You know the moment. The project is late, again, and the explanation arrives before you’ve even finished asking about it, a story, fully formed, that somehow makes it not their fault. The traffic. The system glitch. The email that “must have gone to spam.” The teammate who “never told them.” It’s not that you can’t ever verify these things it’s that there’s always, without fail, a reason that isn’t them.
And you leave that conversation, once again, carrying the frustration home with you, replaying it, drafting the email you’ll never send, letting one person’s pattern quietly take up the rest of your afternoon.
That part is worth addressing directly: not just how to deal with someone who lies and deflects, but how to keep their behavior from being the thing that runs your whole day.
The Reframe: Their Excuse Is Information About Them. Your Reaction Is the Part You Control.
The instinct, faced with a colleague who consistently lies or dodges accountability, is to try to solve the actual dishonesty, catch the inconsistency, present the evidence, and finally get them to admit what really happened. That instinct is understandable. It’s also usually a losing game, because someone who has built a habit of deflecting accountability isn’t short on ways to keep doing it. There will always be another excuse. That’s not a puzzle waiting for the right piece of evidence to solve it…. it’s a pattern.
Here’s the reframe worth sitting with: you don’t have the power to make someone stop lying or stop making excuses. You do have the power to decide how much of your day their pattern gets to occupy. Separating those two things, the part you can’t control (their honesty) from the part you can (your response, your boundaries, your energy), is where your actual leverage lives.
This isn’t about giving up on accountability. It’s about redirecting your energy toward the places accountability can actually be enforced, documentation, escalation, clear boundaries — instead of pouring it into the exhausting, unwinnable project of getting one person to finally tell the truth.
Why This Kind of Coworker Is So Draining
Part of what makes lying-and-excusing colleagues so uniquely exhausting is the mental tax of constantly having to evaluate what’s real. Most workplace friction, even difficult friction, at least comes with honest information you can work with. This kind doesn’t. Every explanation has to be quietly filtered, is this true, is this partially true, is this simply what’s convenient to say right now, and that ongoing filtering is its own form of labor, even before you get to the actual problem the excuse was covering for.
There’s also a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching accountability consistently land somewhere other than where it belongs. When someone reliably avoids consequences by redirecting blame, it can start to feel almost personally insulting, as though honesty and follow-through, the things you take seriously, simply don’t apply the same way to them. That frustration is valid. It’s also worth noticing when it’s taking up more of your emotional bandwidth than the actual practical impact of their behavior justifies.
None of this means you’re being too sensitive or too rigid about honesty. It means you’re working alongside a pattern that’s genuinely disruptive, and disruptive patterns deserve practical strategy, not just private frustration.
What Letting This Ruin Your Day Actually Costs You
It gives someone else’s dishonesty control over your energy. Every hour spent stewing over one colleague’s latest excuse is an hour of focus, patience, and goodwill that isn’t available for your actual work, or for the people around you who do show up honestly.
It keeps you reactive instead of strategic. Getting pulled into the emotional current of each new excuse means you’re responding moment to moment, rather than building the kind of documented, boundaried approach that actually protects you over time.
It can quietly erode your trust in your own read of situations. If someone consistently rewrites reality convincingly enough, it’s easy to start second-guessing your own memory of what actually happened, which is exhausting on its own, separate from the original issue.
How to Navigate This Without Losing Your Day to It
1. Get in the habit of documenting instead of debating. Rather than trying to win the argument about what “really” happened in the moment, quietly note it, dates, deliverables, what was actually said or agreed to. You’re not building a case out of spite. You’re creating an accurate record that speaks for itself, so you don’t have to keep relitigating reality from memory alone.
2. Respond to the pattern, not the individual excuse. Instead of investigating and reacting to each excuse as if it’s a new, isolated event, notice and respond to the pattern as a whole: “This is the third deadline that’s slipped this month.” Addressing the pattern, calmly and factually, is far more productive than debating the merits of any single excuse.
3. Keep your responses short, neutral, and non-engaged with the story. You don’t need to accept, challenge, or emotionally react to an excuse in the moment. A simple “Okay…. let’s talk about how we get this back on track” keeps the conversation moving toward what actually matters, without you having to validate or dismantle the excuse itself.
4. Loop in the structures that can actually hold accountability. If this pattern is affecting your work, your team, or your deadlines, this is exactly what documentation, manager check-ins, and clear written expectations are for. You don’t have to be the sole enforcer of honesty from a colleague, let the systems that exist for this purpose do some of that work.
5. Build a clean mental exit from work conversations that go this way. After a frustrating interaction, give yourself a brief, intentional reset, a short walk, a few minutes with your headphones on, a deliberate shift in task, before moving into the rest of your day. The goal isn’t to suppress your frustration. It’s to keep one conversation from expanding into the whole afternoon.
The Question Worth Asking Yourself
Not “how do I finally get them to stop lying”…. that question keeps your peace dependent on someone changing a pattern they’ve likely had for a long time, possibly long before they ever worked with you.
The more useful question is: What’s the smallest, most contained response I can give this situation, so the rest of my day stays mine?
You can’t control whether a colleague keeps reaching for an excuse instead of the truth. You can control how much of your energy, focus, and peace you hand over to that pattern once you notice it happening…. and protecting that is not indifference. It’s just good boundaries, applied where they’re actually needed.
Their excuses are their pattern to answer for. Your day is still yours to protect.
Common Ground Coaching 
Leave a comment