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Well, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone, but I’m sorry to say I felt the need to put this one out there as one of the keys to success as a project leader.<\/p>\nWell, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone, but I’m sorry to say I felt the need to put this one out there as one of the keys to success as a project leader.<\/p>\n
Key success behavior #2:\u00a0 Don’t Lie.\u00a0 I recently had lunch with someone who’d been lied to by her manager three years ago.\u00a0 As she described her sense of betrayal it was clear that she felt the sting as clearly as if it had occurred yesterday.\u00a0 People don’t forget being lied to.\u00a0 Although some people seem to find telling lies as easy as breathing (I’m thinking of sales forecasts here, mostly, but there are other examples . . .), most people feel a little alarm go off when they’re spewing untruths, and some even feel the need to take a bath afterward (like my family – we were raised Catholic – guilt was a biggee for us).\u00a0 But that little tug from your conscious is nothing compared to the physical wave of disgust and dizziness that washes over a person when they find out they’ve been lied to.<\/p>\n
There are no little lies.\u00a0 OK, maybe if someone asks “Does this dress make my butt look big?”, it’s possible that saying “Gee, it looks great on you!\u00a0 If you like it get it!” wouldn’t count as a lie.\u00a0 But anything else pretty much counts.\u00a0 This is about your personal integrity, not about project management deliverables, so I’m not talking about fancy marketing language that overstates the product performance or excessively optimistic predictions of meeting scheduled milestones.\u00a0 I’m talking about destroying your credibility and undermining your relationships by saying things that are untrue.\u00a0 One of my (former) teammates told several people that he taught me everything I knew.\u00a0 Gosh, that would be a severe limitation if it were true.\u00a0 Fortunately I knew a few things before I met him, and managed to learn a few things on my own since I met him.\u00a0 Of course when I asked him if this was what he said he denied it, adding a second lie to the first.\u00a0 I chalked it up to a simple misunderstanding the first time, but when something similar (much worse, actually, but too inflammatory even for a blog post!) happened with a third person I knew and trusted, I decided that I’d had quite enough.\u00a0 It’s no big surprise that we’re no longer working together.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned in the first post this week, your integrity and credibility are a great source of power to you as a project leader.\u00a0 If you allow yourself to lie, or even flirt with telling “little white lies”, you are putting at risk the source of your power.\u00a0 Sometimes you will fall into temptation.\u00a0 It’s despicable to lie, and humiliating to be caught when you do lie.\u00a0 It’s just not worth it.\u00a0 Find a way to say what’s true for YOU.\u00a0 When you speak from your heart about how you FEEL you are not lying.\u00a0 For example, as a project leader you might have occasion to say “I had to make a tough decision and you are probably not going to like it, but it’s my responsibility, and I’m truly sorry for any negative impact that had on you.”\u00a0 That’s way better than saying “My boss made me.”<\/p>\n
One important distinction I’d like to make about this is that “Don’t lie.” isn’t the same as saying “Tell the Truth”.\u00a0 The truth doesn’t always need to be told.\u00a0 Sometimes your friend’s butt does look big in that dress.\u00a0 Who cares?\u00a0 Sometimes what you think of other people is none of their business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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