How does honest work

By avoiding honesty you are not allowing the person who hurt you to understand your true feelings or to help you understand the reason behind the hurt in the first place. You are preventing the relationship from growing and even risk it eventually falling apart. When we hide the truth for fear of showing our true vulnerabilities we open up our reactions to misinterpretation. Click To Tweet. Honesty prevents someone having to try and second-guess what is wrong with us.

Lies hurt. No matter how much you fear upsetting someone by telling them the truth, it will be no way near as much as you hurt someone if you lie to them instead. By lying you are disempowering yourself and the person you are lying to. By offering the truth, you are showing that person you value them. Often the truth can eventually follow many previously told lies, which makes telling the truth all the more difficult, but do it. It matters to you and it matters to them.

When I was at a particularly vulnerable stage of my life I was lied to continuously for several months by someone I trusted and whose opinion I valued. Eventually the truth came out and while it hurt … lots … it helped to turn a devastating situation into something I felt able to deal with. For me it offered me freedom to make a choice based on the truth.

It also helped to heal a wound by offering me a sense of personal value. When you tell a lie you are opening up a vortex of deceit which ultimately harms you as much or even more than the person your lie is directed towards. When you tell a lie, not only do you have to try and remember what you said and the reasons you gave, you also devalue your integrity. Telling lies whether to yourself or to someone else eats up your energy and creates an unstable future. You deny yourself the opportunity for personal growth.

Being honest is so freeing. People know where they stand with you, because they know you live your life with integrity. Honesty promotes honesty which will enhance your relationships and help you live a life that is right for you as you remain true to your principles and values. Lying breaks trust in a relationship. How will they know whether than can trust you again in the future? What does it say about you? Lying is manipulative, and nobody wants to share their time with someone who is primarily motivated by suiting their own purpose.

White lies often show a sense of compassion rather than a blatant intention to hurt or deceive. If your lover buys you roses yet you prefer lillies do you say your preference? Probably not, because he or she has made an effort to buy you flowers to show his or her love of you. Next time you are out shopping together, you might pass by the lillies and say they are your favourite flower, which gives him or her the opportunity to buy those next time.

White lies are not OK when they hide a deeper problem. If something is really bothering you, it is important to have it out sooner rather than later. Remember to be kind with your honesty as far as possible. We put ourselves on the line and face being judged or misunderstood. Remember that being honest takes a lot of courage. If the individual you are opening up to truly values you, he or she will also value the fact that you have taken the step to be open and honest.

Likewise, if someone is opening up to you, let them speak and listen to what they are saying. While a wrong may have been committed previously, you are being offered the truth and the ability to make a choice for the future. That person is honouring you by giving you the truth, whether you want to hear it or not. Honesty is when someone honours you by giving you the truth, whether you want to hear it or not. Why do we lie?

There seem to be different degrees of lying from a simple white lie told in compassion, acceptance and love of another through to a manipulative and self-seeking lie whose intention is to deceive and disempower.

Psychopaths tend to be pathological liers. But back to you. Next time you are faced with the potential to lie, ask yourself these questions:. Remember that when you tell the truth, you are making yourself vulnerable to others.

When offering honest feedback make sure that you are tactful when telling the truth which will help to generate a safe space for honesty. It will help you to cultivate an atmosphere of genuineness and integrity which will lead to deeper relationships and an enhanced sense of wellbeing. Honesty is good for you and good for those you communicate with.

You used the wrong carrier. Financial types have taken control, the merchants are out. I delayed payments an average of 22 days from my predecessor at this kind of amount, and this is what I saved. They have too much power—they screw one guy, and guys are waiting in line to take a shot at them again.

Heroic resistance to an oppressive power is the province of the students at Tiananmen Square, not the businessfolk in the capitalist societies the students risk their lives to emulate. Businesspeople do not stand on principle when it comes to dealing with abusers of power and trust. You have to adjust, we were told. If we dealt only with customers who share our ethical values, we would be out of business.

But the deal was so good, I just accepted it, did the best I could, and had the lawyers make triply sure that everything was covered. Sometimes the powerful leave other no choice. The auto parts supplier has to play ball with the Big Three, no matter how badly he or she has been treated in the past or expects to be treated in the future.

Suppliers of fashion goods believe they absolutely have to take a chance on abusive department stores. Power here totally replaces trust. Nevertheless, even those with limited power can live down a poor record of trustworthiness. To illustrate, consider the angry letters the mail fraud unit of the U.

Post Office gets every year from the victims of the fake charities it exposes. They want to avoid information that says they have trusted a fraud. When the expected reward is substantial and avoidance becomes really strong, reference checking goes out the window.

In the eyes of people blinded by greed, the most tarnished reputations shine brightly. Such investors want to believe in the fabulous returns the broker has promised. The search for data that confirm wishful thinking is not restricted to naive medical practitioners dabbling in pork bellies. The Wall Street Journal recently detailed how a year-old conglomerateur perpetrated a gigantic fraud on sophisticated financial institutions such as Citibank, the Bank of New England, and a host of Wall Street firms.

A Salomon Brothers team that conducted due diligence on the wunderkind pronounced him highly moral and ethical. A few months later…. Even with a fully disclosed public record of bad faith, hard-nosed businesspeople will still try to find reasons to trust.

Lured by high yields, junk bond investors choose to believe that their relationship will be different: Wyatt had to break his contracts when energy prices rose; and a junk bond is so much more, well, binding than a mere supply contract. Similarly, we can imagine, every new Pitino employer believes the last has done Pitino wrong. Their relationship will last forever. Ambiguity and complexity can also take the edge off reputational enforcement.

When we trust others to and keep complexity their word, we simultaneously rely on their integrity, native ability, and favorable external circumstances. So when a trust appears to be breached, there can be so much ambiguity that even the aggrieved parties cannot apprehend what happened.

Was the breach due to bad faith, incompetence, or circumstances that made it impossible to perform as promised? No one knows. Yet without such knowledge, we cannot determine in what respect someone has proved untrustworthy: basic integrity, susceptibility to temptation, or realism in making promises. We own the market. Then the company went on the skids. The funny thing is, afterwards he bought the business back from us, put a substantial amount of his own capital in, and still has not turned it around.

He was independently wealthy from another sale anyway, and I think he wanted to prove that he was a great businessman and that we just screwed the business up. If he was a charlatan, why would he have cared? Where even victims have difficulty assessing whether and to what extent someone has broken a trust, it is not surprising that it can be practically impossible for a third party to judge. That difficulty is compounded by the ambiguity of communication. Aggrieved parties may underplay or hide past unpleasantnesses out of embarrassment or fear of lawsuits.

A final factor protecting the treacherous from their reputations is that it usually pays to take people at face value. Assuming that others are trustworthy, at least in their initial intentions, is a sensible policy.

Mistrust can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most respond to circumstances, and their integrity and trustworthiness can depend as much on how they are treated as on their basic character. Initiating a relationship assuming that the other party is going to try to get you may induce him or her to do exactly that.

Overlooking past lapses can make good business sense too. People and companies do change. It is more than likely that once Borland International got off the ground, Kahn never pulled a fast one on an ad salesman again. Trust breakers are not only unhindered by bad reputations, they are also usually spared retaliation by parties they injure. Many of the same factors apply. Power, for example: attacking a more powerful transgressor is considered foolhardy. Getting even can be expensive; even thinking about broken trusts can be debilitating.

Businesspeople consider retaliation a wasteful distraction because they have a lot of projects in hand and constantly expect to find new opportunities to pursue. The loss suffered through any individual breach of trust is therefore relatively small, and revenge is regarded as a distraction from other, more promising activities.

It will take away from everything else. You will take it out on the kids at home, and you will take it out on your wife.

You will do lousy business. In general, our interviews suggested, businesspeople would rather switch than fight. An employee caught cheating on expenses is quietly let go.

Customers who are always cutting corners on payments are, if practicable, dropped. No fuss, no muss. Our interviewees also seemed remarkably willing to forget injuries and to repair broken relationships.

A supplier is dropped, an employee or sales rep is let go. Then months or years later the parties try again, invoking some real or imaginary change of circumstances or heart. What about the supposed benefits of retaliation? Game theorists argue that retaliation sends a signal that you are not to be toyed with. This signal, we believe, has some value when harm is suffered outside a trusting relationship: in cases of patent infringement or software piracy, for example.

But when a close trusting relationship exists, as it does, say, with an employee, the inevitable ambiguity about who was at fault often distorts the signal retaliation sends.

Without convincing proof of one-sided fault, the retaliator may get a reputation for vindictiveness and scare even honorable men and women away from establishing close relationships. Even the cathartic satisfaction of getting even seems limited.

We would be guilty of gross exaggeration if we claimed that honesty has no value or that treachery is never punished. Trustworthy behavior does provide protection against the loss of power and against invisible sniping. But these protections are intangible, and their dollars-and-cents value does not make a compelling case for trustworthiness. A good track record can protect against the loss of power.

Long-suppressed memories of past abuses may then come to the fore, past victims may gang up to get you. A deal maker cited the fate of an investment bank that was once the only source of financing for certain kinds of transactions. The industry knew that this is what you had to expect; our people had no choice. Now that the bank has run into legal problems and there are other sources of funds, people are flocking elsewhere.

At the first opportunity to desert, people did—and with a certain amount of glee. They are getting no goodwill benefit from their client base because when they were holding all the cards they screwed everybody.

There are parabola curves in all businesses, and people still supported me, even though we had a low, because they believed in me. Trustworthiness may also provide immediate protection against invisible sniping. If a client tries to jerk me around, I mark up my fees. On occasion, sniping can threaten the power it rebels against. The high-handedness of department stores, for example, has created a new class of competitors, the deep discounter of designer apparel.

At the same time, the manufacturers have learned that we treat them right. We scrupulously keep our promises. Anyone can set up an outlet. What really matters is the trust of the suppliers. Neither of these benefits can be factored easily into a rational business analysis of whether to lie or keep a promise. Sniping is invisible; the sniper will only take shots that you cannot measure or see. How could you possibly quantify the financial repercussions when suppliers you have abused refuse your telephone orders or ship hot items to your competitors first?

Assessing the value of protection against the loss of power is even more incalculable. It is almost as difficult to anticipate the nature of divine retribution as it is to assess the possibility that at some unknown time in the future your fortunes may turn, whereupon others may seek to cause you some unspecified harm. The net present values, at any reasonable discount rate, must work against honoring obligations.

Given all this, we might expect breaches of trust to be rampant. In fact, although most businesspeople are not so principled as to boycott powerful trust breakers, they do try to keep their own word most of the time.

Even allowing for convenient forgetfulness, we cannot help being swayed by comments like this:. I think that when I was young and naive about many things, I may have been underpaid for what my work was, but that was a learning experience.

But if I charge my customers the list price, they will do the right thing by me when there is a glut. Just as those who trust find reasons for the risks they want to run, those who are called on to keep a difficult promise cast around for justification even when the hard numbers point the other way.

But why has it taken root? Why do business men and women want to believe that trustworthiness pays, disregarding considerable evidence to the contrary? The answer lies firmly in the realm of social and moral behavior, not in finance.

The businesspeople we interviewed set great store on the regard of their family, friends, and the community at large. They valued their reputations, not for some nebulous financial gain but because they took pride in their good names. Even more important, since outsiders cannot easily judge trustworthiness, businesspeople seem guided by their inner voices, by their consciences.

When we cited examples to our interviewees in which treachery had apparently paid, we heard responses like:. They may be rich in dollars and very poor in their own sense of values and what life is about. I cannot judge anybody by the dollars; I judge them by their deeds and how they react. All the other success we have had is secondary. The importance of moral and social motives in business cannot be overemphasized.