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  

Letitia Baldrige on Executive Manners

On TV, you'll see a woman 65 years old married for the third time tossing her bouquet. It's so ridiculous... SO many travesties of taste go on the air.

On Zed Diamond and Jenny Markham’s wedding day, fate threw a curve separating them for three years. She had amnesia; he thought she was dead.

Then one day they rediscovered each other and decided to reaffirm their wedding vows. What's the proper protocol for such an event?

If you are a couple from the daytime soap opera “Capitol,” you call upon Letitia Baldrige for the answers.

Baldrige, former Social Secretary to U.S. ambassadors, and Jackie Kennedy's White House Chief of Staff, is without contention the foremost expert on personal and business etiquette in the United States.

For “Capitol’s” renewal-of-vows ceremony, Baldrige said the bride should walk in from the side, not up the aisle. She should wear a pastel shade, not white. The cake, too, should be decorated with color. No flower children should toss rose petals nor friends throw rice.

Those rites are reserved for the first wedding.

When it comes to the marriage ceremony, Baldrige is a traditionalist.

“You can only get married for the first time once,” she insisted in a recent interview.

Baldrige, who rewrote “Amy Vanderbilt's Book of Etiquette” in 1978 and has gained even more renown for her “Complete Guide To Executive Manners,” published in 1985, was asked to advise “Capitol” on the correct wedding form for a couple who previously married.

That meant Jenny could not toss her bouquet, could not wear a train or a long veil (only a short one) and she needed to generally “play it cool on the white stuff.” Baldrige was delighted that “Capitol” asked for her assistance.

“On TV, you'll see a woman 65 years old married for the third time tossing her bouquet. It's so ridiculous,” she said.

“Television has such tremendous influence, but so many travesties of taste go on the air. You'll see tables improperly set, with the fork and knife and spoon juxtaposed.

“Or on one nighttime soap opera, they showed a poolside luncheon with everyone dressed in tennis shorts and bathing suits, and the butler was serving lunch. That’s only with white gloves for the most formal dinner with everyone in evening clothes.”

As Baldrige knows well, traditions and correct manners are enjoying a hearty resurgence in the ‘80s.

“It's part of the sociological shift,” says Baldrige. “From 1965 to 1978, traditions were out. People got married in the fields, with Hindu zithers playing and cows in the background instead of organ around in music. People walked around patches of poison ivy instead of the church. It was all a caricature of weddings when the youth rebelled in the '60s.

“Then, of course, those same kids put on three-piece suits and wanted to work in corporations, and suddenly attitudes changed. Now, people want to be in the mainstream. They want to do the formal things properly again.”

The growing deference to tradition is not limited to social occasions, Baldrige discovered after she rewrote the Vanderbilt book.

“There was one small chapter in there on business etiquette. And it was reprinted in airline magazines and company publications all over the world,” she said.

“Then, I started getting calls from businesses and corporations around the country asking for help on how they worded their invitations, and about protocol at meetings. I realized there was a real market there.”

So in 1980 Baldrige added an executive branch to the New York public relations and marketing firm she has run since 1964.

“But I knew I needed a textbook on business etiquette. So I wrote the ‘Complete Guide To Executive Manners.’” Actually, the book is, as Baldrige called it, “the first, big, sort of encyclopedia on behavior in the office.”

Yes, the book covers the proper form of address for officials in government, military and business. Yes, it discusses how far in advance business invitations should be mailed.

But it also delineates the qualities of good managers: Never expect others to follow rules you do not. Never repeat a rumor that would hurt someone's reputation. Keep promises, both large and small.

Baldrige learned the rules of good business behavior by her proximity to people of power and class.

“Since I was 20 years old. I had role models like Clare Boothe Luce. I had all those years in the White House, all these years in business. I worked with David Bruce, who was the greatest senior diplomat we had in this century, in the American Embassy in Paris.”

Baldrige said the basis of executive good manners is twofold: “It’s 75 percent common sense and 25 percent consideration of others. By common sense, I mean making decisions that are efficient and work well. By consideration, I mean decisions that are unselfish and care about someone else's feelings.” – By Divina Infusino for Copley News Service, 1986

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Etiquette Challenges in 1992

Letitia Baldridge was a wise woman: “For every step forward in electronic communications we've taken two steps back in humanity,” Ms. Baldrige said. “People know how to use a computer and answering machines but have forgotten how to connect with one another. Our society is unraveling. We're too self-obsessed. Look at all those unattractive people talking about depraved things all day long on TV talk shows. People can talk about themselves, yet the art of conversation, which has to do with sharing, is disappearing. I feel as though I am chasing a runaway locomotive.” Sadly, Baldrige died in 2012, at the age of 86. One has to wonder what she would have thought of today’s social media platforms.

At Tea with Letitia Baldrige

(She was the Calming Voice of Civility in Uncivil Times)

O TEMPORA! O mores! The mores are enough to make Letitia Baldrige, the guru of social niceties, put down her cup of tea and wring her hands in Ciceronian despair. She reeled off some recent examples.

The bride-to-be who faxed her wedding invitations. The cellular phone that rang during Mass. The young executive who goes from word processor at work to VCR at home and does not know how to make small talk.

“For every step forward in electronic communications we've taken two steps back in humanity,” Ms. Baldrige said. “People know how to use a computer and answering machines but have forgotten how to connect with one another. Our society is unraveling. We're too self-obsessed. Look at all those unattractive people talking about depraved things all day long on TV talk shows. People can talk about themselves, yet the art of conversation, which has to do with sharing, is disappearing. I feel as though I am chasing a runaway locomotive.”

In this automated society, etiquette has an anachronistic ring. But in reality, Ms. Baldrige’s message is not one of clinging to old-fashioned manners when all around are losing theirs but how best to adapt with civility to a changing world.

That's often where tea comes in: people need it more than ever, Ms. Baldrige said. (Yes, Ms. “I'm a businesswoman, and Ms. is an appropriate form of address,” she said. She is known as Tish to friends.) Ms. Baldrige views tea not as a ceremonial or snobbish throwback, but as a relaxing break in the daily routine, and one that is quieter, less complicated and often less demanding of one’s time than lunch or dinner.

With a background in governmental protocol and 18th-century decorative arts, Ms. Baldrige, 66 years old, has progressed from updating Amy Vanderbilt's book of etiquette in the 1970's (with advice on how to address an invitation to a couple who are not married, revolutionary stuff at that time) to writing a guide to manners for executives in the 1980's to sorting out the “new manners” of the 1990's. She is currently revising the executives’ guide, paying attention to issues like sexual harassment, child care and the proper use of beepers.

Before catching a shuttle from New York to Washington, where she lives with her husband, Robert Hollensteiner, a real estate developer, she was having tea at the Mayfair Regent Hotel, one of her favorite places. “They know how to serve it here,” she said as she poured some orange pekoe from a china pot through the silver strainer balanced on her cup. “You'd be surprised how much easier it is to conduct business over tea than over lunch or dinner in a bustling restaurant.”

She selected her tea without hesitation from an assortment of eight. Her utter confidence and sense of command in making her choice, as much as in handling introductions or in keeping a conversation going, are warmly reassuring, never intimidating.

Tea can make people comfortable in a similar fashion. In business situations, Ms. Baldrige believes, the logistics of tea are actually easier to handle than those of a full meal, especially for people who have yet to figure out which side their bread-and-butter plate is on. Once the formality of pouring is out of the way, the participants can get down to business, without spending too much time. No need to worry about elbows on the table because the table is often too low.

“I've seen business deals confirmed over tea and people fired over tea,” she said.

Ms. Baldrige, who now conducts seminars on behavior and corporate relations, cut her social teeth as the personal secretary to the Ambassador at the American Embassy in Paris. That job was the beginning of her career in protocol: she went on to Rome with Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce and then, in 1961, to Washington with the Kennedys. More afternoon teas than she can remember. And enough stories to last for a month of afternoon teas.

“In Rome, I accidently introduced a new Ambassador from Pakistan as the Ambassador from India in front of the entire diplomatic corps,” she recalled. “He exploded and left, and I spent the next four days apologizing with calls, letters, visits, flowers. If I did something like that today, it would be all over the media, and I would probably have been fired. I learned to apologize in a major way.”

She is more careful about introductions and greetings these days. As Ms. Baldrige was considering a little tray of tea sandwiches at the Mayfair Regent, a woman recognized her and stopped, mentioning an occasion when they had met several years ago. No flicker of puzzlement crossed Ms. Baldrige's generous, open face as she waited for the woman to finish. “Of course,” she said brightly, as though the previous encounter had occurred just yesterday. Afterward, she said: “I never would have recognized that woman, but she had the good sense to introduce herself by name. Everybody forgets names and faces, and it's just inconsiderate to expect someone who isn't your boss or your sister-in-law to know exactly who you are.”

What do you do if you fail to pin a name on a familiar face? “You come right out and ask the person's name and then say something about how you know you've met before, but there are days when you even forget your own children's names.”

Not that she is likely to, in the case of her own children. Her daughter, Clare Smyth, 26, is named for Mrs. Luce, and her son, Malcolm Baldrige Hollensteiner, 24, is named for her oldest brother.

She confesses she is somewhat appalled at her son's table manners. “I think he really does it to twit me,” she said. “He's always got the spoon in the ice cream carton, because he can't be bothered with a dish.”

Ms. Baldrige has written a dozen books, many about etiquette. But these days instead of merely talking about manners in her seminars, she digs beneath the formalities to reveal the logical, civilizing nature of social protocol.

“There are major C.E.O.'s who do not know how to hold a knife and fork properly, but I don't worry about that as much as the lack of kindness,” she said. “There are two generations of people who have not learned how important it is to take time to say ‘I'm sorry’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and how people must relate to one another.

“But that does not extend to allowing perfect strangers to address you by your first name. With me they're better off sticking with Baldrige, because too many people have trouble getting Letitia right.”

Ms. Baldrige admits to having some old-fashioned values and holding views that some would call sexist. “I marched in the pro-feminist parade with everyone else in the late 60's,” she said, “but that does not mean that women should abdicate their roles in the family. Women have the babies, and they have to be the ones to teach manners and ethics. Men won't do it because they're more concerned with making money, keeping fit and having a good sex life.”

Ms. Baldrige grew up in Omaha, but you'd never know it from her Eastern establishment accent. She still loves the Midwest for what she calls its relative lack of artifice. She went to Vassar and then, in 1946, enrolled in graduate school, the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute of Psychology at the University of Geneva. “I fell in love with Europe and decided I would do anything to get back there after I finished my studies,” she said.

She landed the job at the American Embassy in Paris after reluctantly taking a secretarial course, a requirement for a woman trying to get a job in those days. “For me to be in that atmosphere, with people like Dean Acheson coming to the Embassy, was incredible,” she said. Once in the Embassy, even with steno pad in hand, her career was off and running.

When she returned home after three years, she began liberally sprinkling her conversation with French words. “I was thoroughly obnoxious, a big blond snob, really bad news,” she said.

She then worked at the Central Intelligence Agency on a psychological warfare project. “In retrospect, what they were doing was not so different from public relations today,” she said. In 1953, thanks to her command of Italian, she became special assistant to Ambassador Luce in Rome. By 1956, she was in New York at Tiffany & Company as the first director of public relations and the first woman to be an executive there.

“Those were the glorious days of Walter Hoving,” she said, referring to Tiffany's former chairman. “He would not sell scarfs and handbags.”

She took advantage of her job at Tiffany’s to purchase a full set of sterling silver flatware for herself. “I was single, a career woman, but you do not have to be a bride to want beautiful things and to use them when you entertain,” she said. “It should be no different today.”

Then this arbiter of taste looked around the area off the Mayfair Regent lobby where tea is served. Her eyes lighted on the giant floral arrangement in the center of the room. “Look at those fabulous flowers,” she said, adding in a conspiratorial voice, “Sometimes they put in a few fake ones to help out.”

Oh?

“I know it,” she went on, “because I felt them when no one was looking. I'm always doing things like that.” – The Living Section, NYT, 1992

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia