Sucking Up

Everyone hates a suck up. It's often painfully obvious that someone is sucking up to a superior, and oftimes the superior seems to be quite oblivious to it. And then there are those who take it to another level, and actually masquerade as hard workers.

I had a discussion with a friend on the matter some days back, and he pointed out that these brown noses are disguising their sucking up efforts as initiative rather than hard work per se. Simply put, the strategy here is to volunteer for as many non-work gigs as possible as long as they're visible to the superior in question. This creates the impression of an outgoing worker full of initiative. It is especially insidious with highly social suckups, because they really do genuinely enjoy participating in such activities, and will have an air of genuine enthusiasm for them.

Herein lies the problem: while these activities have little bearing on actual productivity, they are often in line with management's goals of "team building" and other similarly social-oriented management objectives. It is therefore not hard to see how such people will appeal to the managerial bunch, and indeed may wind up in management themselves.

Of course, this raises some evaluation dilemmas. For one, can someone be regarded as a suckup for actively participating in activities that management likes and endorses when one genuinely enjoys them (regardless of ulterior motives)? For those who do have ulterior motives, is the time and effort spent in such activities justified in terms of the gains? And finally, while visibility will let one be honestly evaluated in a superior light as far as the manager is concerned, is this unfair to other less social but equally effective (often the case, given that they're focused) and genuine hard workers?

I think the general consensus is that performance evaluation is broken and is likely to stay broken for the forseeable future given the limits of human cognition: it is unlikely for a manager to be able to really focus on objective performance evaluations on top of other duties, and humans do rely heavily on things they can observe to make judgments. The optimal solution in this case for less-social employees seems to be to have a token participation in such activities (preferably one that the employee favors). Alternatively, going for high visibility assignments can have a similar effect without involvement in non-productivity related activities. Ah, the joys of working within a broken human system.