Everyone loathes a sycophant. Management experts warn about the poisonous influence of the flatterer. Academics cite the business risks of being surrounded by servile toadies. Leaders insist they are never swayed by suck-ups.
And yet sucking up persists. Why? Because it works. Or rather, it works often enough to justify the indignities involved.
I have not been able to stop thinking about this irksome fact of corporate life since the inauguration of Donald Trump, a leader whose desire for pliant minions is said to be bottomless.
As it turns out, the early days of the Trump administration have been an absorbing masterclass in the pitfalls that face the fawning.
Consider the handful of bosses who were chosen to question Trump when the president was beamed live into the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.
Brian Moynihan, Bank of America’s chief executive, began with a chummy reminder of Trump’s first-term visit to Davos five years ago, when “we walked among 150 CEOs from all over the world and you engaged with them about your policies”.
But when he asked Trump to explain how he now planned to keep the economy growing, things went awry. In the middle of a meandering answer, Trump suddenly accused Moynihan’s bank of shunning conservative clients. “What you’re doing is wrong,” he declared, adding that he hoped it would stop.
The banker did not respond to this unexpected public scolding but the incident was telling. Giving bosses what you think they want can backfire.
I learned this as a young political reporter in Britain when covering my first party leadership contest. To my surprise, an MP who had been among the earliest and loudest supporters of the winning candidate was left on the backbenches, when the new leader announced his cabinet.
“Loyalty doesn’t always pay,” a political veteran told me, explaining the MP’s overt display of faithfulness made it easy to overlook him for plum jobs. Who was he going to complain to?
I’ve seen this dynamic play out repeatedly in corporate offices, which is why it has always seemed preferable to adopt the bolder approach that another bank boss questioning Trump took in Davos.
“I believe you don’t know me as well as my fellow panellists,” said Santander’s Ana Botín as she told Trump that her bank was large and had 170 million customers. “That’s more than my friend Brian [Moynihan] or Jamie [Dimon],” she added to laughter and applause, before briskly asking Trump how fast he would meet his vows to deregulate and cut bureaucracy.
Trump told Botín he knew her bank well and “you’ve done a fantastic job”. The mercurial president could easily change his mind but Botín’s quiet display of independence is a reminder that one can get ahead without resorting to open bootlicking.
This is a message in a forthcoming book, Managing Up: How to Get What You Need From the People in Charge, by Melody Wilding, a professor of human behaviour at New York’s Hunter College.
Wilding is no fan of sycophancy. She makes the case for understanding a boss’s needs and earning their support by communicating effectively.
But she does recommend strategies to become more noticeable by, say, taking the elevator instead of the stairs, “if it means you’re more likely to bump into someone new or influential”. Or sitting near decision makers in meetings so it’s easier to strike up a conversation.
This sounds like sucking up on the sly, I told her when we spoke last week. Wilding insists it’s more about being visible to busy managers who are often hard to meet. “What you do with that visibility is not necessarily sucking up,” she said. The idea is to make people see you as a person, not “a line on somebody’s org chart”.
She has a point. In an ideal world, these tactics would be unnecessary. Leaders would know who in their team could do what, and would treat them, and their ideas, accordingly.
In the real world, bosses are human. They like being flattered and admired. It makes a break from being bombarded by complaints and problems. They are, in other words, susceptible to sycophancy.
Yet sycophants should beware. History may not be kind, especially to those who court the powerful while treating the less important with condescension, like the young Henry Kissinger. He may have gone on to be a highly influential diplomat, but as historian Robert Dallek once wrote, to some he was always Henry Ass-Kissinger. --Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
[ https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2023/11/30/henry-kissinger-obituary/ ]
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