Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.  He first came to national attention in 1984 with his book Losing Ground.  His subsequent books include In Pursuit, The Bell Curve (with Richard J. Herrnstein), What it Means to Be a Libertarian, Human Accomplishment, In Our Hands, Real Education, and the national bestseller Coming Apart.  He received a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT.  He lives with his wife in Burkittsville, Maryland.

ON THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN THE WORKPLACE

The first thing you need to understand is that most large organizations in the private sector are run by curmudgeons like me. That statement may not be true of organizations in the entertainment or information technology (IT) industries, which are often filled with senior executives who are either young themselves or trying to be. But it is true of most large for-profit businesses, nonprofits, foundations, law firms, and financial institutions. Academia goes both ways, with many professors who try to be best buddies with their students but a few who are world-class curmudgeons.

Technically, a curmudgeon is an ill-tempered old man. I use the term more broadly to describe highly successful people of both genders who are inwardly grumpy about many aspects of contemporary culture, make quick and pitiless judgments about your behavior in the workplace, and don’t hesitate to act on those judgments in deciding who gets promoted and who gets fired.

Be warned that curmudgeons usually don’t give off many clues that they’re doing these things. I’m an example. I don’t snap at subordinates. When someone approaches me, I like to think that I’m accessible and friendly. I try to express any criticisms cheerfully and tactfully. And yet behind my civilized public persona I am perpetually ticking off things in my head about the employees I encounter, both pluses and minuses, filing them away, and when the time comes for performance reviews, those judgments shape my responses.

Lots of the senior people in your workplace who can help or hinder your career are closeted curmudgeons like me, including executives in their forties who have every appearance of being open minded and cool. By their fifties, the probability that they are curmudgeons has risen precipitously. By their sixties, you can just about bank on it, no matter how benign their public presentation of self may be.

Curmudgeons of all ages and both genders remain closeted partly because they want to be polite, but also because they don’t want to sound like geezers, old and out of touch. Voicing curmudgeonly opinions would instantly label them as such. So they never admit that they judge you on the basis of their inner curmudgeon--but they do. If you want to get ahead, you should avoid doing things that will make them write you off.

These tips about how to behave in the workplace range from matters of style to the meat of your work. Some of them advise you to conform to your curmudgeons’ prejudices on matters that you may think should be no one’s business but your own. But let’s get one thing straight at the outset:

1. Don’t suck up.

Let’s assume that you’re going to work for a quality organization in the private sector. Within that organization, some of the people who run the place will be extremely good at what they do, some will be merely competent, and some will conform to the Peter Principle (“Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence”). It’s not a good idea to suck up to any of them.

By sucking up, I mean flattering supervisors, pretending to agree with their bad ideas, or otherwise unctuously trying to ingratiate yourself with them. Sucking up is usually thought to be a great way to get ahead, so this advice requires some explanation.

My career has brought me into contact with many highly successful people from the corporate, financial, publishing, journalistic, and scholarly worlds. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I have to go by my experience: Just about all of the highly successful people I’ve dealt with have been impressively skilled. I cannot think of any who got to their prominent positions by faking it. They have also almost always been self-confident, not in need of stroking, and good judges of people.

Caveat

I have had no experience with highly successful people in the entertainment industry or in government bureaucracies, where my advice may not apply. In politics, sucking up is part of the job description.

If the highly successful people in your organization are like that, trying to tell them they’re wonderful will be a disaster. They will recognize what you’re doing and disdain you for it. And it’s not going to work much better with other supervisors. You don’t want to suck up to the less competent or the incompetent, because (1) they probably are not in a position to help you much anyway, and (2) there’s too much danger that the people you really want to impress will observe your sycophancy and remember it.

The flip side is that highly successful people tend to value honesty and courage. I’m not recommending that you go out of your way to disagree with them or otherwise show your independence. It’s appropriate to be tactful if you’re a junior person working with a senior person, and you certainly don’t want to be abrasive. Just don’t trim your views if they go against the grain of the discussion. Express yourself forthrightly, and the odds are that you’ll get points for it.

If I’m wrong, and you find yourself in an organization where sucking up is in fact a good way to get ahead, look for a new job. It’s not a quality organization after all, no matter how glittering its public reputation may be. Life is too short to work there.

2. Don’t use first names with people considerably older than you until asked, and sometimes not even then.

I have in my library the three-volume collected correspondence, stretching over a half century, between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Their friendship was deep and intimate. And yet the last letter from Jefferson to Madison, written less than a month before Jefferson’s death, begins not with “Dear Jemmy” (Madison’s nickname), but with “Dear Sir.” It concludes “most affectionately yours, Th. Jefferson.” Not “Tom” or “Thomas,” but “Th. Jefferson.”

Ah, for the good old days.

The use of first names has undergone a cultural transformation in the last three or four decades, so that by now the use of honorifics and last names is nearly extinct. It’s not just the telemarketer on the other end of the phone who calls you by your first name. I have had parents introduce me to their six-year-old with the words “This is Charles,” requiring me to choke back an overwhelming urge to pat the little one on the head and say, “But you may call me Sir.”

I blame this misbegotten use of first names on the baby boomers. Frightened of being grown-ups since they were in college, they have shied from anything that reminds them they’re not kids anymore. But we’re not talking about your social interactions with random aging boomers. We’re talking about your professional interactions with highly successful older people whose good opinions you would like to acquire. By and large, highly successful people are quite aware that they are grown-ups. So cater to them: Call them by their last names until invited to do otherwise.

Often the invitation will be offered the first time you meet that highly successful person--“Call me Bill,” says Mr. Smith. But before you respond with “Sure, Bill,” consider what’s going on.

One possibility is that Bill is serious, in which case “Sure, Bill” does you no harm. But another possibility is that Bill is going through the motions because he doesn’t want to appear old and grumpy. In that case, suppose you thank him without using “Bill” and subsequently, unobtrusively, continue to refer to him as Mr. Smith. It’s a no-lose proposition. If Mr. Smith really likes being called Bill by new employees forty years his junior, it will give him a chance to say so and show what a nice guy he is. If Bill is a closeted curmudgeon, his opinion of you will rise.

Another consideration is this: If you start out your relationship with a highly successful older person on a “Mr.” or “Ms.” basis, you can look forward to a satisfying moment down the road: At some point, when you have proved yourself, Mr. Smith is going to say to you, “I think it’s time you called me Bill.” The pleasure of that moment is inestimable.

3. Excise the word like from your spoken English.

Do you use the word like as a verbal tic? I mean, like, do you insert it in, like, random points in your, like, spoken conversation? If the answer is yes, this is the single most important tip in the entire book:

STOP IT.

I cannot think of another flaw among members of recent generations (this has been going on since at least the 1990s) that irritates curmudgeons more. Many of us have a hard time staying in a conversation with people who use like in every sentence. We resist hiring them. If assigned such people on our staffs, we avoid interacting with them. Yes, our reactions really can be that extreme. Even moderate use of like as a verbal tic lowers our estimate of the offender’s IQ and moral worth.

How many of the people who can help or hinder your career feel as strongly about the like tic as I do? More than you might think. I am struck by the high percentage of people who have risen to senior positions who also care deeply about the proper use of the English language. That kind of pickiness is common not just in professions like mine, where the English language is our stock-in-trade. A surprising number of senior executives in corporations that make soap or machine tools are picky about good English. An even higher proportion of them are obsessively precise about everything. To people who love the English language and are precise, your use of like as a verbal tic is a proclamation that you don’t love the language and are sloppy. Unfair? Maybe. But that won’t keep us from writing you off.

4. Stop “reaching out” and “sharing,” and other prohibitions.

In every era, novel ways of saying something get picked up, and soon thereafter what was once evocative becomes stale. I start with the Big Three--share, reach out, and be there for you--that unequivocally should be struck from your spoken and written language, then proceed to somewhat less offensive fads. The final ones are overused by just about everybody in Washington, where I work. I’m not sure how much of a problem they are elsewhere. But you can extrapolate from these examples to trendy phrases that are used in your industry and put yourself on guard against them.

Share. People don’t just tell people things anymore. They share them. I suppose this fad got started because it conveys an attractive sense of bringing the other person into your personal circle. And sometimes share is the correct word. If your coworker has just explained his weird behavior by revealing that he has Tourette’s syndrome, that’s pretty personal, and it’s okay for you to respond with “Thanks for sharing.” But if your coworker tells you that he will be tied up in a meeting for the next hour, the simple “Thanks for telling me” is correct, and “Thanks for sharing” is sappy.

Reach out. If I sense that my coworker is troubled and so I take him out for a drink after work to give him a chance to confide, I’m reaching out to him. If I just want some company, I’m not reaching out. I’m inviting him to have a drink with me. Reach out is not the same as invite or inquire. Use the right word.

Be there for you. “I’ll be there for you” has come to mean “I hereby make a meaningless pretend commitment.” It’s not going to make your friend feel better. If you are serious, be more specific, as in, “Who do you want me to kill?” or--revolutionary idea--actually being there for your friend, as in saying “Sounds to me like you could use some company. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” Similarly, thanking someone by saying, “Joe has always been there for me” is a wishy-washy way of conveying appreciation. Joe will feel a lot more gratified if you are specific and emphatic.

Impact used as a verb. The use of impact as a verb, when what you mean is affect, has gotten out of hand. The correct meaning of impact as a verb is to come into forcible contact with another object. A collision is involved. The next time you hear someone say that something “impacted” something, ask yourself if the imagery of one object colliding with another is appropriate. The answer will almost invariably be no. When choosing a verb, be content with affect and save impact for when you intend the imagery that the word is supposed to convey.

Interface. It means the same thing as interact, except that it is appropriately used to describe connections between machines, not human beings. When you stop to think about it, interface is also a strikingly cold substitution for interact when human beings are involved.

Issues. You can have issues with your spouse about your political views, but not about your infidelities. In the latter case, you don’t have a position to defend. You can’t have issues with alcohol or bipolar disorder. They aren’t arguing back. Stop using issues as a euphemism for a problem.

Brand, as in brand yourself or branding, referring to human beings. Start by recalling what branding originally meant: a trademark burned into a product--or, in the case of animals, burned into the flesh. Why would you aspire to be labeled and defined so that your subsequent behavior must conform to the “brand” that you have established?

Data mispronounced and used as a singular noun. This is not a fad, but it’s important to me and so I’ll include it here. People who deal with data professionally know that the first syllable of data rhymes with “rate,” not “rat.” The word is plural, so they say “The data reveal that. . . ,” not “The data reveals that. . . .” You will hear some prominent people, especially television journalists, pronounce data incorrectly. I am told that the style manuals at some major publications now say that it’s permissible to treat data as singular. Do not lower yourself to their level.

Going forward. This is an example of a phrase that sounds good the first time you hear it used in its new meaning of “next,” or “in the future,” or “from now on” (e.g., “This will be our strategy going forward”). But after you hear it repeatedly, it grates. Just say, “This will be our strategy from now on.” It’s cleaner.

Grow, referring to something that is not a plant or some other living thing, as in “grow your business” or “grow the economy.” It is a corruption of a perfectly good verb for no reason. The English language has plenty of ways to talk about expanding or enhancing nonliving things.

Drill down. The first time I heard drill down, I thought it was an effective image--going deeper into a complex issue. Many other people had the same reaction and so we all started using it. Now it is a cliche.

Incentivize. What’s wrong with just saying that you want to “create incentives”? Besides being overused, incentivize has an ugly connotation of manipulating people to do things, while the noun incentive evokes people determining that something is in their self-interest and acting upon that judgment--a more respectful image.