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

Letitia Baldrige on Executive Etiquette

There is, for example, the matter of etiquette on corporate jets. Given the pressure to take off on time, “guests should arrive early,” Miss Baldrige said, “and they should be very polite to the crew.” The host's obligation is to serve “healthy, good food - not cold quiche” and to have an up-to-date annual report on board. “There are little details that make corporate jets exceptional,” she said.

You arrive early at a restaurant for a business lunch to which you've been invited by a fellow executive. Do you take a table? If you take a table, should you order a drink? And if your host never arrives, what do you do?

Take the table, but not the drink, because "It looks sloppy," says Letitia Baldrige, the former White House social secretary and an authority on etiquette. Nor should you eat the bread sticks: "It gets the table all crumbed up." If the host fails to arrive after 40 minutes, tip the waiter $5 or $10 and let the other executive know, so that you can be reimbursed. "A host is a host," Miss Baldrige said.

This month Miss Baldrige, who heads her own public relations and marketing company, is starting a "corporate manners" division to educate men and women on the nicer points that are often overlooked in the business world. There is a desperate need for such training, she said in an needs, Mr. Korda said, "is efficiency, excellence and caring about your work."

Whatever the value of corporate manners, few people would seem better prepared to instill them than Miss Baldrige. A Vassar graduate, she has spent a lifetime advising others on etiquette, as social secretary to the late Ambassador and Mrs. David Bruce in Paris, to the former Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce in Rome and to Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House. In 1978, Miss Baldrige revised "The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette," and she is currently writing a book on corporate etiquette, to be published next year.

The vice president of Miss Baldrige's new division, Lily Lodge, has a pedigree at least as impressive. Miss Lodge is a Wellesley alumna, niece of the late Henry Cabot Lodge and daughter of John Davis Lodge, the United States Ambassador to Switzerland. Miss Lodge, a speech teacher, will bring her talents to "a business world punctuated with dissonant voices, harsh accents and unpleasant tones,” Miss Baldridge said.

Miss Lodge has already helped modulate voices at Revlon, Citibank and the Ford Foundation. "I've worked with lots of women climbing up the corporate ladder who have shrill, high voices, so that what they in their companies," she said, while "middle managers are fascinated" with the subject. Clients have included Dean Witter Reynolds, where she was a director before the brokerage house was acquired by Sears, Roebuck.

Corporate manners training will encompass the usual niceties of the non business world: How to make an introduction; how to be a good host or guest; how to become a good conversationalist. But it will also cover a range of subjects particularly relevant to corporate life: when to use office stationery for extracurricular matters; how to act at a meeting; how to behave at a business lunch.

There is, for example, the matter of etiquette on corporate jets. Given the pressure to take off on time, "guests should arrive early," Miss Baldrige said, "and they should be very polite to the crew." The host's obligation is to serve "healthy, good food - not cold quiche" and to have an up-to-date annual report on board. "There are little details that make corporate jets exceptional," she said.

The quality of a company's stationery can be telltale, too. "A really first class company uses really fine stationery," Miss Baldrige said. From the chairman's office down to the executive vice president level, genuine engraved stationery is de rigueur. "Fake engraved stationery is like fake furs," she said.

She is enthusiastic about letter-writing for joyful occasions (a colleague's daughter is admitted to Harvard) or somber events (family illness). If an executive has just emerged from a meeting at which he came under fire, Miss Baldrige said, a well-mannered colleague peer or subordinate - should drop him a solicitous line: "Dear George, I understand that you had a tough time, and hope your spirits are up."

In the cutthroat corporate world, admittedly, such commiseration might be regarded a trifle suspiciously. "I'd kill anybody who did that to me," Mr. Korda said. "First of all, who needs it? Secondly, maybe the man deserved to have a tough time."

While he is "in favor of good manners," Mr. Korda insisted, he doubts that social niceties can be transferred to business. "Manners in corporations are for people in positions of power so that they don't misuse their power," he said. "For the rest, I'm not sure it comes up. Business is not necessarily nice. It's competitive and harsh, it has to do with excellence and self-interest."

Miss Baldrige disagrees. For every Machiavellian prince at a company, she maintained, there are a dozen true princes. "It's like taxi drivers," she explained. "If you take five taxis a day, one driver will be nasty and the other four are perfectly nice. You remember the nasty one. But you should remember the four who were nice. And we just have to look at corporate America that way." – By S. Salmans, 1983

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