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No-Nos for Holiday Office Parties 

There are three social environments when it comes to your career.

At one end is the formal atmosphere of your professional business life. Here, all eyes are on you… and to succeed, you must conduct yourself with the utmost energy, enthusiasm, and decorum.

At the other end is your personal life, which, if you can, you should keep separate from your business relationships so you can behave exactly as you please.

And then, in the middle, are the semi-business/semi-social events that surround business functions – the dinners and cocktail parties that often follow conferences, trade shows, and seminars. And the holiday office party.

Throughout a good part of my career, this middle ground was a challenge for me. I wanted to, and felt entitled to, relax and enjoy myself. But I was conscious of the fact that I was, for everyone else in the room, a boss or an employee. Through trial and error (mostly error), I eventually had to recognize that, like it or not, I was being judged by my behavior at this “social” event. And that virtually everything I did would go down, in some fashion or other, on my “permanent record” as a businessman.

Having figured this out myself the hard way, I sent a half-tongue-in-cheek memo to the employees of one of the companies I owned, warning against improper office-party behavior:

  1. Passing out from drink
  2. Telling your boss what you really think of him/her
  3. Telling your boss’s spouse what you really think of him/her
  4. Commenting (positively or negatively) on your colleagues’ body parts
  5. Any form of “dirty” dancing
  6. Telling your boss’s spouse how “hot” your fellow employees think he/she is
  7. Falling in sudden love with anyone at the office party
  8. Finally telling that colleague about his/her body odor problem
  9. Showing anyone your “secret” tattoos
  10. Dancing on, standing on, or toppling over furniture
  11. Yodeling, Tarzan calls, or hyena laughing
  12. Forcibly encouraging people to do that YMCA thing
  13. Disrobing, even if it’s “so fucking hot”
  14. Leading a conga line
  15. Taking the “after party” to a karaoke bar
  16. Doing anything that in any way resembles John Belushi’s behavior in Animal House