Need some job luck? Be a suck-up

The state jobless numbers come out Wednesday, and chances are good that Michigan will continue to top the August rate of 15.2 percent unemployment that made us the worst job market in the nation.

If you're out of a job, it could be a long while until you find someone willing to give you a new one. And if you've got a job, chances are you want to keep your boss completely happy.

So should you be networking? Posting your resume at online job boards? Practicing your penmanship for that "Will Work For Food" sign?

Nah. According to UC Berkeley business Professor Jennifer Chatman, the one best thing you can do if you really want to land or hang on to a job is: suck up.

Kissing up to the short list

A research project that Chatman calls "one of my more depressing studies" found that job-seekers who made an effort to ingratiate themselves with their interviewers were 20 percent more likely to get the job.

(Note to my editor: I love that headline on this column, boss! I don't know how you always come up with such clever ideas!)

"What we found was that the higher the level of sucking up, the more likely the person got the job offer," Chatman says. "It didn't really matter how real it was."

In fact, she says, the more obviously obsequious the sucking up was, the better it worked.

"You'd think there would be a point where it would be so drippingly transparent that it feels inauthentic and disgusting, and the recipient would see what the person was trying to do," she says. "But we never found that tipping point where it was too much."

(Boss, the Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to you instead of President Barack Obama, because you make peace at the office very single day -- a piece of heaven!)

Short list to snake pit

But while sucking up might work to land you the job, it also means you could end up employed in a dysfunctional snake pit of incompetent, insecure yes-men and yes-women who put flattering the boss ahead of the company's best interests, right up until the place is shuttered.

The problem with ingratiating behavior is that people tend to do it more during bad times, when they're feeling the most nervous about getting or keeping a job. So just when a manager needs to hear honest criticism and new ideas, all the staff says is, "You look great boss! Did you lose weight?"

Ultimately, Chatman says, too much employee sucking up can suck the company dry.

"It works in the short term if you're trying to get someone to like you," she says. "But over the long run, at every level, it is a disaster. It is absolutely the wrong thing to do."

What a conundrum! Here I've found a powerful tool that can keep that weekly paycheck coming, but could also end up destroying the company. I must choose wisely ...

(Hey boss! You should read this column I wrote on the dangers of sucking up at work -- but I bet you could have done it even better!)

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