Executive Etiquette from 1986

“The worst thing you can do is to go to your new boss and ask him over for dinner,” Baldrige said. “Let them do the inviting in the beginning. They need to make the first step.”

Etiquette tips for avoiding those business faux pas…

Executive etiquette. There is nothing scientific about it.

It's a question of grace, style, intuition the delicate, ever-changing nuances of social behavior that, if heeded, can make the job a whole lot easier, the employer a great deal happier and the employee perhaps a little more successful.

Enter one of the masters of manners, Letitia Baldrige, chief of staff and social secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy.

"You have to know how to play the keyboard," Baldrige began in a recent interview from her home in New York City. "When you're the new kid on the block, the main thing you have to remember is to keep your distance."

Baldrige, who recently completed "Letitia Baldrige's Guide to Executive Manners" and who delivers etiquette seminars throughout the country, is referring to the eggshell relationship that can exist between employer and employee.

There are certain things you do and certain things you do not do. Ever.

"The worst thing you can do is to go to your new boss and ask him over for dinner," Baldrige said. "Let them do the inviting in the beginning. They need to make the first step."

After feeling out one's supervisor, soaking up the office atmosphere and waiting for a proper interval of time to pass, the employee's social invitation should be made privately, Baldrige added.

"And always make sure you tell the boss's secretary not to broadcast it. That's how terrible jealousies begin. If you happen to have a lucky in with the boss, don't make it known. You'll just make enemies."

Judi Kaufman, a trainer for Etiquette International in Beverly Hills, said it is usually advisable that a restaurant, not the employee's home, serve as the site for the first social encounter with the boss.

"The employee, obviously, is not at the same economic level of his supervisors, so a restaurant is often a good neutral place to avoid any possible embarrassment," Kaufman said.

The old "let's-have-dinner" ritual, according to Baldrige, is only one of many social codes the eager young executive should learn and learn well.

Never call the boss by his or her first name until asked to, she cautioned. "And never should a young executive have his (or her) secretary place a call to a senior executive. There's nothing more pretentious than that."

Backslapping, making too many jokes about the job and acting too casually are the most commonly committed blunders made by ingratiating employees in the office, Baldrige stressed.

"There always has to be that distance kept," she said. "Call it respect or call it fear, but you don't do things like plopping yourself down next to the boss in the executive dining room." In addition to serving the First Lady, Baldrige also was President Kennedy's adviser on matters of protocol.

Perhaps that's why she offered this piece of advice: "There is nothing that drives a senior executive more wild than when a junior executive barges in to the boss's office while the boss is in with someone else (to ask) questions that aren't at all urgent or important That just drives them crazy."

Further, at social functions like an office party or company picnic, "Never hover around the boss and monopolize him even if you've established a friendship."

And, Kaufman added, "Don't drink too much at the party. The best way to win over a boss, said Kaufman, is "to know his or her spouse and a little about what they're interested in, plus knowing the first names of the children."

Kaufman's list of egregious office errors include: don't take credit for someone else's work, don't be abrupt on the telephone and don't write any memos to a supervisor longer than a page.

"You'd be surprised how much an employer appreciates good telephone manners and someone who can boil all the information the boss should know into one page," Kaufman said.

Baldrige said it's the "little extra things" that breed employee success. Make sure to respond to an RSVP, she advised, and write thank you notes when someone does you a service and congratulatory notes when someone gets a promotion.

"Another thing," Baldrige continued, "we are the worst nation in the world in terms of introducing people. If you can't remember their name, laugh about it, but make the introduction."

The introductory protocol is quite simple: "If you're talking to a judge or a chief executive officer, for instance, introduce the lesser to the more important and the younger to the older. — By Ellis E. Conklin, UPI Feature Writer, 1986

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor of the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia