1. Opening reflection

Across more than a decade of human resources practice in Bangladesh and Australia, spanning commercial banks, services organisations, and engineering firms, and through the direct management of over a hundred disciplinary and grievance matters, I have come to regard managerial dishonesty not as a lapse of character but as a structural pathology. The euphemisms offered by polite business discourse, “trust deficits” and “integrity gaps”, soften what is in fact a slow-burning corrosion of institutions. A manager who lies does not merely injure the person sitting opposite them. They contaminate the information environment on which every subsequent decision depends.

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I have watched the pattern unfold at close range. I have observed a senior officer in a financial institution systematically attribute the analytical work of juniors to himself while positioning those same juniors as the cause of outcomes he alone had authorised. For years his standing with the executive layer remained intact. It took a routine regulatory review, prompted by an unrelated matter, to expose the discrepancy between his reported stewardship and the paper record. By the time the institution understood what had happened, he had been promoted. I have observed, too, a department head maintain parallel narratives with each of her direct reports, each tailored to flatter the listener and disparage the absent. Her unit’s turnover exceeded 40% annually for four consecutive years, a cost the organisation absorbed as a mysterious “cultural issue” until an exit interview analysis made the pattern unmistakable.

Machiavelli, writing in The Prince, observed that “men are so simple, and so ready to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived”. The modern workplace, for all its HR policies and leadership frameworks, remains a court in the Florentine sense. Where there is hierarchy, there is incentive to deceive. Where there is ambiguity, there is space for the deceiver to work. The question is not whether such managers exist, for they do, and in significant numbers. The question is what becomes of them, what becomes of those around them, and what a thoughtful subordinate should do upon recognising one.

2. The typology of the lying manager

In the disciplinary and employee relations files I have accumulated over the years, five archetypes recur with striking regularity. They are not mutually exclusive, but each carries a distinct psychological signature.

The first is the credit thief. This manager systematically appropriates the work of subordinates while presenting it upward. The underlying driver is rarely straightforward greed. More often it is a profound insecurity about one’s own diminishing contribution, combined with a learned conviction that the organisation rewards visibility rather than substance. The credit thief is frequently the most articulate person in the room, because articulacy is their only remaining asset.

The second is the blame shifter. When outcomes sour, this manager locates a plausible subordinate and positions them, in conversations with senior leaders, as the proximate cause. Robert Hogan’s research on leadership derailment, which has tracked thousands of executives across several decades, identifies this pattern as one of the most reliable predictors of eventual career collapse. The blame shifter is driven by an acute fear of exposure and a fragile self-concept that cannot absorb the ordinary friction of error.

The third is the promise merchant. This manager extracts effort, loyalty, and patience from subordinates through an escalating schedule of commitments that they have no intention of honouring. The promotion that never arrives, the budget that never materialises, the recognition that is perpetually deferred. The promise merchant is, in my observation, often convinced of their own sincerity in the moment of making the promise, which makes them particularly dangerous, because they cannot be cross-examined with their own memory.

The fourth is the information hoarder. This manager treats organisational information as a personal strategic asset. Team members learn critical facts too late, peer managers are kept in deliberate ignorance, and upward reporting is curated to a degree that borders on fiction. The hoarder’s psychology is one of scarcity, a conviction that being indispensable requires being opaque.

The fifth, and in many respects the most damaging, is the gaslighting supervisor. This manager systematically denies the reality of events that subordinates have witnessed, overheard, or received in writing. They reinterpret the subordinate’s memory, question their competence in detecting obvious facts, and cultivate an atmosphere in which employees begin to doubt their own perception. The driver here is often a deeper pathology than mere opportunism. In severe cases it shades into what clinicians recognise as narcissistic or antisocial tendencies, and such supervisors consume the careers of those below them without ever appearing, in any single interaction, to have done anything wrong.

3. The harsh reality such managers face

It is fashionable, in certain quarters, to insist that dishonest managers prosper without consequence. The evidence, carefully examined, tells a different and more consoling story. The lying manager rarely escapes unscathed. The reckoning is almost always delayed rather than avoided, and this delay is the reason the myth of impunity persists.

Credibility erodes before it collapses. In the early years, the lying manager appears poised and effective. Colleagues tolerate minor inconsistencies, attributing them to the ordinary noise of working life. Within a five to seven year window, however, senior leaders who interact with the manager in multiple contexts begin to accumulate a quiet catalogue of discrepancies. A story told one way in the boardroom, told differently in a skip-level conversation. A project outcome claimed in one meeting, contradicted by the record in another. This catalogue is rarely aired in formal settings. It is carried privately, and it hardens into a settled verdict.

The loss of discretionary effort is perhaps the least visible cost and the most devastating. Amy Edmondson’s foundational work on psychological safety demonstrates that employees who perceive their manager as unreliable or deceitful cease to volunteer their best ideas. They deliver the minimum required. They reserve their creativity for environments they perceive as safe. The lying manager rarely understands that the dull performance of their team is an indictment of their own reputation.

Reputational debt compounds. Each deception is a micro-loan drawn against future credibility, and the interest rate is ruinous. Over a decade, this debt renders the manager effectively unpromotable in any organisation that possesses a functioning reference culture. I have participated in succession discussions in which a technically competent executive was quietly excluded from consideration with the phrase, “we are not sure we can rely on what he tells us”. No formal accusation is ever made. None is needed.

Peer networks isolate the deceiver with surprising speed. Colleagues who have been burned once rarely forget, and they warn others. The manager who arrives at a new role with an impressive title often discovers that their peers have already been briefed, in the discreet register of corporate gossip, to hold them at a distance.

Upward mobility closes silently. Senior leaders, particularly in mature institutions with strong governance, develop an informal taxonomy of executives they consider safe to promote and those they do not. Once categorised as unsafe, a manager rarely recovers the category, because the evidence required to reverse the judgement is precisely the kind of evidence a deceiver is least equipped to produce.

Finally, the psychological cost of sustaining multiple contradictory narratives is considerable. Research on deception, including work by Paul Ekman and his successors, indicates that maintaining false accounts over extended periods produces measurable cognitive strain, sleep disturbance, and interpersonal anxiety. The lying manager is often a tired manager, and the fatigue eventually shows in the quality of their judgement.

4. The organisational consequences

A single lying manager can impair an organisational unit. Several, operating in concert or merely in parallel, can hollow out an institution.

Psychological safety, as Edmondson’s research makes clear, is not an abstract virtue but an operating condition for effective cognitive work. Once it degrades, employees stop reporting problems, stop questioning assumptions, and stop volunteering corrections. The organisation continues to appear functional until a precipitating event, a regulatory failure, a product defect, a client loss, reveals how much knowledge was being suppressed in the weeks and months prior.

Information flow collapses asymmetrically. Bad news travels slowly, and good news travels on embellished wings. Senior leaders find themselves making strategic decisions on the basis of a reality that no longer corresponds to the ground. Adverse selection follows. The most capable subordinates, who have the most options, depart. The remaining staff skew toward those who lack alternatives or who are temperamentally suited to compromised environments. The team’s aggregate capability declines not in a single collapse but in a slow demographic drift. Over five years, a unit can lose 60% of its top quartile performers and replace them with a uniform middle.

Quiet quitting, rising attrition costs, compliance exposure, and legal risk accumulate in parallel. Bangladesh Labour Law, whose procedural requirements I have worked within for most of my career, offers detailed protections to employees subjected to arbitrary or unfair managerial conduct. A gaslighting or blame shifting manager can generate litigation exposure that vastly exceeds the salary cost of the subordinates involved. I have seen single wrongful dismissal matters settle for sums equivalent to 12,50,000 taka and more, before accounting for reputational damage. Across a sustained period, the cumulative settlements and management hours absorbed by such cases can run to 50,00,000 taka or higher in a single institution.

The cultural cost is the deepest of all. Dishonesty at the managerial layer licenses dishonesty throughout the hierarchy. Junior employees observe what is rewarded and what is punished, and they adjust their conduct accordingly. Institutional memory, which depends on faithful record keeping and honest transmission, begins to hollow out. An organisation in this condition may remain profitable for years, but it is, in a structural sense, already insolvent.

5. The cost borne by subordinates

I turn now to the human toll, which must be described with clinical precision rather than sentimentality.

Chronic stress is the baseline. Subordinates of a lying manager live in a state of sustained vigilance, parsing every interaction for signs of the next distortion. The physiological consequences of prolonged cortisol elevation are well documented and extend to cardiovascular, immunological, and cognitive domains.

Learned helplessness follows when repeated efforts to correct the record fail. The subordinate concludes, reasonably, that the environment does not reward accurate perception, and they begin to suppress it. Career progression is impaired in the meantime. Performance reviews are written by the manager who is distorting the record. Promotion recommendations are withheld or quietly redirected. The subordinate’s skills may be growing, but the organisational ledger, the only ledger that matters for progression, tells a different story.

Self-trust sustains damage that outlasts the employment relationship. Former subordinates of gaslighting managers often report, years later, a persistent difficulty in trusting their own judgement even in unrelated settings. In severe cases, clinically significant anxiety and depressive episodes emerge, a pattern documented in Bennett Tepper’s research on abusive supervision and in the broader literature on moral injury.

The moral injury deserves particular attention. Honest employees who are compelled, through organisational pressure, to participate in a distorted reality suffer a wound distinct from stress. They are asked to betray their own perception of truth, and the betrayal lingers. It is a wound that promotions do not heal and that therapy only partially closes.

6. A Machiavellian counsel to the victim

Here I must abandon the therapeutic register and adopt another. A subordinate trapped beneath a lying manager is in a position structurally analogous to that of a courtier in a hostile court. The counsel of fairness will not serve them. The counsel of Machiavelli will.

Observe before you act. Study the lying manager the way a naturalist studies a predator. Learn their patterns of deception, the audiences they flatter, the subordinates they favour, the narratives they repeat. Do not interrupt your observation with premature confrontation. Machiavelli writes in the Discourses on Livy that “whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times”. The subordinate who understands the manager’s times will know when to speak, when to wait, and when to move.

Discipline the paper trail. Memorialise everything in writing, calmly and without accusation. A confirmation email after a meeting. A follow-up note after a verbal instruction. A summary of decisions reached. In my professional practice, I have seen the written record tilt the outcome of internal investigations more often than any other single factor. The lying manager rules through the malleability of memory. Written records are the corrective. They need not be weaponised, and in most cases they should not be. Their mere existence shifts the balance of probability in any future dispute.

Practise patience. Do not confront a stronger opponent on their chosen ground. The deceiver has practised the craft for years. They have rehearsed their defences. They control the narrative channels. The subordinate’s advantage lies in time, in accumulating record, and in waiting for the moment when the manager’s contradictions become visible to others of their own accord. That moment arrives more reliably than the impatient subordinate believes.

Cultivate parallel alliances. Build relationships upward, laterally, and outward. A mentor two levels above the manager. A peer in another function who sees your work. A respected figure outside the organisation. The lying manager’s power depends on monopolising the channel through which your reputation travels. Break that monopoly, quietly and without drama, by ensuring that multiple credible parties know what you do and how well you do it. Jeffrey Pfeffer’s work on power in organisations is instructive here. Influence accrues to those whose reputation is not hostage to a single relationship.

Practise the selective disclosure of competence. Ensure that your work is visible to those beyond your immediate manager. Contribute to cross-functional projects. Accept speaking opportunities. Publish internally. Present at committees. The lying manager thrives on being the sole narrator of your professional story. Deprive them of that monopoly.

Reserve the judicious use of departure. Sometimes the most Machiavellian act is to leave on one’s own terms, with reputation intact and network expanded, while the liar remains behind to be consumed by their own fictions. Departure is not surrender. It is repositioning. The subordinate who leaves with dignity, with relationships preserved, and with a credible external narrative has outmanoeuvred the manager who remains trapped in a court of their own making.

Let me close this counsel as Machiavelli himself would. In the twenty-fifth chapter of The Prince he writes that “fortune is the arbiter of one half of our actions, but she still leaves the other half, or thereabouts, to be governed by ourselves”. The subordinate who prepares, who observes, who records, who allies, who waits, and who moves at the right moment, is the subordinate who makes themselves ready for fortune when she turns. Virtue without cunning is a candle in the wind. Cunning without virtue is a fire that consumes its bearer. The two must be combined, carefully and without romanticism, by anyone who wishes to survive a hostile superior and emerge with their character and career both intact.

7. Closing reflection

Organisations that tolerate managerial deceit eventually pay the full invoice. The payment is sometimes a regulatory fine, sometimes a client defection, sometimes a lawsuit, sometimes a slow demographic collapse of talent that no board paper adequately explains. The invoice is always delivered. The only variable is the date stamped at the top.

Individuals who navigate such environments with strategic intelligence rather than naïve idealism are the ones who emerge strengthened. They leave with their reputation intact, their network expanded, their perception of organisational life clarified rather than shattered. They carry forward, into their next role, a practical wisdom that their peers who sheltered in gentler environments do not possess.

It is not a cheerful conclusion, but it is a true one. The lying manager is eventually consumed by their own fictions. The wise subordinate ensures they are not consumed alongside them. That, in the end, is the most Machiavellian lesson of all.

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