Is Your Nose Growing

How often can one "misspeak" and still maintain credibility? When the puppet Pinocchio told a lie his nose grew. His proboscis gave clear evidence of the lie. With people we cannot always tell whether a statement is true or not. Hillary Clinton was recently awarded four Pinocchio's by the Washington Post for exaggerating her landing at the Tuzla, Bosnia airport in March 1996. Videos of Mrs. Clinton and her daughter being greeted by officials on the tarmac at the airport soon appeared on YouTube. The video record clearly shows there was no sniper fire as told by Mrs. Clinton, more than once. Clinton after a week said she may have misspoken and if she did it was a minor blip. Ethical business communication starts with the truth.

Mrs. Clinton isn't the first person in the public light to "misspeak". What about those whose lives are not recorded, your boss, your coworkers or even you? You probably have known someone given to exaggeration or even hyperbole. I worked with such a person. His stories often were a little too fantastic. I was never quite sure what I could believe from his stories, and after a while, what he said related to work.

Another coworker's lies qualified him for what one author called a snake in a suit. Are the exaggerations and lies these people tell just "misspoken?" While these men were not in the position to make high level decisions like those that led to the collapse of Enron, they still had a negative impact on working relationships of the organizations where they were employed. Several current business books discuss the importance of trust in building business relationships.

In this post-modern era many people question the concept of absolute truth. Where is the ethical standard for our speech, if it isn't based on truth? The book of Proverbs considered part of the world's wisdom literature says, "Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding." (Proverbs 23:23 KJV). Our courts still ask people to take an oath to tell the truth, before they testify.

As individuals we can only be responsible for our own speech. Over time we may forget some details. We might accidentally attribute a quotation to the wrong author. In these cases we can say we misspoke. I was in a humorous speech contest with one other competitor. I took second place. I could report that I came in second and the other fellow came in next to last. Embellishing the facts, leaving out important details, obfuscating the facts all amount to lying. It is a matter of personal integrity. How do you avoid these situations? It comes down to that old maxim, think before you speak.

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