My Colleague Lied to Me About a Shared Project |
My Colleague Lied to Me About a Shared Project
… and two other tricky workplace dilemmas.
EXPERT OPINION BY ALISON GREEN, INC.COM COLUMNIST @ASKAMANAGER
Illustration: Getty Images
Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues—everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.
Here’s a roundup of answers to three questions from readers.
1. A colleague lied and said he’d done work he hadn’t done
I was hired about six months ago at a prestigious organization in my field. My coworker, Fred, started at the same time in a similar position. We work closely and we get along well, for the most part. I consider him something of a friend — or, at least, I felt that way until recently.
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We have been working together on a big report that needs to get done in the next few months. Last week, I had been working on other projects and logged back our the shared file to begin work again. We were sitting together and as I was logging in, he said (unprompted) that he had been hard at work on the report and updated and added information to a key section. I noticed that very few things had been changed, so I checked the version history and found that he had worked on it for a total of two minutes in the 24 hours before I checked.
So I asked him in the moment about what exactly he had done on the report, and this is where I caught him in the lie. He doubled down and said that he had changed four or five big things, and when I pushed and said those sections looked exactly the same, he said that he had been working on it offline. I asked him to always work on the shared document and moved on.
I’m having a hard time letting the lie go. It was small and not very significant in the long run, and I don’t want to harm our working relationship. But I hate being lied to, especially because he doubled down when I wouldn’t have cared if he hadn’t done the work in the first place. I’ve also had issues with him in the past for being oddly obsessed with delineating the work that he did versus the work we did together, and for taking a lot of the credit. As a result, I’ve started being less collaborative with him and more clear about assigning credit to myself.