Business Gift Etiquette

Alexandra Roberts on executive presence and social protocol

A business gift is a small message sent on behalf of a relationship, and most of the advice about it concerns the object, mainly what to buy and how much to spend on it. That advice is sensible as far as it goes. It stops short of the parts that decide whether the gift lands at all. Who is allowed to give to whom. And what to do when the gift is wrong, which happens more often than anyone admits.

When I was Front Office Manager at The Lowell on the Upper East Side, December meant gift deliveries for guests, and they came through the front office. You learn a surprising amount from the receiving end. The enormous baskets were awkward for everyone, because nobody staying in a hotel can carry a wheel of cheese home on a plane. The small boxes with a handwritten card were the ones guests asked about when they checked out.

Nobody ever asked about a basket.

Spend what the relationship can carry

Every guide says to give something of moderate value, and they are right, though moderate is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. The real ceiling is set by the person receiving it. Many companies, and nearly every bank and law firm, cap what their people may accept, and some require any gift above the cap to be reported or returned. Before you send anything to a client, ask their assistant, or your own colleague who manages the account, whether there is a limit. It is an ordinary question, and asking it reads as care.

Below the ceiling, spend in proportion to the relationship. The size of the contract is irrelevant. A gift that is obviously more than the friendship can bear makes the recipient wonder what it is for.

Gifts move down the org chart

This is the rule I find myself explaining most often to founders, and the one the standard guides skip. Inside a company, gifts travel downward: from the chief executive to the leadership team, from a manager to the people who report to them. A gift traveling upward, from an analyst to a partner, is awkward for both people however kindly it is meant, because it can look like an attempt to buy goodwill from the person who decides your bonus, and the partner now has to decide what to do with it. If a team wants to mark a manager’s promotion or departure, one shared gift and one card that everyone signs is the graceful form. Nobody can be accused of currying favor with a card that has fourteen signatures on it.

For senior people the obligation runs the other way. If you give gifts to your direct reports, give to all of them, at the same level, and do not let the gift to your favorite be visibly better.

Something they can use up

Here I part company with much of the published advice, which favors gifts that last: a leather portfolio, a good pen, a desk object. I would rather send something that disappears. Very good olive oil. Or a bag of coffee from a roaster they mentioned once in a meeting and forgot they mentioned, which is better than the olive oil by a wide margin, because it proves you heard them. A lasting object asks for a place on someone’s desk, and if they do not love it, it sits in a drawer as a small, permanent obligation. A consumable is enjoyed and then it is gone, and what remains is the memory that you were paying attention.

Paying attention is the entire skill. Listen for it in conversation all year (the restaurant they keep going back to, or the fact that they quietly stopped drinking last spring) and write it down somewhere you will find it in November.

The logo

If your company’s logo is the largest thing on the gift, it is an advertisement, and the recipient knows it. Keep it off entirely, or put it somewhere small, like the inside of a box lid.

The card does most of the work

People keep cards. They rarely keep the printed slip that comes inside a corporate gift box reading “With best wishes from all of us at,” followed by a company name. Write the card yourself, by hand, and say one specific thing about the year, such as the introduction they made in April that turned out to matter. Three sentences is plenty. Sign it with your first name if you are on first-name terms. The same rules apply as for any business thank-you note, and that is really what a business gift card is: a thank-you note that arrived with something to eat.

Send it in January

Most client gifts go out in the second and third weeks of December, which is precisely when they are least noticed. The recipient is already away, and the gift sits in a mailroom until the second of January next to everyone else’s. Send yours in the week after Thanksgiving, before the pile forms, or in the first two weeks of January, when nothing else is arriving and a note that says “to the year ahead” feels thoughtful. It does not feel late. January has the added advantage of being religiously neutral, which December very much is not.

Send it to the office unless you know the person well enough to know their home address without asking for it.

Returning a gift that is too generous

None of the guides I read on this subject cover the moment you open a gift you cannot keep, which is strange, because for anyone working in banking or law it happens most years. A vendor sends a case of wine. A client’s founder sends a watch. Your company’s policy says no, and now you have to say no to someone who meant well.

Do it quickly, within a few days, and do it in writing. A short handwritten note is best: thank them warmly and specifically, say that your firm’s policy does not allow you to accept it, and say that you were genuinely touched that they thought of you. Do not apologize for the policy at length. Do not keep the gift for two weeks while you decide, because a gift returned in late January after arriving in mid-December reads as a judgment of the sender. If the policy allows it, offer an alternative that keeps the gesture alive, such as sharing it with your team or passing it to a charity, and say so in the note. If you would like to soften it further, invite them to lunch, which is usually within policy and is, in any case, what the gift was trying to buy. The phrasing is close to the one I describe in how to decline a business invitation, kind and short and not open to negotiation.

If you are the one whose gift comes back, accept it with good grace and say nothing more about it. Sending a smaller replacement is worse.

Receiving one you can keep

Write back within a week. A thank-you email is acceptable for a box of chocolates from a vendor; a gift chosen with obvious care, with a card in the sender’s own hand, deserves the same in return. Mention the gift by name, and if you ate it, say so and say what you thought of it. That last detail is the one senders remember.

Executives who come to me to work on executive presence rarely think of December gifts as part of it. They should. A client will forget most of what you said to them this year, but they will remember whether the person who sent them a bag of coffee from the roaster near their house in Noe Valley had actually been listening when they mentioned it in March, and they will remember it in exactly the meetings where you would want them to.