How to Manage Up

Editor's note: Welcome to our new weekly column on business etiquette. If you have a pressing question for Miss Conduct, please send her an email.

We've discussed the basics of business etiquette -- treating everyone as if they were your boss -- so now it's time to dig in deeper. How do you treat your real boss?

Much has been written about managing Neanderthal or impossible bosses, the kind who move your cheese or don't get to yes, but comparatively little ink has been spilled on the question from an etiquette point of view.

Because etiquette applies universal rules within a culture -- but each corporate culture and each boss is unique -- broad rules about all bosses are problematic. What works within one company would be anathema in another.

From some points of view, the very concept of business etiquette is oxymoronic because it pits competition against cooperation. But that's why it's so much fun to figure out -- in the great game of business, it works as both strategy and tactic.

If we apply a few social rules to the issue of managing up, we see that business superiors mostly want to be treated like social superiors. That means no matter how little grace they might exhibit themselves, we must treat our bosses the way a merchant would treat a noble in days of yore, or the way a particularly well-bred child considers a sports superstar today -- like a god.

In sum, use Miss Conduct's Rule No. 3 from her rules of etiquette: If you can't keep 'em laughing (or kill a goat in sacrifice), then flatter.