Discussion on:

Seven reasons your coworkers don't trust you

Everyone knows you have slept with half of the staff and haven't told your significant other. Quit being a slut. You gossip more than you work and everyone is tired of hearing you speak.

C'mon, kids; that was funny! He said what we all thought when we first saw the title.

It was a joke after all.

A lot of humor can slip past people who are burning up their 'linear-logic circuits' at the time; hours later (during Happy Hour) they get it. Your deadpan delivery helped stump them, I think.

"6. You spin the truth"

Everyone spins the truth. It is a requirement for survival. It you tell the unvarnished truth 100% of the time, you'll be hitting the bricks right quick like.

Management, by definition, is "spinning the truth." That's what they do.

"Spinning the truth" means nobody is going to believe you or trust you. It your position relies on this kind of"divine deception", your customers won't trust you either. Go work for the CIA.

Faux news. :-P

Fundamentally disagree about "everyone spins the truth".....that is incorrect and that attitude is too prevalent in US industry........the unfiltered truth is what is required

but a fundamental part of human nature is seeing the world and situations through our own perspectives. This, in and of itself, is going to cause some skewing of "The Truth." It's inevitable. We can, however, do our best to stick to the truth as we see it, to listen to others and how they perceive events, and to find the closest thing to truth within the threads.

OK, philosophically we'll never get to the final ultimate truth. But on a day-to-day level, we all know what it means to be honest in describing a situation, or what it means to put a spin on it to serve our or the company's interests. Honesty works. Admitting your own mistakes follows from honesty.

Introduce an average autistic person into the work-place and see how far that notion that "unfiltered truth is what is required". People who don't know when to keep their mouths shut -- to smooth over disagreements, keep confidences and respect privacy -- are not welcome in most work-places.

Being honest does not imply blurting out every truth you are aware of. It seems to me that many of these comments are people trying to come up with indirect ways to justify lying.

At least not for me. I am one of the most honest people in my work place and I certainly believe that covering up fault and skewing facts intentionally does no good for anyone involved.

However, I also have come across and been involved in conflicts that arose from differing perspectives of a situation. Both parties honestly believed they were telling the truth, but they were doing so with lack of facts or through the filter of personal perspective. We should not jump to the conclusion that someone is being dishonest without open dialog and understanding. That's my point. Rash judgement is easily as much of an issue as dishonesty.

(Edited for typo)

I agree, frankness is different to unfiltered honesty! Frankly I am offended by the comment that "everyone spins the truth". There are, of course, times when tact is needed, but tact and spin are worlds apart. One is motivated by a wish to improve or maintain good relationships, the other is much more about manipulation and getting your own way. If we can't tell the difference then maybe its time to look at our emotional maturity and see what we can do about improving our tact.

I've dabbled in the unfiltered before and you know where it got me? The unemployment line. There's a reason some people are at the top. They know how to play the game. Management, especially middle management with an agenda, is not concerned with how well you do your work or whether things are done correctly and on time, or hell, correctly at all.

As long as you can ********, you're golden. Unfortunately I wasn't born with a silver tongue and cannot seem to develop one, and not for lack of trying. I've worked in many, many places over the years and it's exactly the same situation at companies large and small. Though in smaller companies it's much harder...

The "truth" (as we see it) can be filtered without lying. Sometimes it is better to say nothing.
Liars and BSers will always be exposed in the end anyway.

I've known a autistic guy that was a pathological liar. Autism doesn't make people honest, it may make them younger than their years in which case they are often very innocent and honest to a fault at an older age, but that doesn't mean that they don't attempt to lie and manipulate to get what they want. Especially when mislead or if they find that bending the truth gets better results.

Truth, yes. Unfiltered, not necessarily. Most of the time, when the "unfiltered truth" comes up, the context is bad news of some sort. There are a myriad of articles on how to bring up bad news so as to keep focus on the news and not on the people.

It may well be that John or Joan is an incompetent dolt, but flat out saying so is not helpful. Dispassionate analysis of an objective failure (project delivered late, not at all or full of bugs) will make this clear, but not look like an attack on the person.

One never tells a child that he/she is stupid; what the child did was ill advised, dangerous to him/herself or others, out of line with the family's morals or ethics, but it's the act, not the person. If you can't come up with something more constructive than "stupid" when discussing someone else, you're applying the term to the wrong person,

It sounds more like a Parent/Child, Teacher/student or Supervisor/dumbass employee relationship.
Aren't we talking about trust among *co-workers*?

I've seen this in the workplace way too many times! For a number of years I worked in an industrial environment where tact was something used to determine how sticky something was, and was not part of the manager to employee vocabulary!

As you move up the food chain and out of the garbage, the language changes, sometimes not by much, but it does change. I saw a big difference going from manufacturing to engineering, and then later on to MIS. Different worlds really do exist.

Sometimes you do need to be blunt, and unfortunately it's not always politically correct, but it needs to be done. I've been in a situation where an former manager was supposed to cover for me. To be honest, and I told his manager the CEO, that he was useless because I had 3 times the work to do when I got back to work. It probably wasn't nice, but he got the axe a few weeks later. No loss as far as I'm concerned.

It'll never happen. We are a litigious society, and we don't have "loser pays" court system.

Anyone can (and DOES) sue anyone else for anything. And since we are not automatically "loser pays," even if I prevail in the lawsuit, I still have to pay the fees, etc. incurred to defend myself.

So, it would help if one didn't go around hollering "you suck" even if "you" do, even if it is the unvarnished truth. One MUST spin it, or one must hit the bricks.