The editor called the reporter into her office. "I have a story idea. Why don't you do something about flattery in the workplace? We even have a headline: 'The Age of Obsequiousness.' "
"I believe," the reporter said slowly, searching for the precise words to describe her feelings, "that this is a great idea. I'll get right on it."
Flattery. Kissing up. Call it ingratiation, if you prefer psychological jargon. Or call it by its coarse -- yet far from crudest -- name: sucking up.
But if you have an ounce of honesty or self-awareness, you know you do it. You know you love it when someone does it to you. And you know you are outraged when you see others doing it.
"I've never heard anyone admit to being an ingratiator," says Dr. John Sabini, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania. "I'm sure it's the sort of thing that people disavow."
Not everyone. Some people are proud to be known as kiss-ups. Baltimore lawyer Jim MacAlister, for example, cheerfully acknowledges that he and other savvy attorneys always have a nice word for the judge.
"Even if the judge has a tie that looks like a lobster bib, you say, 'Hey that's a great tie.'
"But I think most judges can see through it," he adds. "They're pretty good. They've been around long enough to have seen it all. Yet we still do it."
Why? Because there's a dirty little secret about flattery: It works. Even when people see through it.
"Even the most successful people like to be flattered," says Dr. Andrew J. DuBrin, an industrial psychologist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, whose books on office politics advise a judicious use of flattery.
"Why did Johnny Carson keep Ed McMahon around?" he asks. "I think Ed McMahon was a world-class laugher at the boss' jokes. Even if it is transparent, people have such strong ego needs, it gets through and still works."
All things being equal, the obsequious toad edges out the sincere naif. One study on how to advance in the upper echelons of Fortune 500 companies pointed out that a company's top employees tend to be equal in performance.
So advancing was based on image (30 percent) and face-time with the boss (50 percent). Flattery can play a big part in both.
"This behavior is the icing on the cake," says Ronald J. Deluga, a psychology professor from Bryant College in Rhode Island, who, in yet another study, surveyed 150 pairs of bosses and subordinates. "From a statistical point of view, it adds 5 percent."
Again, the bosses in Dr. Deluga's study recognized the behavior, yet still had favorable opinions of the kiss-ups. However, the kiss-ups were in serious denial.
"Often the subordinates in particular would write: 'I never use this technique but I know someone who does,' " Dr. Deluga says. "Many people use this, but we don't like others to use it."
Candid thoughts from city's best and brightest
Give credit to Richard Sher, the WJZ anchor and reporter. Asked for his thoughts on flattery, he turns the interview into a comic monologue. interrupting himself to bestow flowery compliments on his interviewer and anyone within earshot.
"Kellye Lynn, our new medical reporter, she's sitting right across from me, I compliment and flatter her as much as I can because she is excellent," he says by telephone from Television Hill. "She's new and terrific, and she's going to be a superstar."
Then he adds: "I've talked to a lot of news people, and I think this is one of the most enriching story ideas I've ever heard."
One has to admire this. The compliment is not only obvious, it's a joke, a riff on the topic at hand. The receiver knows this, yet the receiver almost purrs with pleasure. It could still be true. Right? Right? (Memo to self: Tell boss that Richard Sher thinks her idea is terrific.)
Yet this technique would be lost on Steve Kaiser, president of his own public relations firm, Kaiser Associates, who says he shuns flattery and flatterers.
"To me flattery has absolutely no place in the workplace," he says. "My clients hire me because what they see is what they get. If they hire me to tell them only good news, I'm certainly of no benefit."
He learned to shun flattery while working for then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer and his longtime associate, Marion Pines. "If you went the flattery route with Schaefer or Pines, you were shot down."
In fact, one can argue that Mr. Schaefer has gone the anti-flattery route in his career, alienating some voters. (Think of the woman who gestured to Mr. Schaefer -- obscenely according to him, innocently according to her -- only to be told via letter: "Your action only exceeds the ugliness of your face.")
The elevator to success
Of course, ingratiation -- and its consequences -- have always been with us. Perhaps Cain thought Abel was a suck-up. Sir Thomas More didn't tell Henry VIII what he wanted to hear and lost his head.
In popular culture, there's a clear line from Eddie Haskell to Sammy Davis Jr. right up to Larry King. In the hit musical, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," J. Pierpont Finch oozes his way to the top.
But the difference between art and real life is that flatterers are usually revealed and reviled for their insincerity. June Cleaver never bought Eddie's compliments. On "The Simpsons," two-faced Sideshow Bob ended up doing time after framing his employer, Krusty the Clown.
Off television, however, kissing up is so controversial that some people are loath to speak on the record even about observing obsequiousness. But a woman at a well-known media company -- not The Baltimore Sun -- agreed to share this story, as long as names were omitted to protect the guilty.
She recalls a co-worker, fondly known by her colleagues as "Eve Harrington" -- an allusion to the back-stabbing character who wheedles her way to the top in the film "All About Eve" -- who came to the office while on maternity leave, adorable baby in tow. Dimpling and simpering, she informed her supervisor she considered him the father of her child because he had hired her, bringing her to the city where she met her husband.
"It was nauseating," the eyewitness recalls. "Of course, he had no idea what was going on. In fact, if he reads this, it probably wouldn't occur to him that it's about him."
A young man who has made his mark at two huge conglomerates also asked for anonymity when talking about his experiences as a boss and a subordinate.
Traditional flattery doesn't work for him.
"I don't really like it that much, because I tend to be so busy that it annoys me," he says of the casual comment, whether directed at his tie, wit or haircut. "It's just eating up your time, the gratuitous compliments."
He says a better, more subtle form of sucking up is seizing the opportunity to strut one's stuff for the boss. His advice: Be prepared, at any time, to ride the elevator with your company's chief executive officer, or meet him in a long hallway. Have two to three good questions about the company at the ready to show how you could enhance a project.
"I call it managing upwards," says this upward-bound executive. "When you do it well, nobody knows you're doing it."
A little flattery never hurt, too little flattery has
Finally, Dr. Sabini, the social psychologist from Penn, would like to say a word in defense of ingratiators.
"I don't think that most of the time, people run around mis-portraying their attitudes entirely. That's why it's so easy not to see yourself as doing it. You don't mention the half you disagree with. You overstate your enthusiasm," he says. "That's a general fact about how we protect our own sense of moral innocence."
He also has a cautionary tale about flattery. He once knew a colleague, a man of high standards and integrity, who was determined not to be called a flatterer or a kiss-up. He then got a job teaching at Johns Hopkins University.
"He bent over so far backward as to be overtly insulting," he says. "But I think that's unusual."
So what happened to this particular colleague?
"I don't know," Dr. Sabini recalls. "He didn't get tenure."
Smooth talking through the ages
Flattery -- and its pitfalls -- has been the source of literary contemplation since Biblical times. Here is a sampling from the world's greatest minds and wits. (And we really mean that, guys. Honestly. You're beautiful.)
D8 "Meddle not with him that flattereth with his lips."
-- Proverbs, 20:19
"There is no other way of guarding oneself against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth; but when everyone can tell you the truth, you lose their respect."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli,
"The Prince" (1532)
8, But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
says he does, being then most flattered.
"Julius Caesar" (1598-1600).
"Of all wild beasts, preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer."
-- Ben Jonson, "Sejanus" (1603)
0$ Tis an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery's the food of fools;
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit.
-- Jonathan Swift, "Cadenus
and Vanessa" (1713)
Your face is a company face
It smiles at executives and goes back in place!
. . . You'll never rise up to the top
But one thing's clear
Whoever the company fires
& You will still be here
-- Frank Loesser, "How to
Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying" (1961)