Move over Eddie Haskell. Harriet E. Miers could teach you a thing or two about sucking up.
Papers released last week by the Texas state archives show a woman who admired the boss and wasn’t afraid to show it, with puppy dog cards and flowery notes in her own hand, often added to official typed correspondence.
“You are the best Governor ever – deserving of great respect!” Miers wrote to George W. Bush in a belated card for his 51st birthday.
At the bottom of the greeting card, she added, “At least for thirty days – you are not younger than me.”
In a flowery thank-you card, she wrote, “Hopefully Jenna and Barbara recognize that their parents are ‘cool’ – as do the rest of us. … All I heard is how great you and Laura are doing. … Texas is blessed!”
Her strong words of praise did not end after her boss attained the White House (taking her with him.) Lawmakers released some of her recent speeches and other public remarks.
In July, she told a Washington, D.C., law firm, “My admiration for the president’s leadership and Mrs. Bush’s leadership has been reaffirmed on virtually a daily basis.”
Can flattery this blatant work? Can you say Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers?
“Boy, is she good,” says business consultant Richard Brenner of Chaco Canyon Associates in Boston. The aside in the card about their age difference is particularly impressive, he says.
“With that personal, almost private connection between the two of them, she is building a secret little treehouse where they can both sit sometimes.”
As simple as it might sound, currying favor is a complicated dance. It can be fraught with danger – not just for the employee, but for the boss and workplace.
In his 2000 book, “You’re Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery,” Richard Stengel has a chapter called “Sucking Up to Caesar.” Yes, it worked back then too.
“We like to think that the smarter a person is, the higher she ascends up the ladder of success, the less susceptible that individual is to flattery,” Stengel writes. “In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. People of high self-esteem and accomplishment generally see the praise directed at them as shrewd judgment rather than flattery.”
It doesn’t always work. And most people in positions of power like to think they have built-in, ah, baloney detectors. But no boss is entirely immune to blandishments from underlings.
“I have been a victim of false flattery, and I have been a false flatterer,” says Peter Guber, the former chief of Sony and Columbia studios. “Sometimes I recognized it after I’ve said it, or even when I’ve said it.”
If art lies in concealing art, unfortunately in Miers’ case, says Guber, “the curtain has been pulled back.” Not that he judges her poorly for her efforts. “The reality is she was trying to set an emotional tone for the relationship. I don’t think that’s necessarily always bad. It’s a question of whether it’s sincere.”
Bush was a famously average student and has never pretended to be part of any intellectual elite. (In fact, he has honed his reputation as a regular guy over his years in public service.)
So when former White House speechwriter David Frum wrote on his blog that he had once heard Miers call Bush “the most brilliant man she’d ever met,” tongues across the political spectrum were set wagging: Could she really mean it? And if she were sincere, did this reflect poorly on her judgment?
“I assume she is not sincere because if you’re smart enough to be on the Supreme Court, you should be smarter than the president,” says Ben Austin, who is working for Rob Reiner on his campaign for universal preschool in California.
Perhaps the American centers of what social scientists call “ingratiatory behavior” are Hollywood and Washington, D.C. Both are places where flattery is not only the coin of the realm, but even when it’s an obvious counterfeit, is still valuable to the recipient.
Stengel, once a senior editor at Time, writes that the caliber and pervasiveness of toadying in Washington makes the nation’s capital “more like the courts of Renaissance Europe than it is to our modern era.”
“Sycophantic behavior exists anywhere you go,” says Austin, “but the White House is so dependent on its staff members performing at a high level that if the main attribute you bring to the table is the ability to write nice notes to your boss, you aren’t going to last. At least not in a normal White House.”
Brenner notes that ingratiatory behavior can involve mimicry (adopting the mannerisms, speech or dress of the boss), subtle manipulation (seeking advice or support from a boss when it’s not really necessary); adoration (always sitting next to the boss at meetings or meals); and fulfilling the boss’ dreams (proposing solutions that please the boss, even if they are unfeasible).
