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Discussion on: Is honesty always the best policy?

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Tom VanAntwerp

Honest is best, but only in combination with tact. It's on you to make sure you can truthfully communicate information without triggered negative emotions in the recipient. If they feel like you're being a jerk or questioning their abilities, whatever you say might as well be a lie because they won't accept it.

The only exception to this might be if someone literally can't handle the truth. Personal example: I once worked with a person senior to me who was having trouble figuring out how to get files on Dropbox. We had migrated from local network shares to Dropbox for various reasons. He wasn't well-versed in "the cloud" and had no interest in learning. He wasn't in a technical role, and it wouldn't have been worth his time to really understand what had changed. He reacted strongly and negatively to any kind of change in his familiar workflow. The solution was to change the icon for his Dropbox folder to the same icon as the old network share drive. He never complained about it again.

Hopefully you work with people who are open to learning and sharing information. The above scenario is not ideal.