Discussion on:

Seven reasons your coworkers don't trust you

As you say it is instinctive, I agree, we all deceive to protect. When running from a sabretooth tiger, I am sure our predecessors used diversion and deception to protect themselves. Now we have very complex language, lies are verbal or printed deceptive practices for protection, perhaps not from a tiger but from personal embarrassment, personal attacks, getting into trouble etc.

"Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive" True, but a good spider spins a good web too.

If you like cheating people, you'll enjoy lying.

If you want to be trusted, you won't lie to people. Lie once and kiss your reputation good-bye. Ever hear anyone say "I trust him, he's a good liar"?

Yes, humans lie. We also murder, rape and steal. Choose your poison.

In fact, choose your friends based on how well they "survive" by lying. Enjoy your life.

...from human-nature commentators from Mark Twain to Psychology Today. However, I once lived in a house with a Jack Russell terrier who would commit petty crimes (vandalism and theft) and FRAME MY CAT for them (by secreting whatever household item he'd picked up and chewed in Dr. Forrester's cat-bed for us to find). He didn't fool anyone, but his desire WAS to 'bear false witness against his neighbor'....

Sneaky little dog (too smart for his own good) actually took on our 'worst human quality' to 'get ahead in the workplace' by trying to make his associate look bad to management.
(If we took too long to notice the article in question was 'missing', he'd do a little dance by the cat's bed to draw attention to it).

Normally relation among co-workers are good as all of them facing the common problems from their bosses, managers and team-leaders. So I don't find this post that much informative as the other posts are based on Industrial reality here.

8. You're lax about ethics
I recently overheard a colleague talking about how he thought the corporate conduct policy was in place to show customers and that you only need to follow it when there's a good chance of getting caught. Needless to say, it's hard to trust someone who doesn't seem to have a functioning moral compass.

9. Talking about Others
I did this quite frequently until I recognized the effect it was producing. It's okay to occasionally vent, but when it becomes habitual, people start to wonder what you're saying when they're not around.

I understand that when you open your self up for lack of trust, then not having the faith of your coworkers is inevitable. However, you have to be careful of the shark in the workforce pool, these are the people that are out for your job. These animals are the ones that you think you can trust, but turn out to be ones with the knifes; BEWARE! I speak from experience!!!

doing those things. Sure nobody trusted them, but management loved them.

In my experience, recognizing effort applies if and only if the effort is accompanied by the desired results. I've seen co-workers put in huge amounts of effort and come away with few results. I've also seen co-workers misdirect their efforts. Recognizing effort -- however well intentioned -- that is not accompanied by the desired results. is a recipe for disaster.

The best advice I could give, based on my decades in IT is to document everything and build an objective case for every decision you make. When management lies (as most management does these days because they are psychopaths, or what Dr. Phil likes to call BAITERs in his book "Life Code"), you have to follow the prescription given by Dr. Robert Hare and Dr. Paul Babiak in "Snakes in Suits": Build and keep the documentation. Make sure it's in a safe place away from work.

I had bad IT management from the beginning to the end. My first Data Processing manager wanted me to put down hours I didn't work in order to cheat a child development study -- and wanted us to give him the money for the department xmas party. You know the story of the two married managers (married to each other) in government IT controlling 85% of the people and budget in opposition to the Law, happily signing each other's requisitions. Some know of the corruption of an $85 million IT project that went south in a major misfortune 50 company which finally led to the sell off of the business.

Much of management is filled today with narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths and nutjobs. If you must work in such an environment, you may be able to have the respect of your peers by being straight arrow and having integrity, but it will never get you into the league of liars where Executive Ability (the study from the University of Toronto) is dependent upon lying successfully at an early age. If you are not a successful liar by the age of five, just forget joining management because you just won't fit in.

If you do a good job and treat your fellow minions with respect, you might survive and prosper, but you don't really want to come to the attention of corrupt management: There is no way to be competent in a dysfunctional environment.

I would also advise not to become too tied to your work. All your labors can be wiped in a moment at the whims of the political ambitions of less than stellar management. Oh, sure, the only real purpose for management is to provide the workers with what they need to do the job to achieve the goals of the organization, but over the past 50 years, we've gone from objective to subjective and from solid process to how people feel. Management's agenda these days is to promote itself and climb the ladder for more power and more money. If you get in the way you will not survive. Always be prepared to walk away when you have to (assuming you have one shred of integrity).

Times have changed.

Strive for survival.

Also be prepared to provide evidence for the indictments.

What Tony Hopkinson told me when I last complained about the suits....

"Your Attitude is Unhelpful" :P

or would you prefer:

"I find your lack of faith disturbing"?

And here I thought I had a bad opinion of Upper Management......

I find it that people don't trust me when I don't spin the truth to meet their liking. When I tell the ABSOLUTE truth, they either deny it, or don't want to hear it, so there's the lack of trust there.

but they do a great job of shading and tinting it to reflect their own perspective.

Planck's Constant and the value of Pi cannot be changed by management to persuade the universe: The management can only overwhelm people into believing they can change it.

Management would like to persuade you that there is such a thing as a win-win fast, cheap AND good, even as you work longer hours for less pay to validate the insanity of the smarmy psychopaths in charge of selling hope and change through their lies -- which, if you will note -- there cannot by definition be lies without truth.

It's called perception management: In the long term it rides the crest of entropy to end in dysfunctional chaos.

Anyone who believes truth is just perception has distorted perceptions, happily buying into what structural visualization deprived non technologists are selling.

It's up to you, but I don't want them to fix my car, perform surgery on me, change the oil, design nuclear power plants, teach my children or even take care of my cat, because I know in advance, I'm not going to like the results if I survive them.

Whether or not your coworkers trust you these days relies upon two things: Whether they have bought into the lies of management or just how much damage you might do to them by revealing the truth, such as it is -- either way, distrust is fear based toward you if you have integrity -- irrelevant to whether you can do the job and do it well.

The value of Pi is relative to the curvature of the spacetime you are measuring it in.

Pi as a ratio I'll give you. It's not a truth by my definition though, it's a fact.
So now we are not even agreeing on what to be absolute about.


We are distortions of reality. There's good argument that this reality you speak of is a figment of our collective imagination.

You were so sensible, from your other posts.

Oh, well.

A billion bucks to CSC from U.S. Taxes for THE Air Force System -- a total failure: Fact or truth?

I don't much believe anyone involved with that one can be trusted, do you?

Not that I didn't see the same thing at Weyerhaeuser, on a smaller scale, not paid by taxpayers.

Still no trust.

The billion bucks is likely to be a fact.
Failure, I daresay that depends on who you ask, so it's a truth.

Try again
How about Tony is 5'6" in height?
If you asked a bunch of vertically challenged people, they are going to say I'm tall.
Are they telling the truth?

Truth is a value judgment it's relative to your beliefs. Don't believe me try and convince an ardent capitalist of the necessity for government intervention in the market.
Or a christian that there is only one god and his name is Allah
Pull out as many facts as you like.
None of them will be true.

Don't why I bothered with this now seeing as you believe in absolute truth...

No truth, just popular lies.

You'll be a major success.

Although there will always be a few people who don't trust you.

Always in the past, I've agreed with your assessments -- thought they were spot on.

But with Dr. Phil McGraw's "Life Code" perhaps it is time to follow his advice and not give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

Facts aren't true.

I'm not seeing a basis to build any kind of reliable technology there.

If your culture does not suit the culture where you work then you will not be trusted. If everyone likes football you have to like football, if everyone speaks language x then you have to speak language x. When in Rome do as the Romans do. If you conform/copy or ... appear to conform then people around you will trust you. It has nothing to do with your capabilities as an employee. I have worked in a number of countries. I still keep my own style of work but I always show my colleagues that I fit in by mixing their culture with my own. This means that they easily sympathize with me and, at the same time, appreciate the results that I produce. Basically I try hard to fit in without sacrificing my own identity.

what the culture is if management lies to everybody, plays games and takes credit for things that were failures (standard SOP these days).

If you have integrity in dysfunctional environments, you won't be trusted, except by a few that hold your values.

Everybody else -- you can't trust them, they don't trust you and nobody can much trust anybody.

Solution: Superior power, leave or go crazy.

In my experience I have seen that my attitude has always had a positive influence in the companies that I have worked at. I hope that you do not consider yourself as the leading role in "Der gute Mensch von Sezuan" by Brecht. I have seen that even in dysfunctional environments that there are always some people who can be influenced to take a more positive position. Remember that a dysfunctional company never starts off dysfunctional otherwise it wouldn't have survived from day one. The culture that you described is very much that of many civil services but to be honest I have also worked in some civil services (since I am a European citizen I am quite portable) and even found that people responded well even in those stubborn environments. My experience tells me that my attitude played the most important role in influencing others and not any corrupt way of thinking.

And they were oft inspired by my attitude. Signs of:

"You can't be competent in a dysfunctional environment"

were popping up all over the place, as was my book, "Assertive Incompetence: An Introduction to Management Malpractice".

Still, I doubt I was a prostitute wandering around trying to please the gods looking for the good.

In Europe, there are a number of Laws which prevent some of the abuse of the United States Corporate and Government world so prevalent here. There, as I understand it, you actually get vacation and aren't on call day and night as the sole support of the most important system in the whole place -- you don't have your boss insist that you take your phone with you so they can call you back thousands of miles away on your vacation with your family if something happens. They can't make you give up your honeymoon to Hawaii because you an important piece to complete an 18 month project.

And I would suppose that if the Executive Vice President sleeps with his admin, he would do it discretely and not fire the HR person who brings the matter of the admin signing her time slips -- forging her boss's signature -- for thousands of dollars of overtime she didn't work (they finally fired the VP in the middle of his trip to China and prosecuted the admin).

I would see the Europeans as being more enlightened than the Americans and so your experiences of extreme insane abuse of employees may not be one you have experienced. Perhaps management over there is more rational.

Life over here in the government / corporate circles continues to be ever the more chaotic and sometimes, like those who work for Dish Network, become so intolerable that the only solution is to leave, because of the low pay, long hours and terrible working conditions, all to make the billionaire at the top more profit.

So I hope you enjoy your European management. I'd bet, if I were a betting man, it's a whole lot better now, but you never know what's coming.

So keep up your spirits and continue to sing "Tomorrow" on the job, because it's only a day away.

I have worked for some real nut job companies in the USA and Canada too. The most repressive was a US based company operating in Canada, where they thought the same employment rules apply.

Whenever they came up with some new document to sign and stood there drumming their fingers, waiting for me to sign it. I'd just throw it in my briefcase and say I'd get it back to them within 7 business days.

I didn't buy ANYTHING they put in front of me, NOTHING AT ALL, because it was all US HO generated BS that didn't apply in Canada.

They'd say, we have great lawyers that makes these things bulletproof, I'd just reply 'but I don't live in the US or work for a US company, this is Canada and MY lawyers will ensure it fits withing Canadian Employment guidelines. In MOST, if not all, cases it was laughed at, circled and marked with so much red that it was barely legible.

I'd give it back and say, have your super lawyers come up with something that applies in this country.

They just ASSUMED that if it was within the law in the USA, it was withing the law here too, which it isn't.

Europe has more stringent rules than Canada but certainly nowhere near the repression you see in the USA. I ran two companies in the US, then shut them down and moves operations back up here where people got a fair shake. I'd rather tell someone they were unemployed than treat them like minions.

While you do come across as very jaded and really upset with 'the establishment' not ALL US companies operate that way, in fact usually smaller business value employers more and pay really isn't that much different in most cases. For a few grand a year, you get treated like a human, to me that's worth it.

If fewer people desperately subjected themselves to accepting these horrors of corporate America, fewer companies would push the limits as they do. When so many people are willing to be treated like crap and put up with it, even sucking up to the people who treat them that way. there's not a lot of choices left for employees who demand better treatment.

One key I have found: In the USA, the employment standards laws are in place to protect corporate greed and completely ignore the employees.

In Canada, the Employment Standards Act really stands to favour the employee, they say it is fair for both parties, which it may well be, but I have yet to see Employment Standards take the employers side.

Want better treatment? Move, you at least have THAT freedom in the USA.

with the guy.

First sign of a dysfunctional system, is people in it, who think it's more important to spin a negative into a positive than to fix the negative.

My glass is neither half full, nor half empty. It's cracked, or too big....
No amount of positiveness is going to change that. If you want to tell me that this time it, will. Well that last guy said that as well (and the one bfeore that, and the one before that.... They skirted the truth, whether you consider it absolute or relative.

If you believe in something, it appears to be the truth, to you. To believe in something you must have faith. Is faith not then the truth?
Yet faith can hardly be deemed fact. Truth can therefore not be simply factual but faith.

People who have strong Christian faith believe Christ is the Lord. To the one with such faith, Christ being the Lord, is truth.

Remember the start of the Iran war and how Saddam was stockpiling WMD to use on his own and, even worse, the American people? There were no facts, but those who believed it or had FAITH in the president saw it as truthful. The problem is, those who HAD faith were quickly let down as FACT proved their faith to be incorrect. So what was once deemed truth was proven otherwise by fact.

Simply put, FACTS are not truth, TRUTH is not fact. I'll take facts over truth any day of the week.

Now honesty, that's a whole new game.

We can both look at the same set of facts, and come up with different truths.

If you challenge someone elses truth, you are attacking them right where it hurts. Facts become irrelevant.

No longer debating whether Tony's front door is red, but about how much of a communist that makes him...

You have to fix dysfunctional management.

Dysfunctional management is immune to being fixed by positive happy Pollyanna spin. The dysfunctional environment becomes even more so, adding delusion to the already unworkable.

What it really takes is superior force -- superior technology, a new-broom-sweeps-clean management change, revolution, a division sell-off and any number of power moves that overwhelm the dysfunctional management to subsume them out of existence to replace what's broken.

I worked for an IT Manager who (unknown to us at the time) had schizoaffective disorder, meaning he had the worst of both schizophrenia and bipolar disease. He was also an alcoholic to boot. He did odd things. No one could ever understand his decisions. He was always at odds with the other managers (not that they weren't really terrible too). He was showing up drunk at work and the IT Manager gave him an ultimatum: Quit drinking on the job or just quit. He quit. Now you'd think that would be the end of it, but someone nice over in accounting had been nice to him. He began stalking her. Big mistake. Her husband was the sheriff's deputy. A court order followed. He was in and out of the mental ward. He finally died alone. I remember that he had left a voice mail on my work phone in the middle of the night wanting to get together with me to go drinking (apparently he didn't realize I didn't drink). I worked elsewhere by that time and by the time I got in the next morning to call him, he didn't remember leaving the call.

Now when I speak of absolute truth, it's like this: They guy was absolutely nuts.

I've worked for such creepy weirdoes my whole career, so when I see discussions of competent management, I have more than a vague suspicion that either it's fantasy, from an alternate universe or from long, long ago and far away. It's management of this sort that Dr. Phil's new book, "Life Code: The New Rules for Winning in the Real World" was written and the world described by Robert Jackall's "Moral Mazes". I lived as a manager in a misfortune 50 "Moral Mazes" corporation. It's quite a shock to see psychopaths managing a Corporation and quite a wonder that business succeeds at all these days. There's quite a lot of slop in the system, and since all the environments seem to be so dysfunctional, they're pretty much on an equal footing -- which is why I surmise they work at all.

I appreciate the folks at ZDNet: Most of them are a cut above the narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, nutjobs and weirdoes running our businesses and government. It is always a pleasure to have a meeting of the minds of those who actually seem to have some sort of moral core with integrity. From my view, while it is refreshing, such people are of a dying breed and the rest of the world has moved on to chaos where everything is negotiable, filled with moveable morals negotiating the fiords of stupidity.

If there is a solution other than absolute power to overwhelm dysfunctional management I would certainly like to entertain it.

Perhaps that is a discussion for another time.

Over the decades, it has shown me the kind of person I simply don't want to be.

The experience makes me want to be a better person -- at least better than what I've seen.

It has also convinced me that I never want to be a manager again or supervisor or responsible for others -- since, in the "Moral Mazes" of cubical cities these days, it is a lose-lose proposition.

Give me technology any time and let me work with that without the drama of politics for the benefit of others.

to confuse truth with opinions.

Some folks need to get their definitions straight and seek redemption from the Universe (Planck's Law is always a good place to start).

Assuming that truth is just what you believe will get you into great trouble on projects where you absolutely have to follow rules and processes, particularly if your dysfunctional distorted perceptions result in financial systems that are billions of dollars (or euros) off.

Just ask the United States Air Force about their experience than CSC.

More fun than having an alcoholic psychoaffective manager I'd bet if I were a betting man.

A little known psychological study in the 1950s ascertained that those who had the ability to achieve the Presidency of the United States did not actually have the ability to be the President of the United States because the skills to attain the job are different from the ones needed to perform the job competently.

So now we have a pandemic belief system that everyone lies but it doesn't matter because no one listens (a corollary of Murphy's Law). Someone like the President tells lies these days and the reaction is pretty much, "So? We like the guy, besides everybody lies" which has led to the chaos we see these days: Nobody can rely on anyone or anything anymore because everything is always negotiable for a better deal.

Technologists are faced with solving problems using politics. That's not very useful IFF you actually want to produce a solid useful viable product. You'll waste a lot of time trying to cover your act while the ship hits the sand and you won't be worth spit.

What I see from my perspective, being retired with 40+ years of IT experience, is that nothing and no one is exactly what they seem to be any more and pretty much can rely on anything or anyone any longer.

If you really want trust from your coworkers, it would seem that the best course of action is to be utterly and completely reliable, straight arrow and never lie (but never be harsh either). There is no guarantee that this will win any favor with management, since it will probably ruin all the lies they have to use to convince people that lies are truth and truth is lies and the project is really done successfully when it isn't anywhere close.

Or.

You can follow my snarky advice and employ Assertive Incompetence: Create the vision of a bright future, when you get just short of having everyone discover it will never work, create a new more fantastic vision of the future to distract them so they forget the old vision and plunge on to the new one. It's the practice of psychopaths, but it works well for management, if not for the lowly workers who are constantly running to catch up to the imaginary milestones they can't make without working long hours off clock and expending their own resources to do it, but they are a disposable resource, so go for it.

Eventually though, there are limits and eventually you'll be like the United States Air Force and discover that you can't afford it any more after a Billion or two dollars.

By that time, you will have made your mark and taken your profits, so why should you care?

I'd say that there's something fundamentally wrong with the macro system. If you can find a smaller business that has integrity (about 50 people max seems to be the limit), then the standard rules of yesteryear about integrity may actually work. Anything larger than that and, well, the narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths and nutcases move in and take over. As has been pointed out by my wise peers here, it's well worth it if you can find such an environment, even if you earn thousands of dollars less a year, for the quality of life alone, working with people you can trust.