Executive Business Gift Protocol

Alexandra Roberts on executive presence and social protocol

The published advice on executive gift etiquette is written for one person standing in a shop, deciding what to buy. Check the company policy, spend a moderate amount, choose something personal, wrap it well. All sound. At the level of a chief executive, though, nobody is standing in a shop. Gifts go out from an office, usually dozens at a time, chosen by an assistant from a spreadsheet in the second week of November, and almost every mistake I see happens in that handoff between the person whose name is on the card and the person who actually sent it.

I saw the receiving end of this for years. At Four Seasons Resort Hualalai, and later as a host at Four Seasons San Francisco, the arrivals that told you most about a guest’s office were the ones their assistant had called ahead about. Some assistants knew exactly what the principal wanted waiting in the room and why. Others read from a list someone else had written.

You could always tell which.

What follows assumes you already know the basics, which I cover in business gift etiquette, from the spending ceiling to why a January gift beats a December one. This is the part that sits on top of it, for the office that has to run the thing.

The office sends it, the executive signs it

Let the assistant or chief of staff run gifting. They hold the addresses and the calendar, and they know which clients changed firms in March, which the executive often does not. I have no patience for the idea that delegating it is somehow cold.

Delegation has one condition, though, and executives skip it constantly: the executive reads the list, and the executive writes on every card. A line is enough. “Still thinking about the Kyoto story,” in their own hand, above their first name. A card printed by the vendor and signed by an autopen is a mailing, and recipients know a mailing when they open one, the same way a hotel guest knows the difference between a welcome note and a form letter with their name merged in. If the executive cannot find twenty minutes in November to write a line for each name, the list is too long. Cut it.

Keep a register

Good hotels keep a guest history, a private record of what each regular asked for and what went wrong last time, so that nobody has to ask twice. An executive’s office should keep the same thing for gifts, and almost none of the ones I meet do. It lives in whatever the office already uses. For each person it records what was sent and when, what it cost, what came back the other way, and the small facts the executive mentions in passing and then forgets they mentioned (a move to Mill Valley, or the fact that they quietly gave up wine last spring).

It stops the office from sending the same olive oil two years running, which happens far more than anyone would confess. It keeps you under the gift limits that nearly every bank and law firm sets for its people, because you can see the year’s total before you add to it.

Keep the received side honestly, too. When your executive is sent something generous, the register is where you note it, decide whether it can be kept, and write the thank-you before the week is out.

The other assistant

None of the guides I read mention this, and it is the gift I would protect if the budget were cut to one line. If your office deals with another executive’s office all year, their assistant has spent the year finding your executive room on a calendar that had none. Send that person a gift. Address it to them by name, at the office, with a card your executive has written to them and nobody else. Do not fold it into their boss’s box. Do not send it through their boss at all, because then it becomes something the assistant was handed rather than something they were given, and that difference is the whole gift.

Spend on the assistant what you would spend on their executive, or close to it. They notice. They also decide, in small ways all year, whose calls get returned first.

Handing it over in person

When a gift is given face to face, at a first meeting with a new partner or a dinner after a closing, it comes out at the end, once the business is finished. A gift on the table before the conversation starts looks as though it expects something from the conversation.

Give it to the most senior person on the other side, from the most senior person on yours. Hold it in both hands. If your counterpart sets it aside unopened, let them; in much of East Asia that is the courteous thing to do, and opening it in front of you would be the odd choice. When you travel for a meeting, ask the host’s office beforehand whether gifts will be exchanged, so that you are neither the only one arriving with something nor the only one arriving without. If they will be, bring a spare. Someone always turns up at the dinner who was not on the list. The same advance work I describe for hosting a client dinner applies here: find out who will be in the room before you are in it.

Deal toys

A Lucite cube commemorating a closing is a gift to yourself that you have mailed to someone else.

The ledger nobody admits to keeping

Executive gifts are reciprocal whether anyone says so or not. When a counterpart sends something noticeably more lavish than you sent them, the polite fiction is that it does not matter. It does a little. Do not rush out a bigger replacement, which turns a kindness into an auction; thank them well, by hand, and adjust next year’s entry in the register. When you are the one who overshot, say nothing, and come back to the right level the following year without comment.

The executives who handle this best tend to treat gifts as one more expression of executive presence, quiet and obviously theirs. Their offices run it like an operation. Their cards read like a person wrote them. And a year later, when the client who received a bag of coffee from a roaster in Mill Valley finds themselves deciding between two firms, what they remember is that someone in your office had been paying attention, and that the note on top was in your own handwriting.