When an employee is insincere, when they present themselves as other than who they are, what impact does it have on the workplace?
I expect that none of us is entirely transparent about who we are in the workplace or anywhere, but there’s a huge gulf between being 100 percent yourself and being a nearly 100 percent phony.
When it becomes apparent that a manager’s true self—including the actions they take toward others—is at odds with their carefully crafted image, a loss of morale can take place, along with a feeling of anger and betrayal.
When Goodness Is Suspiciously Performative
Do you have people in your social media feeds who feel compelled to post photos and videos of themselves doing good deeds?
I knew someone who posted photos of herself giving blood. She gave blood as often as she was allowed, so every couple of months, there would be a photo of herself giving blood or enjoying the treats they gave her afterward to recover.
She would post photos of candles in front of graves for holidays such as Memorial Day and would note when you asked her if she wanted to buy Girl Scout cookies from your niece that she had already bought a surplus of boxes and donated them to a nearby home for veterans.
The problem? This carefully crafted persona did not align with the person those she perceived as competitors encountered in the workplace. Adjectives used to describe her included smug and supercilious. Rather than goodness, an air of superiority was communicated to anyone other than the entry-level employees working under her.
The same communication skills she used to train and mold her entry-level employees and show herself off to good effect to higher-ups were not carried over to her communications with those co-equal to her. She would deliberately withhold or misrepresent information to give herself an advantage over anyone she sought to compete with, taking an “it’s her or me” attitude toward a peer, all the while touting her good deeds with self-righteous zeal.
Teaching an Insincere Person to Be Transparent with Colleagues
Is it possible to teach an insincere person to be transparent with colleagues? I had a co-worker who tried her best to co-opt an idea I presented in a meeting, turn to me gleefully afterward and say, “See how easy it is to steal someone’s idea?”
What do you do with this employee? A manager watching how this person operates might try to broach the subject of sincere communications with them.
“Judy, I noticed your attempt to co-opt the idea for an event from Bethany yesterday. I didn’t like it. It’s one thing if you want to collaborate with a colleague to help make her idea a success, and then if it’s a success, find a way to use a version of that same idea for one of the brands you work on. It’s another thing to try to ‘steal’ that person’s idea as you half tongue-in-cheek joked. I know from the many pictures you share that you love to do good deeds for others, so I found your behavior particularly puzzling.”
Judy then would be forced to confront the much-touted do-gooder image with her true behavior toward others.
Making Actions Count More than Words
It’s easy to undercut others all the while “wishing them the very best.” What’s sometimes harder is persuading employees to take actions that demonstrate a sincere desire to help and elevate peers.
One way is to make concrete actions of goodness toward peers a recognition program and a factor in employee evaluations in annual performance reviews.
You could have a program whereby employees let managers know how a co-equal colleague helped them get a project off the ground or helped them make an assignment they were struggling with result in success. The idea is to foster collaboration and cooperation rather than competition.
On performance reviews, managers could be required to solicit 360-degree feedback from peers about each employee, including a request that employees specify how exactly each co-equal peer helps them do their jobs better.
As a last resort, goodness can be monetarily incentivized. Rather than setting up multiple brands in the same department as in-house competitors, make bonuses dependent on a cumulative tally of how all brands in the department are doing. If one or more are struggling, it will behoove co-equal colleagues to sincerely pitch in to make the stragglers a success.
“How can I help? I want to do more!” the phony do-gooder may repeatedly say. Create a corporate culture, programming, a performance evaluation process, and bonus system that make them live out their words.