A survey designed to show how good managers are at spotting liars has actually revealed how suspicious we are.

According to the research, two-thirds of managerial respondents can tell when their staff are lying, and 90% don’t believe reasons given for being late for work.  But it is one of life’s lovely little ironies that these managers are unfortunately kidding themselves.

Lack of eye contact, avoiding people and body language were the most common signals managers said they use for spotting lies. But these are crude and unreliable indicators; by these standards, every shy person would be branded a liar.

Some people stated that they can tell intuitively whether they are being told the truth or not.  Research shows that those who say this are no better at deception-detecting than those who say they don’t possess these skills, and neither has a record better than chance.

The best way of spotting lies involves careful questioning, looking for irregularities and then following up. In other words, it takes time.

We can also give ourselves away by our micro-expressions, which are barely perceptible to the untrained eye – a slight twitch, a swallow, an eye flutter. But you need to be highly expert to detect these, and the majority of us don’t have the ability or knowledge.

Let’s not forget of course that we all lie at some time or another. 'You look fantastic'; 'the food was delicious'; 'great presentation' - all examples of flattery that might not be true, but helps us all to get along that little bit better.

But look at the two figures again:  90% don’t believe their staff’s reasons for being late; 65% believe they can spot lies. There is a 25% gap between the two, where the manager can’t tell if someone is lying - but doesn’t believe them anyway.

What this survey reveals unintentionally therefore is not the ability to spot liars, but managerial suspicion of their people. So if any one tells you either that they can spot liars, or that they trust their staff, they may be telling you porky-pies.


Professor Binna Kandola OBE

Almost half of UK employees say their boss bullies them. But why is this happening?

It's Anti-Bullying Week, and some enlightening research has just emerged into what’s going on in the mind of bullying bosses. For some time now, it has been clear that when leaders are put under pressure of one form or another, a number of ‘dark side’ characteristics may emerge. These are extreme forms of behaviour – often the flip side of what has made that very person so successful – and will appear to others through actions such as excessive risk taking, perfectionism and manipulation.

This latest research adds another dimension to our understanding of the triggers of such extreme behaviours. Psychologists have identified that self-perceived incompetence – and not actual incompetence - can provoke a manager or leader to bully their staff. In essence, people who are in a position of power, but who believe they are incompetent, are likely to feel threatened. In turn, they will become more defensive and aggressive when put under pressure.

Given everything we know about leaders and their behaviour, this makes a lot of sense. Hey, we’ve all had days where we doubt ourselves, and none of us would claim to be at our best during that time. But what does this tell us about the current state of leadership? I don’t know about you, but I think it helps to explain a couple of major issues at work at the moment.

The first of these is the rapid rise in bullying cases reported in the press. Some recent figures suggest that 49 per cent of British employees blame their immediate manager for bullying them, while some 56 per cent believing it is a serious problem in their office, shop or factory. I have to say that I’m not a great believer in surveys. After all, who wouldn’t take the opportunity to take a quick pop at their manager in a confidential survey? However, the findings seem to be more and more consistent, which is - or should be - of concern to any employer.

The second issue is that so many managers and leaders who felt successful during the economic boom times are now struggling to deal with the harsh realities of the downturn. In reality, many leaders are learning that it’s easy to make money when there’s a lot of it around, but now we’re in a whole different ball game. I know through my own coaching and development work that this has brought on a whole wave of pressure for leaders that they simply have not had to confront over the past ten years.

So what this says to me is that organisations need to act. And quickly. They need to seriously consider the direct support given to their managers, the coping strategies with which they equip their managers and the resources that they provide to those managers. There is a basic philosophy in some organisations that the toughest will survive – they will get through the current turbulent times. That’s true. But the toughest aren’t necessarily the brightest, the most talented or what is needed for the future of the organisation. Are they?

Stuart Duff is Head of Development at Pearn Kandola Business Psychologists

There’s a subtle but important difference between trying to reduce stress, and trying to promote well-being.

A lawyer friend was walking through a client’s offices recently and came across a group of staff being given head and shoulder massages, with another group patiently waiting in line for their turn.  The client said proudly that this was to help reduce stress.  My friend, being of a cynical nature (did I say he was a lawyer?) wondered whether it wouldn’t be better for the staff if they were able to spend a little less time at work.

The story came to mind when reading the National Institute for Clinical Excellence guidelines on Promoting Well-Being in the Workplace. The title is revealing, I think.  For once here is a focus on well-being rather than stress, a subtle but significant distinction – it is the difference between light and dark, positive and negative.  When we place stress in the foreground we try to find ways of reducing or eliminating its causes.  Well-being, however, means we begin to search for ways of making work a more meaningful and enjoyable experience.

The report’s authors conclude that mental ill health costs the country a staggering £28bn per annum.  As you might expect, some of the costs are associated with sickness absence and staff turnover.  Together though they amounted to only 40% of the total.  The big ticket item was presenteeism – which was estimated to be one and a half times the cost of absenteeism, and which is most prevalent amongst senior management.

You might disagree with some the financial  assumptions being made (no report these days ever has cost savings of less than a billion it seems) but the sums involved are large by any standards.

The guidelines tell us what organisations need to do to improve mental well-being including: ensuring a sense of equity, justice and fairness in the way people are treated; flexible working; good line management where people are developed, receive feedback and feel supported.

This is all sensible, practical advice. But it means that we have to examine the organisation’s culture, its processes and management style in a fundamental way –rather than applying superficial if highly colourful sticking plasters to the problems.  If we don’t do this, the queues for the Indian head massage won’t be getting any smaller.

Professor Binna Kandola OBE

Since the start of the financial crisis there has been much talk, by politicians especially, of the need for a Change of Culture within organisations, particularly banks. As time has progressed, the focus for this CoC has become bonuses, sparked by the pay-outs being made to staff by Goldman Sachs.

One of the key reasons why so many financial institutions failed, I would suggest, was due to leadership. Too many of the organisations that needed to be bailed out were led by men whose narcissistic tendencies meant that they believed they were right, and consequently did not feel the need to listen to others. They were aided and abetted by corporate cultures that were concerned primarily about making profit and less about how it was achieved.  The leaders' egos were further fuelled by political complicity, too. Let's not forget that Fred Goodwin was a regular visitor to No.11, a close advisor to the Chancellor, and was rewarded in 2004 with a Knighthood for (try not to giggle now) 'Services to Banking'.

There is a touch of irony in Goldman Sachs being the stimulus for the current round of bonus bashing.  They appear to be one of the few organisations that genuinely tries to uphold its values, and may be an example to others.

At the same time as the calls for a CoC, we find members of the Cabinet promoting the ambitions of Tony Blair to be the EU President. Having studied Blair in some depth, I think it could be argued that his leadership style - excitement seeking, lacking in empathy, an over-reliance on charm and persuasion - is precisely the sort that led so many banks to near-ruin and which will ultimately come to typify his era.

The ways in which organisations choose their leaders, as well as the qualities being sought, are all things that need to be examined if a genuine CoC is to be achieved.  It would help if politicians could set an example.