Sorry, his (or her) lips are moving doesn't count.

Professors David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analyzed nearly 30,000 transcripts of conference calls by CEOs and CFOs made between 2003-2007.  The researchers compared the conference calls with psychological studies that showed how people speak differently when they aren’t telling the truth — and tested whether these common deception traits were more prevalent in cases where bosses weren’t completely truthful about company profits.

They identified five common characteristics of a deceptive boss:

1.  Avoids using the word “I” — and instead speaks in the third person
2.  Uses fewer hesitation words (um, er, etc.), suggesting possible coaching.
3.  Swears more frequently
4.  Makes more references to general knowledge info (i.e., “As you know,”)
5.  Uses fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words” (i.e., likely to call something “fantastic” rather than just “good”).

Their findings were published in a report titled, Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls.