Lying colleague - AIBU and what would you do?

[Nosugartinysplashmilkplease]

I started a new job a few months ago. I had some suspicions from the start but now confirmed my colleague is lying about everything. Confirmed examples include their age, qualifications, family background, town they live, why they’re late everyday, that another colleague asked them out, that they can’t work set days and many many excuses for not doing their job. They’ve been in post a year.

I’ve had a convo with my line manager who is also aware and had run this past hr but hr is not interested. I’m getting headaches from the stress of working with this bullshitter, I do not trust a word that comes out their mouth and do not trust them to do their job. We need to work closely together and they just make pathetic excuses why they’ve not done their job all the time.

AIBU?

Yes - get over it, it’s only work
No - it undermines and destroys working relationships

I’d like to hear your stories and what you did.

Thanks for your responses.

I included the trivial eg town, age etc elements to demonstrate how prolific the lies are. I realise from your comments this just makes me seem like a dick 🫣

How do I know so much about them? Because their life commentary is never-ending and intrusive. And changes all the time and that’s how I know it’s not true. I listened because I was interested, then quickly realised the details changed from the first, second, third mention. I don’t go researching them. They out themselves with the lies about absolutely everything.

Our Manager is dealing with the lack of care in their work, the non-completion of tasks, the incorrect completion of tasks, the lateness and is frustrated with the lying, the lack of ownership. It’s frustrating to work with this person. I was hoping some of you might share what you’ve experienced just to give me some peace that I’m not alone 😊

You are getting obsessed with the wrongness of it all and want right to prevail. Which I totally get but you really need to pull back as others have said. Concentrate less on proving you are right and more on how to not let it affect you. Work stuff yes report it but up to then if they lie about personal stuff, it’s not a crime.

challenge is that if you continue like this, people will think you are bonkers. Cortisol will be streaming through you and that’s not good.

I think that’s the issue , you very much aren’t alone, these people are everywhere! So driving yourself mad every time will shorten your life meanwhile they will just continue merrily on.

I'm in a new role with one of these. So many holes in their stories, in the last week alone, they'be been single since splitting with ex a year ago, have a partner, split with partner last night, with partner of several years etc. Lots of woe is me but quite manipulative with it. All of this is offerred information not sought. Polite, professional and don't get sucked into the drama is the way to go.

The golden rule at work is that what other people do, say, think, feel or earn is absolutely none of your business UNLESS it impacts you in some way such as 1. Impacts your ability to do your job (document) 2. Breaks the law eg harassment/discrimination (document and consider bringing a grievance). For everything else mind your own business otherwise said colleague could raise a grievance against you ('that colleague that keeps bad mouthing me is harassing me'). You will already potentially have scored a black mark for raising it with your manager so I would not raise it again. However working with someone who is a liar does put you at risk so I would audit trail everything you do with them (follow up emails etc) and watch your back.

I had the misfortune of working with a similar colleague who curated a fair smorgasbord of reasons that she could never come in early or stay late , the extra weight pulling required at project ends always fell my way despite me having parental responsibility and her not. The final straw was her literally doing no work for days on end wandering around looking busy with a pile of papers and putting a foot high pile of unprocessed work on my desk. I was told I had to stay late as it must be finished for a deadline that night. I put my coat on got in my car and went home permanently, it’s the only job I’ve walked out of ever,I still don’t regret it to this day. The end to this story is a mutual friend let me know some months later the wandering with papers was to cover being found away from her desk whilst enjoying an affair with a newly married man . Lazy and lacking class what a winner she was.

Our Manager is dealing with the lack of care in their work, the non-completion of tasks, the incorrect completion of tasks, the lateness and is frustrated with the lying, the lack of ownership

well, that’s all that needs to be dealt with, the stuff like age or what town they grew up in is completely irrelevant, it’s work issues only that are relevant. Qualifications are an odd one, I would have thought if qualification was needed for the job, then the workplace would have had to sight evidence of qual/registration as part of the hire process, and if that was not needed then that aspect also becomes irrelevant.

Once you accept that ‘Sarah’ witters on about a fantasy life, it stops being frustrating. You need to stop trying to make it make sense and just accept that for whatever reason- and there can be many- this is what ‘sarah’ needs to do to exist in the workplace.

Let your manager manage her performance, and tune out the inconsistencies.

Years ago I worked with a compulsive liar. His ethnicity (went for something quite exotic), qualifications, experience, age, everything. His family life was interesting and like your person it was always changing and we never knew if he had 3, 4 or 5 children. We tended to ignore him whenever he spoke about anything non work related with a lot of nods, oks, and oh really in response to some of his more outlandish comments. It wasn't worth calling him out on his lies because the responses became even more ridiculous and convoluted. It had a happy ending though. He was sacked when one of his lies got him into serious trouble.

I was in a similar situation. Like you initially I had thought it would be treated as quite a significant situation due to the level of untruths, but as in your case, a lot of it was just lies about her background and life, and weren’t material in terms of impacting her then job. I for ages couldn’t get my head around the blatant lying and why others seemed to gloss over it, which used up my energy and headspace. I decided just to focus on my own work and really just let her get on with whatever she was doing!

As others have said, I would focus on the work, cover your back with written communication. I find these people get caught out eventually or burn out through their own tangle of lies. And it’s important to not get involved in their chaos. That person left then got sacked quickly from her next role (where he really had made up key experience) and is not working in the same area at all anymore.

Has your manager put this person on an improvement plan? It doesn't sound like they'll be able to keep to it, in which case the problem will go away anyway.

I've worked with a couple of compulsive liar types in my time. I think you need to focus on grey rocking them - consider them an emotional vampire. Continue to facial note the work stuff for your manager. Note the impact of their behaviour your on your stress levels. E.g. the fact that they have not completed xyz tasks and I then have to do xyz means my workload is higher and more stressful etc. You can let yourself be silently amused by the ridiculousness. Clearly they are deeply insecure or having mental health difficulties but you can't address either of these things.

But tbh even if I had a running commentary of their life and realising every story was different, tbh I still really wouldn’t care or get caught up on it. You came here to ask if anyone had experienced the same on a later update and maybe I’m just old with too much experience in too many work places, but tbh most (all?) places I’ve worked I’ve thought “yeah right 🙄🙄” to most “stories”. But that hasn’t distracted me from my job or inspired me to keep a running list of their life. I have to stick by my first comment that really who cares, stay out of it, do your job and go home. If you think your job is at risk, keep telling the boss with informed facts of why you think this is.

cover your own back. or you will get the blame as she cleverly manipulated things.

i worked with one of them. she was having an affair with
our senior manager so blamed me for her mistakes. i was sacked after three months. even though she had a very different set of responsibilities to me, i didnt even do that type of work! so no idea why they thought the mistakes were mine!

i always wondered how long it took them to realise i was gone but the mistakes were still happening….. !

so cover your back but forget the personal lies shes told (maybe stes in witness protection, who knows).

id secretly look for another job too.

Confirmed examples include their age, qualifications,

In a grown up company, those alone would be grounds for dismissal.

I think you need to start keeping detailed examples of their work avoidance and stick to that.
Tell your boss that the impact of doing two jobs is now very negatively YOUR health.

Put it back on your boss and stick to its impact on your health and well-being.

Keep careful notes of dates and times.

I worked with a pathological liar. She was a monumentally lazy slacker too. It was horrible. I could never believe a word she said, and she used her lies to manipulate people. She was very attractive too, which meant that men in particular seemed to believe her crap. We were both junior doctors at the time, and I was very glad when it was time for me to move to another job.

All those people saying OP should mind her own business and get on with her job, would you feel the same if your child (we worked in paediatrics) was being treated by someone who was incapable of even 10 seconds of honesty?

We all complained about her, and she was known for her lies and laziness, but nothing was ever done. I hope she’s not working as a doctor any more.

It depends, doesn’t it? Age is immaterial, who cares? Presumably OP doesn’t know whether this person lied about her qualifications in her job application, maybe she didn’t. Lying seems to be increasingly tolerated, I remember being incensed years ago when an Apprentice candidate who lied on his CV won.

The only time I would have an issue is if the job requires a certain level of skills that could impact on anyone else ( think surgeon, social worker, dentist etc)

I feel for you. It’s the intricate links between your job and theirs that’s the killer. People here are just telling you to get on with your job but that’s not always possible, nor that simple and clear cut.

i have worked with people like this, both as colleagues and direct reports. It is possible to sack them but it sounds like your HR are hoping it just goes away.

my main advice is to DOCUMENT everything in writing. I mean re-confirming work tasks or verbal agreements. It will get their back up but that’s an unfortunate side-effect. This can go 2 ways depending on what kind of person they are:

1. Once they realise you’ve sussed them out the lies will start being about you to discredit you if they are nasty and manipulative.
2. if they are genuinely nice, but just have terrible trouble with honesty, time-keeping and work standards then this should put enough pressure in them that they leave in some form or another.

they will have some underlying problem which has led them to be this way. I do feel sorry for them but you need to protect yourself.

Hence the qualifier "grown up".

As far as I am concerned the presence of someone like this in a team would be a clear failure of all the HR bollocks candidates get put through. So the OP is working in a place with shit recruitment and shit pastoral care.

No wonder the UKs productivity is in the shitter if people have to deal with this nonsense rather than actually getting on with the job.

Help your line manager out here, and keep a diarised record of ANYTHING that impacts the quality of your work.
You could send an email to your colleague for severely impacting things eg being so late in resulting in your work missing a deadline and CC or BCC your manager.

Why has your manager not escalated this to the top level? CEO of the company needs to be made aware of all this and that HR aren’t dealing with it - that is their job!!!

We’re going to disagree here. We have no idea whether this person lied in the recruitment process, she certainly wouldn’t have been able to lie about her age (which is irrelevant) because she’d have had to present her passport to confirm identity. Someone lying about their life has no impact on their colleagues unless they allow it to.

Her performance is an entirely different matter. If it’s impacting on someone else’s work it should be reasonably easy to amass tangible evidence and present it to her manager.

The bottom line is there are lies that are gong to get you sacked.

However, there are also lies that are put up as a protection - particularly for women - among colleagues. (Don't ask me how I know 😎).

I've known people who have been economical with the actualitie with their colleagues, but 100% truthful with HR.