Welcome to the ‘Lying Workplace’. 5 Lies We've All Quietly Agreed To
Last week, Forbes reported that employees are handing HR screenshots of text messages that were never sent. AI made them. And when someone actually did send the message, they now just claim the screenshot was faked. This is just 1 of 5 areas where lies are showing up in the workplace, and they’re eroding trust at every level.
I call it the
Lying Workplace, and none of the five lies below are crimes, but that is exactly what makes them dangerous. Every one of them is a small accommodation somebody made because the truth was too expensive to tell.
The 5 Lies of the Lying Workplace
1. The Ghost Candidate
You run a great video interview with a job candidate. They give sharp answers, a clean resume, and solid references. So you make them an offer. Then, someone else shows up on day one.
Gartner asked 3,000 candidates whether they'd faked an interview, either by pretending to be someone else or having someone sit in for them. One in sixteen admitted it. By 2028, Gartner expects one in four candidate profiles worldwide to be fake.
You are not hiring a person anymore. You are hiring a probability.
2. The ‘Secret Advantage’
Someone on your team is twice as fast as they were last year. You think they leveled up. They didn't tell you AI is doing half of it, and they're not going to, because the gap between what you think they can do and what they can actually do is the only leverage they have.
About a third of employees using AI at work hide it from their employer. The most common reason they give is that they like having a secret advantage.
Which means you may be promoting the person who hid it best.
3. The Work Nobody Can Defend
Someone asks AI to write the report. It comes back polished. It sounds right. They send it without checking whether it is right, because they're tired and nobody rewards the checking.
Ask 6,000 workers whether they've done that, and seven in ten say yes.
So somewhere in your company today, a document with someone's name on it is going out the door, and that person couldn't answer one hard question about a single line of it.
4. The Quiet Takeover
This is the one that stopped me cold. When people think layoffs are coming, some of them quietly start using AI to take over a coworker's work. Not to help. To get credit for the other person’s work. So that when the cuts happen, they look essential and their coworker looks replaceable.
ResumeBuilder asked 1,000 workers who were worried about layoffs at their company whether they had done it. Six in ten said yes.
When they asked who the coworker was, seven in ten said it was a friend.
5. The Quiet AI Sabotage
Leadership rolls out the new AI tool. Everyone agrees it’s awesome in the meeting. Then nobody uses it. Not because it's bad. Because they think it's here to take their job, and no one has told them otherwise. So they let it fail.
Nearly a third of employees admit they've done this on purpose. Closer to half among Gen Z.
That isn't laziness. It's self-defense. And people defend themselves long before they defend your mission.
Now Let's Talk About the Lies Coming From Leaders
1. Ghost jobs.
I sat down with CBS 5 News in Phoenix last year to talk about job postings that were never real openings, and I said then what I will say now: you cannot advertise a future you have no intention of delivering and then act surprised when nobody believes the next thing you say. I wrote more about that here.
2. The promised promotion that was never coming.
A colleague of mine was told in January that a director role was hers. She hit her sales number every month after that. February, March, April. In May it was "after the reorg." In August it was "next quarter." In September her manager said, "we're close." Around month nine she stopped chasing the hard accounts. Six weeks later she quit.
A false promise of a promotion kept her producing for nine months, and it cost the company nothing until it cost them her.
3. The “we have standards” lie.
I’ve watched leaders say they have standards and then let the star performer break every one of them and never heard a word about it. That silence is a lie the whole team can read.
Leadership lies often cost their company in high-performance and their best people leaving. Companies that allow those lies did not hire a team full of Tolerators. They built them.
Build What We Call “Trusted Integrity”
Trusted Integrity is the first trait in the Bar Raisers™ DNA, and it is not a one-time play. It is integrity people can bank on. The private standard and the public standard match, every single time, until people stop hoping you will deliver and start counting on it.
The return is not soft. Our National Workplace Trends Study found that 52% of employees would take a lower-paying job to work for a leader they trust and respect.
The standard a leader sets becomes the expectation. The standard a leader protects becomes the culture.
Tomorrow's Move: The Promise Audit
Open a blank page and write down every promise still outstanding to a person on your team. The raise you mentioned. The title conversation. The project you said they would lead. The schedule change you were going to look into.
Now put one of three things next to each one. Delivered. Dated. Or honestly retracted.
There is no fourth option, and “we're close” is not a date. If you cannot deliver it, say so out loud. People can survive a no. What they cannot survive is a maybe that goes on for nine months.
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If you refuse to run a Lying Workplace, send this to another leader who can benefit from it as well.
Bring This to Your People
If your audience needs this message live, book me for your next event.
If your leaders need to build it into how they actually run their teams, bring Destination Workplace® in to train them.
And keep raising the bar! 💪
About Betsy: Betsy Allen-Manning is the wake-up call you didn't know you needed. She's a high-energy leadership keynote speaker and creator of the Bar Raisers™ Movement: a proprietary system redefining how organizations are approaching performance, leadership, and culture. Featured on FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, and TEDx, Betsy works with organizations across corporate, franchise, association, nonprofit, and government sectors. She's the lead researcher behind the National Workplace Trends Study, and delivers programs around her Bar Raisers™ and Leadership Mastery frameworks. She is the founder of Destination Workplace®, an award-winning leadership development firm in Dallas, Texas.
