"Things are tough right now, but once we close this deal then we'll be in a much more comfortable position. Your role on this is critical to our success."

Is this not a reasonable way of approaching it? It seems to be simultaneously honest and empowering. What lie is necessary?

EDIT: slight revision

I wasn't trying to write a business book but what you wrote is fine usually for the senior level employees that get how business works and probably took the job with the understanding of the weight of their position. However you will also have fickle entry/low/mid level employees that don't have the maturity to accept the realities of the business world.

> However you will also have fickle entry/low/mid level employees

You need to read that sentence again. Your comments are very revealing about you and not about CTO level work as you are imagining.

My comments are very revealing about the reality of the work world at mediocre aka most companies.

If you get a big enough group of people there are going to be some people with machiavellian tendencies or at least some that read bad advice on the internet about how to get ahead at work and try to apply it with clumsy gusto. You will look like a real fool to your boss the CEO if you are giving information to these type of people and they try to use it for their benefit.

I may be painting too dark a picture due to the focus the comments have on a single sentence. Overall I had good relationships with the vast majority of people that worked for me. I know this because I still have contact with most of them even though we have almost no chance of ever working together again. You are deluding yourself if you think there are no bad apples out there or that people having problems in their personal life may try to pull manipulation at work to get ahead or however they see may solve their problems.

> You are deluding yourself if you think there are no bad apples out ther

Please don't put words into my mouth.

Compulsive liars cannot change their habits.

And gasp you may have to reward your worker because they truly are that valuable instead of reaping all the benefit for the cto.

Thats mostly a CEO trait. Remember CTO,CFO,COO,CIO, ect are all just jobs. You ultimately report to the CEO, whom ultimately reports to the investors,stakeholders, capital partners, b2b relationships and so on.

For the record I gave 100% of bonuses I had awarded to my staff and 0% to myself the entire tenure.

Who awards bonuses to themselves?!

> You are espousing false virtue/armchair quarterback. Real life is complex and lying can save many people jobs.

I'd rather my job disappear than still be there because someone with employment power over me lied to me. This isn't false virtue or armchair anything. No exceptions, or I don't work with you ever again. It's not hard. Learn to communicate effectively, and learn to treat your employees with the respect they deserve.

Consider that you're advertising yourself as the type of person who absolutely must be lied to in order to maintain morale.

I've been close to situations where the ICs did their absolute best and it was a total waste because of politics outside of their control. Do you tell them that so-and-so highly-respected person was shit-talking them because of an unrelated agenda and invalidated all of their work? Or do you tell them good job (it was a good job) and not get into it?

> Or do you tell them good job (it was a good job) and not get into it?

Personally, I’m okay with not being informed about everything that’s going on. I work at a big enough company that I couldn’t possibly know what goes on all the way up the management chain, but even if I worked at a small startup, I could understand if management didn’t want to be fully transparent. I don’t need to know; it’s none of my business. But I won’t stand being lied to – even about small things, or things I don’t even care about in their own right. I see lies as a breach of trust and as a sign that I can’t trust that person, moving forward.

So it depends on what you mean by “not get into it”. If you really stick to truthful statements, and if there isn’t a high enough prior expectation of transparency to make it amount to a lie of omission, then leaving it at “good job” is perfectly fine. But if you do lie… well, if I find out, I’m probably leaving.

Frankly if this actually happened, I would do neither. Just tell my IC "I'm not sure why your work was invalidated. Let me look into it for you." and then address this as a grievous issue on behalf of my IC with the leadership.

If leadership doesn't fix the problem then just resign in protest.

EDIT: It's now occurring to me that there's probably different schools of thought here. Yes, I've resigned in protest on behalf of my workers before.

If my team is getting fucked, then I've either failed my team, or my purpose is meaningless. Either way, get me out.

> Just tell my IC "I'm not sure why your work was invalidated. Let me look into it for you."

And so you take your first step down the path.. "I'm not sure" is a lie here.

Why do post mortems happen for production issues, when you could just open up "git blame?"

Are you lying to the team when you say, "we're not sure how this happened" rather than just quoting the git blame?

Well, no. The problem is much more complicated than a buggy commit. It's a wider problem with the system. So you say "we don't know, we have to look more into it" and do a post mortem because that is the honest truth.

The same principle applies here. So-and-so highly respected person committed a real-life communication bug that got merged into this IC's production career. But the problem is much more complicated than that. You don't know what the actual problem is until you address it with the leadership team.

I hear you on all of that, I'm just saying that leadership gets complicated. Sometimes the lie is better for all involved, especially the IC. You recognized this with your first instinct on how to communicate it.

As far as the rewards for poorly-motivated actions, we've always got the long term.

> Well I've literally been in the position where this was true to close a deal so we could stay in business. What would be the best option in your opinion? Risk a critical person leaving right then and loosing the customer and then losing everyone job? Or lying and telling them we are all ok just keep on doing your job and don't listen to rumors?

Well I've literally been in this position too.

Lying to people is ineffective. It literally leads to the rumors you want to avoid. And even if your lies pay off, people aren't dumb. They realize how close to the edge they were and that you are a liar. Next time it will just be worse!

It's much better to be honest. Explain the situation. Explain what it will take. Use it to motivate people and build them up. People love a challenge, they want to feel like they're the hero of a story.

You literally took a situation where your employees would have come out stronger and more motivated to work for you, and you turned it into one where they walked away with mistrust.

> You are espousing false virtue/armchair quarterback. Real life is complex and lying can save many people jobs.

It has nothing to do with virtue! Even if you don't give a damn about being a good human being, this is a terrible way to manage people.

In real life, some people are human lie detectors, or at least better at detecting lies than you are a liar.

But I can acknowledge there are cases where transparency is simply not an option.