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Brown nosing is what common positive human interaction is called by those unable to do it.
Buy a round of drinks?
Remember an important date with a note or comment?
Make a point of learning those important dates?
Learn something about the boss's hobby?
Actually enjoy the same hobby and engage in that?
This is not brown nosing
Yes, it is. The worst kind of brown nosing. And your co-workers will despise you for it.
I have yet to see a case of brown nosing that wasn't successful for the brown noser (as long as the brown nosing followed the chain of command-no sucking up to your boss's boss). If you work for an organization with weak, unqualified management, you'll find brown nosing to be a path to the top and riches galore.
As the old saying goes, "Twenty minutes of kissing ass is better than eight hours of busting ass."
All the places that I've worked brown nosing is the key to success. Those who didn't brown nose never amounted to much like myself. I even tried fighting against brown nosing but that didn't work so what am I suppose to do? If you can't be them join them. Why should people like me struggle while brown nosers are moving up? No more from now on I'm going to brown nose any job that I get.
Honestly, if you haven't noticed from my posts, I guess it's a character weakness for me, LOL, I can't do it and it hurts me in corp world. I call it like I see it because I am objective.
At my last job, I busted my ass to try and improve the place, and I did, and because those improvements were expressed publicly and may have accidentally made our AVP look dumb, I just got trashed for it so after a few times, I just shut my mouth and watch them grind it in the ground. I learned quick in Fortune 100 your opinion is not wanted. You are a corp drone shut your mouth and do as you are told or beat it. If you share your ideas with management behind closed door and improve things they will just steal your idea and take the credit.
Now working at small to mid size co's you can actually impart change for the good, without so much ass kissing.
I've been a bit surprised by how many posts I've read lately complaining that the only way to get a job; to get promoted; to get a raise; to succeed at work.... Is to be a brown-nosed.
This hasn't even my experience for the most part. Sure, I've seen it happen occasionally, but it's been the exception rather than the rule.
I've been trying to decide if I'm just lucky to have not encountered a brown-nosing epidemic, or if maybe some people are too quick to cry favoritism and suck-ups. I bet if we had a list of possible behaviors, we cou,don't all agree 100% on what qualified under the brown- nose umbrella
What's your experience been like? How do you define brown-nosing? Had it affected your career?
I do not know how much value brown nosing has because my definition is being "artificially" nice to people.
What is extremely useful in anyone's career and life for that matter is social intelligence.
I know this because it is something I do not naturally possess much of, and neglected developing it for the first half of my life.
At some point I began to look at some of the truly successful people I was fortunate enough to know and began to try to understand what it was that made them more successful than I was. Why was I often passed by for promotions that went to people less qualified?
What I discovered was they all had the ability to point out others qualities and make other people feel good about themselves. They took interest in other people, and somehow could always identify positive attributes about them.
It took me years to understand how powerful this ability was.
It improves every aspect of your career relationships. People enjoy talking to people who make them feel good about themselves. They tend to drop their defenses and be more co operative. They feel less threatened and are less likely to oppose you. People who work under you are more likely to try to please you as they enjoy the fact you will notice their efforts. It improves your attitude because you spend your time looking for positive things people do instead of the natural tendency of looking at what they do wrong.
Looking back though I can understand why these skills were hard to obtain early in life. Often when you are just starting out in lower paying positions, the competition can be stiff, you can often be faced with coworkers who are confrontational and who take any opportunity to make someone else look bad.
It is really hard to not get caught up in negative thoughts and to find something positive to say to someone who is being a jerk to you, but you have to remember you are doing this to develop your skills, and those skills will pay you back a hundred times going forward.
The problem occurs when you make workplace relations into an us against them dynamic.
Are you nice to your coworkers? Do you remember their birthdays and ask them about how their vacation was? If so, why is that terrible when you do the exact same thing with your boss?
We are all social human beings who prefer to be liked and appreciated. We interact with people we see every day. Sometimes I get coffee for my boss and drop everything I am doing to help her out. Sometimes she does that for me. I rearrange my work schedule to make life easier for people who report to me. I appreciate it when they do this in return.
Simply because work usually has a hierarchical element to it does not give you the excuse to be a dick. Get out of 7th grade and treat all people with respect, they will most likely return the courtesy. This is not brown nosing, it is courteous adult interaction.
But if people think that courteous adult interaction is the only way to get ahead, they are probably right. I am not going to promote anybody who cannot work with others and takes an adversarial viewpoint of the workplace. This inevitably results in strife, and there is no way that I am going to reward negative behavior.
If someone is going to get promoted, that manager giving the promotion is going to have to spend more time with that person. Managers are human and won't want to promote someone they find difficult to work with or who otherwise makes them uncomfortable. Brown nosing is annoying and I am amazed that more people can't see past that, but I totally understand why someone who flat out annoys the manager won't get promoted.
As far as why the passive aggressive nutjobs tend to stick around so long, I have never figured out.
Last edited by drankthetea; 07-29-2013 at 07:14 PM..
Reason: typo
No matter how good your work is, if you can't get along with others and complain a lot, you will not get very far. You have to be pleasant to be around and nice to everyone from the lowest to the highest, but especially those who have the power to promote you. This is not brown-nosing, it's just using common sense.
Getting results is secondary. Hard working and getting some results aren't going to help much.
The key to our success is not brown nosing. It is to remember that our real job is to make our supervisor more successful. The best way to do that is to ask directly what our supervisor's priority is and where he or she thinks we need to focus, then focus on those and get results from the high priority tasks.
This not brown nosing and it's called being professional.
We all know what brown-nosing is and it has nothing to do with "anti-social people complaining."
The reality is we're supposed to be going to work to do a job, and while socializing is a vital part of that process, it should not be replacing productivity.
And yet, it takes no effort at all to find examples of people who are relatively useless yet gainfully employed in comfy positions simply by virtue of them being "fun to hang around with."
If the company wants to employ them as glorified mascots or management cheerleaders, fine, but it is insulting to pay them as well as the actual workers when their "jobs" consist of wandering around and BS'ing, and it is even more insulting to guarantee them employment while constantly beating down the productive employees before laying them off to "cut cost." Funny how the worthless bums who do nothing but bury their heads up management's arses are safe from said layoffs...
You and I might know what brown nosing is, but there are people on this board who refuse to socialize at all with anyone at work, don't have any friends at work, and view any social interaction as 'sucking up'.
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