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Don’t Be Thrown by Dishonesty
People lie. They will say that they have completed things that they haven’t, or that they
understand things that they don’t. They will make commitments, and then claim they
never made them. Having a dishonest person working on a project is possibly the most dif-
ficult situation a project manager can face.
There are some things a project manager can do to discourage dishonesty. By keeping all
work out in the open and admitting your own mistakes, you can create an environment
where people are more honest. But this only goes so far—sometimes people lie, and you’ll
have to deal with it.

The best-case scenario is one in which you have evidence that directly contradicts the lie.
If you find that somebody is lying, you need to present him with that evidence. The pur-
pose is not to make him feel bad; rather, it is to help him understand that it’s wrong, and
that he shouldn’t do it again. Don’t get caught up trying to understand why someone is
being dishonest—it could be a misunderstanding, it could be malicious, or it could be
something else entirely. Sometimes the person doesn’t even realize that he’s lying. The
key is to have enough information available so that you can set the situation right and
keep it from threatening the project.
Unfortunately, in some cases, there is no evidence to counter the lie. When this occurs,
there may be nothing that you can do about the situation. If you think that someone is
lying and you don’t have evidence, you can set about collecting that evidence. Usually a
lie is about a commitment that was made: the person may have agreed to do a certain task
in a certain way, and is now claiming that she never made that commitment. Information
about the commitment may be in an email, a project document, or a task definition in the
project plan. But if the commitment was less formal (such as a verbal agreement), there
may simply be no record of it.
If there is not enough evidence, you may have to let the lie pass and live with the conse-
quences. This is a very frustrating situation. In this case, your job is to improve the way
you manage your commitments and those of your team, in order to prevent problems like
this from happening in the future. You can collect better information, change your expec-

tations, help people feel more comfortable letting you know if there are problems, and, in
extreme situations, avoid working with people who have trouble being honest.
NOTE
More information on commitment management can be found in Manag-
ing the Software Process by Watts Humphrey (Addison Wesley, 1989).

Address Performance Problems Early
It is difficult to effectively manage teams without defining their goals up front. The best way
to do that is to involve each person in the definition of his or her own goals. Each of these
goals should be specific, measurable, should pertain to their work, and should be attainable.

MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP 253