Can dogs lie?  No, I don’t mean hanging around on the sofa but actually communicate a falsehood?  Curiosity was killing the cat, so to speak, so I put the question to the Dali Lama of the Internet  to see what I could find out.

Well, I didn’t find much.  Not even my fav Cesar Millan really answered the question on his website.  (I did pose it to him via Twitter @cesarmillan, so we’ll see if he responds.)  What I did find though, were answers from various psychologists who posit that deception is a sign of intelligence, thus the more intelligent an animal is, the more the capability to lie – humans of course, being at top of the brain chain.  A couple of other psychologists explored the idea that a “true lie” is where the liar knows  what he is doing, versus a “behavioral lie,” where the liar is getting the target to behave in a certain way without knowing he (the liar) is doing it.  This point of view suggests that behavioral lying may not require strong cognitive ability.  We do it, but it is not a conscious thing.  Rather it’s something useful that we’ve learned from past experience that gets us what we want.  That’s probably what dogs do, I bet.

True or “real” lying then, may require an understanding that people see the world differently from each other and so have different desires, beliefs and intentions.  To intentionally lie, or manipulate another person’s beliefs, one needs to understand that they have a point of view that can be manipulated.  This is where intelligence comes in.  But behaviorists also tell us that even when a true lie is being verbally expressed, our bodies still give us away.  This is because our brain first has to stop itself from telling the truth, make up the lie and then handle the emotional stress of guilt and fear of getting caught.  Mouths can lie, but bodies can’t.

And thus, the popularity of television shows such as The Mentalist and Lie to Me.

I recently had the experience of observing a panel interview for a client who wanted to be sure the organization was bringing in the right person into its c-suite.  There had been a huge issue with the previous executive who not only demoralized the staff, but caused great stress (financial and otherwise) for the company as a whole.  They asked me to observe each of the five candidates during the interview process to determine any behavioral cues being given that could help indicate whether or not the person was the right person for the position.  The experience was exhausting, (it’s hard to stare at people all day), but one of the most interesting tasks I’ve had the pleasure of working on.

Well, things progressed and after the third interview I was getting pretty good at observation.  I began to notice several things the fourth candidate was doing that led me to believe she was lying through her teeth.  Here’s what I saw:

Hint #1.  Heightened stress response – the candidate sailed through the first set of questions, which were designed to help put candidates at ease.  It’s a similar strategy that police interrogators use with subjects; start with non-threatening questions first and then watch for changes in the nonverbals that indicate deception when the questions get harder.  In candidates who are telling the truth, I find they will start to settle down, rather than ramp up emotionally, as the interview progresses.  But, the longer this interview went on, the more this candidate became agitated and unable to sit still.

Hint #2.  Longer, more direct eye contact – it’s a myth that people avoid direct  eye contact when they are lying.  The opposite is true.  Some people will actually stare you right in the eye as if to dare you to confront them with the fact they are lying.  This was what the candidate was doing with the interview panel.  I was opposite her at the conference table and she picked one person to consistently make eye contact with; and it wasn’t me.  As a matter of fact, she picked the person probably with the least influence on the panel.  That didn’t bode well with the rest of the team.  It made them not like her.

Hint #3.  Shorter response time – when a lie is premeditated, the person will start to respond more quickly to a question than someone telling the truth.  But if caught off guard, the opposite will be true; the person will take longer to frame a response as creating a lie takes some brain time.  You guessed right; this candidate was taking a tad too long to respond, and coupled with the other cues I was getting, was leading me to believe she was not telling the truth.

Hint #4.  Different verbal cues – this one was easy to spot.  When lying, a person’s voice will change pitch and get higher.  Think of a little kid who shouts out, “But I didn’t do it, Mom!” with that little squeak at the  end.  The other verbal cues I was getting from this candidate included a lot of rambling (went all around the questions, but didn’t really answer many of them), stammering (uttering the phrase, “you know?” way too much), and qualifying (using phrases such as “well, to the best of my knowledge”) in answering questions.  I caught this one when responding to the questions regarding company operations, which made me believe she didn’t even read the candidate prep package.  She also kept swallowing and licking her lips.

Hint #5.  Self-comforting behaviors – when lying many people will try to calm themselves by various tics and twitches.  They’ll shuffle their feet, root around in their chair, and stretch to get rid of tension.  Some of the best cues regarding self-calming behaviors though, are when people start to touch their face.  This was the big red flag for me.  Our candidate was constantly rubbing her nose (did you know that when you lie you get a rush of adrenaline which opens the capillaries in your nose and makes it itch?).  She kept crossing and uncrossing her arms.  Playing with her hair.  Rubbing her knees.  Shrugging her shoulders.  Hunching over and then sitting up straight.  Covering her eyes of and on with her hands.  And the biggie:  not mirroring the behavior of the rest of the panel members.  Snag.  Caught her.

Of course there are pathological liars who can outsmart even the most experienced human lie detectors.  If the person truly believes the falsehood there pretty much is almost no way to detect the lie.

Needless to say, this candidate didn’t make the cut.  And I bet she knows the truth why.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire is a post from: The HR Whisperer

I received this gem of a poem from one of my clients.  We’ve been working together on an intervention to help his department and collective organization get employees more engaged.  Tough thing to do, given folks don’t get recognition or even raises, really and job satisfaction is very high.  Just the fact that he sent this to me though, screams volumes in where his head is at, what he’s all about, and what he wants to do.  I’m proud and excited to be helping this fine organization; they’ve got leaders, positional and personal, who want to do the right thing.  Bravo.

I’ve since found out that these “rules to lead by” are called The Paradoxical Commandments.   Written by Kent Keith in 1968 when he was a sophomore at Harvard College, the commandments were part of The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council, his first booklet for high school student leaders.

Kent was 19 when he wrote this.  A babe.  What a great way to think – and act – when living a life.  I’m inspired and I hope you are, too.

So, here they are in the spirit of our forefathers who also wanted to do the right thing – and succeeded.  My best to you and Happy 4th of July, everyone!

The Commandments of Leadership

If you do good, people will accuse you of ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

Honesty will make you vulnerable.
Be honest anyway.

The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down
by the smallest people with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.      
Build anyway.

People really need help, but may attack you if you help them.    
Help them anyway.

Give the world the best you’ve got, knowing you may get kicked in the teeth.        
Give the world the best you have anyway.

Leadership Commandments…Personal or Otherwise is a post from: The HR Whisperer

Happy to be back in the blog saddle once again – it’s been a busy month with billable work, so I just know the economy is on the rebound!

Can’t say the same about Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.  Just read a Reuters article this morning announcing that a New York jury decided on $250M damages against Novartis on behalf of 5,600 past and present women employees, only two days after finding that a U.S. division discriminated against women in pay, promotion and pregnancy (Velez et al v Novartis Corporation, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 04-09194).

What were they thinking?

 The jury found that Novartis systematically denied promotions, paid less and subjected 5,600 women to discrimination up to and during 2004.  Court papers said that the women made complaints to Novartis’ human resources division, which were routinely ignored.

That scares me.

We know that employee behavior is often the product of the pressures of the organizational culture.  And we know that organizational culture often comes from a history of “that’s always been the way we do  things around here.” 

 Aren’t we, as HR professionals, supposed to be able to think and operate outside the confines of an organizational culture, especially when confronted with policies or acts that are in direct conflict with what we know to be the best thing for the organization and the employees?  I suspect that the Novartis HR folks “knew or should have known” that this discrimination was going on.  They were probably told not to worry about it by the execs or legal reps as the inequities were” justified.”  Or they too, got stuck in the rut of a bad culture and found it easier to walk away than put up a fight.

What does that say about the HR pros?  It says they weren’t behaving strategically and putting a strong case in play to move toward a gender equitable environment.

 HR Executive Online points out that it may be no surprise that women outnumber men two-to-one in HR, but make over 30% less than their male colleagues.  Former SHRM chairman Johnny Taylor says it’s because “the senior HR roles are dominated by men.” 

Kate Sweetman, principal with The RBL Group and former editor at the Harvard Business Review adds that “it’s terribly ironic because HR should play a key role in helping women and organizations make changes if the ‘leaky pipeline’ to leadership is ever to be patched.”  She adds that “HR needs to create the business case and help find practical ways for gender equity to happen all the way to the top. HR has failed if they don’t have it from top to bottom.”

 So, did Novartis HR create a “leaky pipeline” fail in this situation?

 In my opinion, yes, they did.  Now where is HR going to find the duct tape?

The Leaky Pipeline: Second Edition of What Was HR Thinking?? is a post from: The HR Whisperer

 Toyota’s recent woes with automobile manufacturing defects and the dragging of their feet in responding to the resulting safety and customer issues has left a lot of people feeling cold right now.  This, combined with the record brisk temps we’ve been having anyway  is wreaking havoc on the car buying public and our collective psyche. 

Well, maybe I’m the only one who’s collective psyche is cold.  

 John Rosevear of the The Motley Fool points out that the problem really isn’t so much the safety issues, which are bad and need fixing, but more with the “company’s longtime pattern of responding to problems with a mix of denial and foot shuffling.”

 And apparently it is going to get worse. 

John goes on to say that,

 “Officials in high places in the U.S. are getting cranky…on Tuesday [February 16^th], the Department of Transportation ordered Toyota to turn over documents related to various safety issues.  That may not sound like a big deal, but it is — the DOT is aggressively looking for evidence that Toyota knew of safety defects but didn’t take appropriate action. And if they find that evidence? Oh boy.”

Suddenly, it’s getting hot in here.

Many companies have faced recalls – I distinctly remember Johnson & Johnson’s recall of its Tylenol product  as I worked for The Southland Corporation (parent company of  7-ELEVEN food stores) at the time and in the absence of our area manager had to tell our franchise owners to remove the analgesic from the shelves.  Bad situation.  Good decision.

But the product recall itself is not the entire issue; the more important issue is how the company deals with the recall. 

Which really is trust, isn’t it  – customer trust in whether or not it is safe to purchase the company’s products, and employee trust in whether or not leadership is upfront in walking the talk.

J&J’s doing a great job.  Toyota’s not.

The president of Toyota’s Georgetown, KY plant says company workers are taking the series of recalls personally.

Of course they are.

It seems that Toyota built its reputation on excellence, reliability, customer service and value.  But the company values listed on its website say:  “We believe…in hard work…that good neighbors make good company and vice versa…that the world is getting bigger, but resources aren’t…in the value of diversity – it’s what makes life interesting.”

I don’t about you, but I don’t take away anything about integrity and trust from those values.  Maybe they are implied, but if company leadership refuses to accept responsibility for its mistakes and doesn’t even acknowledge that trust and integrity are important components of doing business, then what can employees believe in?

Now, I’m not saying that if it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.  But we do know that mutual trust is a critical factor in the employer-employee relationship.  If trust exists, employees have a pretty good idea of what company life they can expect and how the company will behave.  When that trust has been breached, as it has been with Toyota, that relationship changes dramatically.

Or maybe the relationship really wasn’t there to begin with.

The best way to maintain trust is to keep from breaking it in the first place.  Leadership integrity, as demonstrated by behavior, is crucial.  That’s Leadership 101.

So, it really is not just Toyota’s products that need to be recalled; I think it’s also time to recall its leadership.

The Eroded Trust of Toyota is a post from: The HR Whisperer

It’s that time of year again when kids are starting to fill out college applications, deciding if they don’t want college but would rather be a dental hygienist or fire fighter instead, or just plain freaking out that in a few short months their high school career will be over.  I’ve got one of those at home right now and it ain’t pretty.

What do these kids really have to look forward to anyway, career-wise?  With unemployment ravaging the workforce, organizational changes drying up the already few and far between entry-level opportunities, major competition for jobs driving highly experienced people to do desperate things and college tuition rates soaring, just what is out there for new grads?

Not much says an article in the October 19^th issue of BusinessWeek.  Author Peter Coy points out that newly minted high school, college and MBA grads are bright, eager – and unwanted.  The U.S. unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds is around 18% and with the lack of jobs for those kids, their lifetime income potential is plummeting.  It seems like we are creating our own death spiral.

You’d think that with all this cheap labor out there companies would be snapping young people up by the dozen and getting rid of the more expensive employees.  Tain’t so.  We all know nobody’s doing anything in light of the unstable economy. But we weren’t doing a good job of bringing in the new kids to begin with anyway.

Part of what is scary about this too, is that so many of these young people are well-educated, enthusiastic and raring to go.  They’re the ones who are going to be funding Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare in the years to come.  We’re all living longer and many of us lost a ton of retirement money over the past several years due to the bouncing stock market.  So, that means that the older generations are going to have to keep working– which leaves even less for the new kids on the block, never mind our societal coffers.  And let’s not start on the loss of creativity and diversity in organizations.

Some people think the government should intervene before things get worse by subsidizing education, cutting minimum wage, offering more job training, or instituting apprenticeship programs for skilled blue-collar jobs.  Good ideas all, but require some more thinking on my part before I profess an opinion one way or another.

What I will opine though, is that we need to take care of our “pack.”  All organizations should be hiring or interning young people to keep the talent pipeline viable in spite of the wishy-washy economy.

Yea, I know these are great words…reality of business life…who’s going to train them…where do we put them…blah, blah, blah.

If we only focus on short-term and not look toward the horizon, how many organizations are going to miss the sunset and not see the dawn?

Free Puppy Anyone? Taking Care of the Pack Young is a post from: The HR Whisperer

What is it with business people and buzzwords?  Good Lord, we seem to get new ones every year – and I hate them, just hate them.  To me buzzwords are just a slick way of getting people to pay attention to things they should have been paying attention to all along.  Back in the 90s, we used to call this phenomena the “flavor of the month.” In other words, if you waited around long enough the buzz word and accompanying fluff around it would go away and be replaced by a new one.  One of the things some consultants do is create a new buzzword about an old idea they are rehashing or trying to refresh.  A lot of times it’s a marketing ploy to draw attention to their business.  I shudder when I think about it – consultants and their buzzwords, that is.

Well, now the new buzzword is transparency. We’re seeing it all over the place.  I’m sure it’s the result of Sarbanes-Oxley and all that other good stuff we have to deal with in light of some questionable leadership ethics or lack thereof.  That’s okay – the concept that is – but what I hate is how the word is so overused and from that the good of the concept abused.

In the business and social context, transparency is supposed to mean open communication and accountability.  That one can “see through” to the real heart of the matter, i.e., the truth.  Full disclosure.  But I can’t help but feel that some who say they are being transparent are really trying to hide something in plain view.

I googled “transparency in business” and had 18,100,000 hits.  That’s a lot of transparency going on. 

Oh hey — did you know that there is a worldwide  organization dedicated to transparency?  Transparency International-USA was founded in 1993 with the mission to “combat corruption and promote transparency and integrity in government, business and development assistance.”

That was one good hit out of 18, 100,000.  The other 17,999,999 seemed to have to do with visibility and disclosure.  But doesn’t visibility and disclosure really mean how people behave in the conduct of business? See, it all goes back to behavior.

What I am trying to do is raise the issue that we shouldn’t be hiding behind the buzzword of the day to behave appropriately.

Some people may believe that transparency is really about putting your business out there, totally unguarded.  I don’t buy it.  I believe that transparency is about being open and honest – but also protective of the organization and the people who run it.  Being open and honest with the financials?  You betcha.  Being prepared to accept and learn from frank customer feedback gleaned from social media? Yes. You can’t fix anything if you don’t know it’s broken. 

But how about when someone uses transparency as an excuse to share information that has the potential to hurt another individual or to make themselves look good?  Not so much.  That’s not transparency ladies and gentleman, that’s politics.

People have been spinning the since the dawn of time.  Look at the headlines.  There’s been a flurry  of articles from the Associated Press about how “Fox News Channel acts like a wing of the Republican Party” according to White House communications director Anita Dunn.  The AP states that the White House believes that Fox News“ operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” Fox News executive Michael Clemente responded by saying “most viewers know the difference between news and opinion shows. He says attacking the messenger doesn’t work.”

So, who’s being transparent here?  Is this a real debate going on or is it just a political ploy?  There’s probably a fact pattern on both sides – just like there is when we have one employee warring against another about the honesty of a performance appraisal.  Performance appraisals can be notoriously biased, and often are in the guise of being transparent, when they are really being used to craft a particular political climate for supervisors or employees.

I know, instead of calling people out for not being transparent, let’s call them out for not admitting they are using transparency to further their political gain.  You know who you are – that’s because you’re transparent.

When Transparency is Well…Just a Pane is a post from: The HR Whisperer