In my corporate years, I organized a meeting I came to dread.
Every two weeks, about forty of us gathered: the CEO, the president, a vice president, and every department director. My job was to collect each director’s department numbers beforehand and build the agenda. Then the CEO walked through it, line by line, and each director answered for those numbers in front of everyone.
There was yelling. Once, a director left the room in tears after the way his bosses treated him. Everyone understood the rules: toe the line, or be humiliated, or be fired.
So people flattered. They praised and agreed and cajoled, going to extreme lengths to stay on the right side of the people at the head of the table.
Meanwhile, I was running everyone’s numbers through a spreadsheet I had built, and over time I noticed that some of them didn’t add up. It wasn’t widespread, but it was real. One manager did not input incorrect numbers, but was savvy enough with Excel formulas, that they changed the formulas. I read both the numbers and the formulas. People caught between a rock and a hard place had started shading the truth on paper. The smiles in that room and the doctored numbers in my spreadsheet grew from the same fear.
I didn’t have words for it then. Years later, I found research that does: the person who flatters you the most may be the one most likely to turn on you.
What the Research Found About Flatterers
A team of management researchers surveyed CEOs, their top managers, and the journalists who cover their companies. They wanted to know what happens to the people who do the flattering.
What they found was striking. Managers who flattered and agreed with their CEO tended to grow resentful of that CEO. And resentful managers were more likely to undermine the CEO with the press. Not with open attacks, but with faint praise, small digs, and comments made off the record. That quiet sniping showed up later as more negative coverage of the CEO’s leadership.
The smile in the boardroom and the knife in the newspaper came from the same hand.
I wrote about this study, and several others, in The Systems We Build, and the People They Make of Us. Here I want to stay with this one question: why would flattery turn into a knife?
Why Flatterers Turn on You
Flattery feels good to receive. It costs something to give.
Every time you praise an idea you don’t believe in, or nod along when you disagree, you shrink a little. You set your own judgment aside to please someone with more power than you. Do that once and it’s diplomacy. Do it every day and it starts to feel like a tax.
The researchers point to resentment, and they explain where it comes from: a sense that someone is benefiting at your expense. The boss gets the warm glow. The flatterer pays for it with self-respect. Sooner or later, the bill comes due, and it gets paid in the dark, where the boss can’t see it.
I think of it as a cycle of experience, interpretation, and response. The experience is bowing to someone, again and again. The interpretation, often unspoken, is “I’m making myself smaller for you.” The response is resentment, and resentment looks for a way out.
One more finding stayed with me. The resentment ran hotter when the CEO was a woman or a person of color. The same flattery, the same nodding, but it curdled faster when the person in charge was someone the flatterer had quietly learned didn’t belong there.
It Isn’t Only CEOs
This study looked at corporate leaders, but you don’t need a corner office to recognize the pattern.
Think of the employee who agrees with everything in the meeting and then tears the plan apart in the parking lot. The church member who compliments the pastor at the door and complains about him at dinner. The family member who never argues with anyone, yet somehow always has a grievance.
The common thread isn’t weakness. It’s a relationship with no room for honesty. When someone can’t safely tell you the truth to your face, the truth doesn’t disappear. It just goes somewhere else: into the newspaper, into the parking lot, or, as I watched it happen, into the numbers.
What Flattery Costs Us Both
Flattery is a bad bargain on both sides. The person being flattered loses the truth. The person doing the flattering loses a piece of themselves. And the relationship between them becomes a performance that neither one trusts.
The researchers found something hopeful, too. Real friendship between a manager and the CEO softened the link between flattery and resentment. Where there was a genuine relationship, deference didn’t sour as easily.
That tells me the antidote isn’t less kindness. It’s more honesty. The people I’ve trusted most in my life were the ones who told me when I was wrong, not the ones who told me I was wonderful. If you want people around you who won’t turn on you, make it safe for them to disagree with you.
So here’s my question for you. Who in your life always agrees with you? And when was the last time someone told you a truth you didn’t want to hear, and you thanked them for it?
