Have you ever worked with someone who doesn’t always tell things correctly or truthfully?
I was talking with a friend who is having this problem at her work. She and her coworkers are becoming up set, as they are always very honest. They feel like this coworker thinks they are dumb and that they believe everything she tells them.
The things that are said are not about anything big or serious, but nonetheless they are either a “stretched truth” or something altogether made up.
For example, she will tell one of her coworkers that the boss really got made and yelled at her, when her boss told her, nicely, to correct a mistake that she made. Or she will tell her coworkers she went to a certain place on the weekend and her Facebook posts are about her being somewhere totally different. When they confront her about these things she will make up something to say thinking it gets her off the hook and that they believe her.
This is driving her and her coworkers crazy and they just want to scream at her when she does this. They have gone to their boss asking that she be replaced because of this problem. Their boss has told them that she does her work and is good at it and this is a problem that they need to handle with their coworker.
She said everyone else on the team has good ethics and integrity and they do not want to do anything mean to this person like give her the silent treatment, but they do not know what else to do.
I suggested that they ask their coworker for a time when they can sit down together and discuss the problem and how they feel about it. They should write down specific incidences that they could quote to her and then tell her that they do not want to hear about anything that is not true or correct.
She agreed that this might help and was worth trying, as they had not gone to her as a group. I certainly hope it does help, as it must be difficult to work with someone who has this bad habit day after day.
What would you do if you worked with someone like this?
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