The Ethics of Brown-Nosing

In any social group, whether it has a larger function or not, you are going to encounter some cross-section of suck-ups, lickspittles and brown-noses doing what they do best, which is curry favor with those more powerful than themselves on some dimension. It seems to be a hard-wired part of human behavior, and only the most principled of people are completely immune to it. But while the debate as to whether this behavior represents a defect of character or merely the ruthless drive to do whatever is necessary for personal success (and whether that sort of ruthlessness is itself a defect of character) may never be settled, it does seem clear that there is a line between working hard as a means of advancing one’s career and sucking up to the boss in order to avoid doing any hard work while still advancing one’s career – and that this line is sometimes finer than we realize.

Let me give you a scenario that my MBA instructor on human resources topics and ethics, Professor David Mathison gave our class in 1994. Let’s say you’ve just taken a new job, and you decide to put in a few extra hours of work each day, just to make the right impression. Everyone else goes home right at 5:00, but you stay until 6:30 or 7:00 every day, plugging away. Finally, one night, your boss comes back to the office to get something, and finds you still at your desk two hours after everyone else has left. Surprised to see you, he asks if anything is wrong.

This is your big moment. You smile and say, “Nothing’s wrong; I just wanted to get a few more things done before I left!”

And your boss frowns, and asks, “Are you having problems with your job? Everyone else seems able to finish all of their assignments by the end of business.”

And you realize that you’ve painted yourself into a corner. No, there’s no reason you couldn’t finish everything and go home on time. You’re actually doing more work than is necessary, either making the job more complicated than it has to be or taking on other people’s assignments, or both, simply because you wanted to look good. But there’s really no way to tell the boss that without looking like a complete suck-up, because that’s actually what you’ve been doing. You’re behaving in an unnatural or at least non-standard way in order to gain favor with those in power. It’s certainly more useful than complimenting the boss on his hideous fashion sense or offering to take his dry cleaning in for him, but it’s still currying favor. If your boss is the type who dislikes brown-nosing, you’ve probably generated the opposite result from the one you wanted.

Dr. Mathison’s point (and mine here, too) is that no matter how benign your sucking up behavior is, you are still doing something inherently unethical – lying about your actual work ethic and trying to make yourself look exceptional at the expense of your co-workers. You would never do these things openly or blatantly; the suggestion that you would lie to your boss or undermine your more experienced co-workers probably offends you – but that’s exactly what your apple-polishing behavior was doing, albeit more as lies of omission than anything else.

Now I’m certainly not advocating that you avoid extra work right after taking a new job, or at any other time, or for that matter, suggesting that you don’t let your superiors know what you are working on and how much you are accomplishing. I’m suggesting that the next time you do anything other than your regular duties at your normal pace during a standard-length day (standard for whatever job you do, that is) that you make sure you know where that line between normal conduct and brown-nosing is – and whether or not you’ve crossed it…