Handshake, Cheek Kiss or Bow: How to Greet People in Business

In American business, and at a first meeting almost anywhere, the correct greeting is a handshake: stand, look the person in the eye, grip firmly enough to be felt and let go after about two seconds. A cheek kiss is something you follow and never start, and only where it is customary, as in France, Italy and much of Latin America. In Japan and Korea, answer a bow with a slighter bow, and in the Gulf or in any conservative company, a man should wait for a woman to offer her hand.

Alexandra Roberts on executive presence and social protocol

Most greeting mistakes happen in the first second, before anyone has said a word, and nearly all of them are made by people who are moving too fast. I watched one on a terrace in Woodside last spring. A founder crossed the lawn toward a woman who sits on two museum boards, his arm already fully extended from four paces out, and she had a glass of wine in one hand and a small plate in the other. She had to find somewhere to put something down for him. He had opened the relationship by giving her a chore.

Slow down. Half a second is enough.

That half second is where people decide, without knowing they are deciding, whether you are at ease in the room. It is the most physical part of executive presence, and the part people are least likely to have been taught, because it seems too small to need teaching.

The American handshake, done properly

Stand up if you are seated. This applies to everyone now, and the old allowance for women to stay in their chairs has no place in business. Make eye contact before your hand arrives, and keep it while you say your name. The webs of your thumbs should meet, so the grip is palm to palm and not fingers to fingers. Two or three small pumps. Then let go.

People ask me about firmness more than anything else, and the answer is less than you think, as long as it is your whole hand. The limp handshake gets the jokes, but the bone-crusher does more damage in a boardroom, because the person on the receiving end knows you meant it. I would also retire the two-handed clasp, with the left hand cupped over the shake or gripping the other person’s forearm. Politicians do that to voters. Done to a peer, it reads as an attempt to manage them, and the people it is most often done to (older principals, and women who sit on boards) tend to notice it most.

In the United States the host or the senior person is supposed to offer a hand first. In practice nobody keeps score, and leaving someone’s hand hanging in the air while you work out who outranks whom is far worse than offering yours. Abroad, wait.

The left hand

Carry your glass in your left hand at every reception you will ever attend, because the right one is about to be shaken forty times and nobody enjoys shaking a hand that has spent the last ten minutes wrapped around ice.

Cheek kisses, and who starts them

The visitor never starts it.

In Paris colleagues who know each other well often greet with la bise, usually two kisses, and in parts of the south of France the count goes up. In Italy two is common between people who have met. In São Paulo it tends to be one, in Rio two. You do not need to memorize any of this, and I would not try, because the rule that covers every case is to let your counterpart lead and to follow what they do. Cheeks touch lightly, or nearly touch, and the kiss itself is made in the air. Lips on skin is a different greeting entirely.

When I was a student in Rome I went the wrong way more times than I can count, and the Romans forgave every one of them. What they did not warm to was the American who saw the lean coming and stiffened with a hand stuck out, as though fending off a pickpocket. If a French or Italian colleague leans in, go with it. Being slightly clumsy at a cheek kiss costs you nothing. Refusing one, once it has started, costs you the room.

At a first business meeting, in any of these places, expect a handshake and offer one.

Bows

Nobody in Tokyo expects a visiting executive to bow like a Japanese one, and an elaborate, deep bow from a foreigner can look like a performance. A slight bow, from the shoulders, with the eyes lowered, answers the courtesy. Many Japanese executives will offer a handshake to a Western visitor as well, sometimes combined with a small bow, and you should take it. The business card matters more than the bow. Offer yours and receive theirs with both hands, read it properly, and leave it on the table in front of you for the length of the meeting. Writing on it, or putting it straight into a back pocket, is the error that will be remembered.

In Seoul the handshake and the bow are usually combined. When you shake hands with someone senior, a slight bow and your left hand lightly supporting your right forearm will be read as respect, and the junior person is the one who bows first and a little lower.

When your hand is declined

Some observant Muslims and some Orthodox Jews do not touch people of the opposite sex outside their family, and that includes a handshake. In Riyadh or Dubai many men will shake hands with a foreign woman and some will not, and the same is true of women greeting men. A man should wait for a woman to offer her hand. A woman visiting the Gulf can do the same and lose nothing by it. If your hand is declined anyway, take it back without a flicker, nod or place your right hand briefly over your heart, and keep talking. Do not comment on it, and do not make a joke. The person declining is following a rule that is much older than yours.

The Bay Area hug

Founders hug. They hug at demo days and at offsites, and over the last few years the habit has drifted into investor dinners and the occasional board meeting in Menlo Park, where it is less welcome than the huggers believe. My view is firm. A hug is offered by the person with more standing in the relationship, and only once a relationship exists. If you are the junior party, or meeting a client for the second time, a handshake held one beat longer, with your name and theirs, does everything you wanted the hug to do.

The elbow bump and the little wave of 2021 are over. Offer one now and people will assume you are unwell, or that you think they are.

A table for the rooms executives most often walk into

Where each default fits (and where it does not)

• The handshake. Right at almost every first meeting in the world, which is why it is the default. It goes wrong when it is reached across a dinner table, or pushed at someone whose hands are full.
• The cheek kiss. Right in Paris or São Paulo once your counterpart has started it. Wrong in an American office, and wrong anywhere as your idea.
• The bow. Right in Tokyo and, combined with a handshake, in Seoul. In San Francisco, bowing to a Japanese executive who has already put out a hand looks like you read a guidebook on the plane.
• Hand on heart, or a nod. The best answer when a handshake is declined, and a perfectly good greeting in its own right in much of the Middle East and South Asia. Used everywhere as a way of avoiding touch, it starts to look like a statement.
• The hug. Fine between people who have earned it. Never the opening move with a client.

One concession. This page covers the rooms a Bay Area executive is most likely to walk into, here and on the usual business trips, and it leaves out a great deal. Greeting customs vary within every country in the table, and for a formal state occasion or an audience with royalty the host’s protocol office will brief you more precisely than I can. For country-by-country depth, Terri Morrison and Wayne A. Conaway’s Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands is the reference I see most often on the desks of people who travel for a living, and it is more complete on most countries than anything on this site.

The greeting is only the first second. What you say next is in how to introduce yourself professionally, what to call the person whose hand you are holding is in how to address people by title, and the way principals read the whole sequence before you have opened your mouth is in the arrival audit. The rest is collected in Field Notes.

Frequently asked questions

At Four Seasons the best doormen could usually tell you which arriving guests had been in the hotel before from the way they handed over their keys. Greetings work the same way. Everyone in the room is reading them, and almost nobody will tell you what they read.