When people are burned out, ready to leave a job and possibly the entire corporate world forever, some start a phase called “career review.” While this could be a fulfilling process where you list all of your accomplishments and what you learned, it often starts with questioning whether you even wanted your current job, and how you ended up doing something completely different than you’d planned. That can lead to panic that you’ve wasted your entire career. One sneaky little cause for this? Flattery. Today we’ll look at how saying yes to other people was the right choice at the time and what to watch out for going forward.
How Workplace Flattery Manipulates Your Decisions
Flattery is a powerful tool, especially in a corporate setting. Someone tells you how great you are, and you find yourself agreeing to take on a new project. It works because the need to be seen and appreciated is fundamental. We all want to be useful.
I chatted recently with a wrestling coach who talked about it this way: You face your opponent. Their objective is to take you from standing to lying on your back. Their problem is that you will try to stop them. So they have to find ways to destabilize your center of support, to get around your flailing limbs and dodging head and take you down.
Flattery is a tool of destabilization. When it’s done effectively, it bypasses all of the negotiating and defenses that you could raise, and that closes down your critical judgment. You say yes before you know what you just agreed to, because they made you unstable in one deft move. The yes lives in the judgment gap, and your boss and colleagues know it.
Every honest and joyfully-given yes has a set of conditions, and it helps to know yours. If the new work moves your objectives forward and doesn’t mess with your center of support, then you can see it as less of a burden and more of an opportunity. If it doesn’t meet the conditions, you’re headed to the “hey, waitaminute…” moment, and then to resentment.
When Colleagues and Bosses Use Flattery
I see a couple of versions at play. The first is peer and subordinate flattery. This is the team member who displays learned helplessness, saying things like, “you’re so much better at event planning than me,” or tells you that they can’t possibly understand your area of expertise. It’s the direct report who escalates every problem to you because you always solve it, or who hands in sloppy work knowing you’ll correct it. None of this is accidental, and it might not even be fully conscious. It works because the flattery convinces you to take over. The result? You’re doing two jobs and feeling vaguely good about it, until you’re not.
The second type is boss flattery. This one carries institutional weight and higher stakes. It can sound like, “you’ve proven yourself, so here’s one more direct report.” Or “I trust you more than anyone else on the team with this board presentation.” The flattery and the request are a package deal. Saying no requires you to decline both the work and the recognition at the same time, which is a lot harder than declining the work alone. The reward for your extra work is implied, but rarely materializes. The only real thing is the work itself.
Why It Kept Working — and Why That’s Not Your Fault
So then you notice that you’re in a repeating cycle because your totally valid need to be appreciated doesn’t go away. And sometimes, the flattery is genuine and you actually want the opportunity being handed to you. That makes it harder to build a blanket defense against it.
This means you can stop blaming yourself – you were just being human in a culture that knew how to manipulate you. The real tension is how you participated in the manipulation that ended up with you accepting work you never wanted.
The flattery-to-resentment pipeline is full of twists and turns. You might feel duped or gaslit, or it could be death by a thousand cuts. You keep saying yes, which trains everyone to feed you more sugar-coated work. The even longer game happens when you see people get promoted for delivering all the work you did.
Patterns are usually visible only in retrospect, and your career review is the perfect moment to see and understand them. So next time when you notice the pattern start, you can say to yourself, “ooooh I know this one!” But how do you create that moment of objectivity?
How to Pause Before Saying Yes
When faced with any request, a lot of us say yes automatically. In order to give yourself some other options, you’ll need to take a breath first. That allows you to receive the compliment, say thank you, and decide what you want to do next.
If we go back to the wrestling idea, you then realize you have a bunch of tools that can prevent your opponent from taking you down. They range from corporate speak like “that doesn’t align with my core metrics this quarter” to the simpler, “no.”
Experimenting now with ways to say no will come in handy when you begin the next phase of your career, or the first phase of your retirement. Even if you’re swearing up and down that you’ll never get into your current situation again, people are waiting to try their flattery tactics on you.
It could be a startup founder, the head of a nonprofit, or someone who heard you’ll soon have extra time on your hands. When you listen to their pitch for your help, you can do a couple of things. First, check in with yourself. Is this work exciting and interesting? Would you offer to help even if there wasn’t a person in front of you about to ask? Or does it advance someone else’s goal using your labor?
Then listen for which mechanism they use to get you to do the work. It might be the same playbook that previous colleagues or bosses used on you.
This is not to say that their appreciation of you isn’t valid. You have a ton of experience and relevant skills that could help with a lot of projects after you leave this job. The question is whether flattery is softening your will, or if the will was there to begin with.
What Happens When You Stop Saying Yes Automatically
A friend of mine left her corporate job and is volunteering for a human services agency one day a week. Someone there approached her with an offer: come on board for a temporary role. It’s just 40 hours a week, you’d be so good at it, you already know the ropes.
In the past, that flattery would have worked on her in a snap, and a few weeks later, she’d be wondering why she has no time for her hobbies or to look for the job she actually wants.
But today, she is accepting the compliment and setting it aside to consider the other projects and life obligations that require her schedule to be flexible. She’s figuring out whether this job will work for her – how to retain her center of support and not let it destabilize her. If her conditions are not met, she’ll stick with that weekly volunteer gig and call it good.
As you conduct your career review, think about how much of it was you responding to opportunities you were genuinely excited about, and how much was the way someone presented it to you. When you are faced with flattery and can take a breath to check in with your true objectives, you’re less likely to feel duped later.
Burn the map. Build what fits.
