The Art of Spotting Bullshit: A Guide for the Impact-minded Professional

If we’re type of people who care about making a positive contribution - for those we’re serving, for our enterprises, and society - it’s important to sniff out bullshitters so we can surround ourselves with people committed to and capable of making a difference.

Why? Because to make an actual impact I need to surround myself with people who actually are able to accomplish something (and be that type of person myself) rather than people who are all smoke and mirrors. Bullshitters may initially impress with their confidence and eloquence, but ultimately, they leave you facing the consequences alone. So if we want to increase our chances at making an impact for those we’re serving we have to do something simple, but often challenging: avoid bullshitters.

But the problem with a good bullshitter is that they’re good at bullshitting. Moreover, many capable people aren’t good at promoting themselves - precisely because they spend most of their time solving problems and helping people rather than bullshitting.

When you’re in the trenches with someone, day after day, it becomes easier to tell whether they’re a bullshitter or not. But we often have to decide whether to hire someone, promote them, work for them, or partner with them without being in the trenches with them first.

And so sniffing out bullshitters is actually a really important skill. So if you’re the sort of person who cares more about making a contribution than you do about promoting yourself this post is an invitation to you. How do you sniff out a bullshitter?

To get us started, here are some of the techniques that I’ve experimented with over the years:

• Ask them, “Can you walk me through it from start to finish, in detail?”

• Listen for jargon and corporate-isms which don’t have actual meaning. If someone can only speak in code and with overused corporate cliches, it usually means they don’t know what they’re actually talking about.

• Look at how individual contributors - especially someone’s non-managerial direct reports - talk about them. If they can’t tell you specifically why someone is capable, they probably aren’t. People who work on the front lines directly with products or customers have the most reliable radars for detecting bullshitters.

• Ask them, “can you tell me what aspects of that accomplishment were luck and which were the result of intentional decisions?” I haven’t asked this question in an interview yet, but I want to. Even bullshitters can accomplish things if they’re lucky - but probably can’t fake intention if no intention ever existed.

• Look for complex slides with lots of words or highly complex and ambigious objective statements. People who are able to explain complex things simply have done the work to hold an opinion.

• Look for a track record of bouncing around. Bullshitters can’t stick with a job for more than 2 years because once people realize they are bullshitters they know it’ll be easy for them to be laid-off or fired. Anyone can fake it in a job for a year or two. Of course, there are exceptions, especially when the person in front of you has a non-traditional background or extenuating personal circumstances.

• Do they gossip? If you don’t have anything more productive to say, spinning stories about others is an effective sleight of hand to distract people from one’s own lack of vision, intellect, or leadership.

These are just some tells I’ve seen as a pattern over the years. What has helped you detect bullshitters?

In closing, I’d like to be fair to a close cousin of bullshitters: storytellers. Storytellers root in the truth and aim to serve collective goals through the narratives they share. Bullshitters in my experience are quite the opposite - I’ve found them to be narcissists who care more about themselves than others.

Telling stories is really important in organizational life because stories help us do things like: make meaning of our work, motivate us to act, and learn from past mistakes. Story tellers matter because telling stories is an essential part of making an impact. The difference is subtle, but important: story telling moves a team or constituency forward, bullshitting only moves an individual person into positions of higher status and authority. Bullshitting is hype without substance, storytelling is substance.

I hope I’m not a bullshitter, I suppose I don’t know that for sure (after all, I do spend a lot of time writing and talking). I do know, though, that I don’t want to be. And I do know that bullshitters often get ahead and get a lot of credit, at least for awhile. And I do know, finally, that I want to leave this world better than I found it.

I figured that by putting a bat signal out on how to suss out bullshitters, we can more easily get the ourselves and others in a better position to make a contribution and at least make it less likely we accidentally hire, partner with, or work for a bullshitter.

I've shared my strategies, but I'm always learning. What are your tried-and-true methods for identifying bullshitters? Share in the comments below.