a miserable process to have them be gone, but that's different...that's why so many managers find themselves wishing a problem employee would conveniently chose to retire or relocate to another continent. You have to go over everything that's wrong with the employee, in painful detail, and the person you're firing is defensive or resentful at BEST. You never wanted to be a prosecuting attorney; that's why you went into the electrical engineering business in the first place! (Or publishing or whatever.) And at the end of the day, you have to do the person's work yourself, until you go through the long and messy process of hiring a replacement and training them.

[lemonsharks]

Except that in places with at-will employment, including much (all ?) of the US, the employer really doesn't have to go over all the reasons in excruciating detail.

All they have to do is deliver the news, complete any end of employment paperwork, mail any of the employee's stuff home to them, and not contest unemployment.

In places with at will employment, the let's ~~berate~~ go over everything that's wrong with the employee song and dance is 100% CYA for the employer, who often either intends to fight the unemployment claim or is firing the employee for an illegal reason.

Does it "feel good"? No. I've done it. I hated it. And I'll never take a managerial job again because of it.

Do I have any sympathy for people who "have to" fire employees? No I do not.

[mirlacca]

Even at-will employers have to be wary of the company getting hit with a wrongful dismissal lawsuit. I had a boss once who took a couple of years documenting an employee's behavior before firing him.

OTOH, I know of three cases where women were fired pretty quickly. But again, the managers did document causes.

[cereta]

Yeah, I get this in my work, too. Teachers like to chortle about catching plagiarizers or failing someone who, say, hasn't done half the work, but actually sitting down with them and going through it suuuuuuucks. Whether the answer is tears, belligerence, or just a complete inability to grasp what the problem is, it almost always requires a few moments in a quiet office after. Doing it over email is usually (but not always) easier, but it's seldom fun.

[torachan]

Yeah, he sounds like a very toxic person who is finally gone from my workplace. Especially the whole "they were disrespecting me" thing. My life has improved immensely since getting rid of this person at work and in fact the whole workplace atmosphere has changed now that he's not poisoning it. I hope the LW can get rid of this guy soon, because he's not going to change.

[cereta]

Is anyone else flashing on, like, the whole Trump administration/GOP? Seriously, this reminds me so much of that interview with the ambassador to the Netherlands where first he says he didn't say a thing he definitely said (calls it "fake news"), then when shown a clip of him saying just that thing, says he never called it fake news and hadn't used the term "today." The poor reporter just didn't know what to do.

And the thing is, I'm not just seeing a parallel, here. All of the guy's tactics (rewriting history in real time, falling back on vague things like his "integrity") are right out of the Trump/GOP playbook. I mean, I'd lay hard money that dude is a MAGA-type.

[minoanmiss]

Quite a few people said as much in the comments, yeah.

[cimorene]

What he sounds like is someone with narcissistic personality disorder. That particular feature of Trump's conversations are a very common symptom of that. Of course, they aren't the only people who can do it (manipulative people who are just assholes do it on purpose and in full awareness of what's going on), but the difference is that narcissists sort of simultaneously believe and don't believe it - their relationship to the truth/reality itself is disordered because it's just completely irrelevant to them; instead they're concerned only with their egos, and will 100% pathologically act like the above and like Trump when questioned forever, no matter what.

[cereta]

I agree. I mean, I've argued with myself for years about much of his bullshit Trump actually believes, but I do think the answer is "quite a lot." The closest thing he had to a religion growing up was a church run by the guy who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, which...explains a lot, and I swear I could see the moment when, as he said, "Frankly, we did win this election," that the Big Lie became Unassailable Truth in his mind. I do think that a lot of the other players know perfectly well that they're lying. They've just seen Trump get away with it so successfully that they don't see a compelling reason not to. Where letter dude falls on this spectrum is unclear, but either way, LW needs to get him gone.

[cimorene]

I think some of them obviously do - did - at some points, and at the same time, it would occasionally be clear that some of them were also out of touch with reality. But having pathology in a position of power is evidently known (to specialists) to create a sort of cult of personality and spread the disordered thinking to followers that they accumulate - Dr Bandy Lee has posted about that on Twitter as well as in various articles and op-eds she's written over the last five years or so. I gather it's also touched on in that book by mental health professionals called "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump", but I haven't read it.

[cereta]

I've got that one in my queue. Now that he's no longer in office, but while the damage and the threat of more are still real, I'm sort of plowing through all kinds of perspectives on him and the surrounding forces. I couldn't while there was a threat of a second term; it was just too much.

[ashbet]

This guy sounds MINDBENDINGLY frustrating.

And the consistent pattern of lying and uncompleted work should have gone to a PIP before now.

(And I say this as a lazy-ass employee, but I would never have dreamed of making a habit of lying to my supervisor’s face about easily-verified stuff!!)

[raine]

This dude is so gaslighting the LW, whether he means to do so deliberately or not. I worked with someone like that and discovered their definition of "completed" was "I worked on it yesterday" and "I don't want to be held accountable for work I've been assigned if it comes from a woman". Thankfully, I had a good boss to back me up, but lord, that was a painful exercise.

[tielan]

There is another option, but it's going to cross into cultural norms.

In some cultures, it's unacceptable to give a negative answer to a superior. One simply Does Not Do That. So they say "yes, it's done" or "yes, they'll do it" then they'll prevaricate. I don't know if Paul is of that cultural background - and even if he is, it's still not acceptable in the office culture he's working in - but it's something to keep in mind.

Still, as I noted before, it's unacceptable behaviour in the office, and an intelligent employee knows what they can and can't do going forward.

[heavenscalyx]

I'm betting one reason the LW hasn't gotten serious about firing this guy is because LW is a young woman and Paul is an older white dude who has been at the company for awhile, with accompanying social capital.

[minoanmiss]

As i said above, I would not bet against you.

[mirlacca]

This.

[shirou]

It is astonishing what some AAM LWs consider not serious enough to escalate. Paul needs to be gone yesterday.

[mirlacca]

I think even the suggested revision is not good. I'd suggest this:

You: “Hi Paul, did you complete Project X?”
Paul: “Yes.”
You: “Will you send it to me via email please?”
Paul: “I already did.”
You: "Send it again, please. I'll expect it in the next five minutes."

And then END THE CONVERSATION. Hang up, walk away, whatever. Do not be drawn into his gaslighting.

And when, of course, he doesn't send the report within the stated time limit, send one more message:

You: "Paul, I have not received your report within the stated time limit. I will have to note this for your performance evaluation for this period."

And don't discuss it. Just shut it down.

For the inappropriate comment discussion:

"Paul, that comment was inappropriate, and I do not expect you to repeat that behavior."

And when he protests, repeat the same words until he realizes that no matter WHAT he says, he's going to get the same response.

[mirlacca]

(I'm also willing to be that the manager is female.)