my boss loves being told she’s beautiful

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. A reader writes: My boss clearly loves compliments on her appearance, and our team is responding with more and more of them. It feels embarrassing and a bit ridiculous to me, especially since no one ever makes these kind of compliments to anyone else (e.g., “I love your shoes” to another team member but stuff […]

Apr 7, 2025 - 16:11

my boss loves being told she’s beautiful

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

My boss clearly loves compliments on her appearance, and our team is responding with more and more of them. It feels embarrassing and a bit ridiculous to me, especially since no one ever makes these kind of compliments to anyone else (e.g., “I love your shoes” to another team member but stuff like “you’re so beautiful, your face is radiant” to the boss).
I’m her deputy. I can’t bring myself to say anything about her looks, it feels too weird. But the compliments come so often from other team members that I worry it starts to look pointed that I say nothing. And I also wonder if I need to point out to her that this dynamic that is intensifying and suggest that she cools it down a little (without implying that I don’t think she looks good)?
Or should I let this go and just accept this as a quirk of an otherwise good boss?

I wrote back and asked, “I am admittedly fascinated by this — how did it even start happening?! Did someone compliment her on looking nice one day and her reaction was so appreciative that others started doing it too?”

Yes, exactly this. It started with occasional compliments about something she was wearing. She normally says something like, “Oh, do you really think so? You’re so nice, you make me feel so good” and sometimes goes and looks in the mirror or reapplies make up. And I guess naturally people started saying it more and more.
And it’s been gradually ramping up to the point that now every day when she arrives at the office, it’s almost a team ritual to gather round and tell her how beautiful she is. I don’t think she favors the ones who gush about her the most, she just enjoys it in general. But it still just feels weird to me and I don’t know whether to tell her she’s gorgeous or try and tactfully tell her to shut it down!

Well…

This is of course really weird and not good from a team dynamics perspective, but it’s also hilarious.

Like, can you imagine coming to work every day and preening while people gathered round to tell you how beautiful you look? And then going to gaze at yourself in the mirror to bask in your reflected beauty? I do not think this is a normal experience, even for the supermodels among us.

And it is extremely entertaining.

As for what to do … you’re absolutely right that it’s weird and she should cool it, but given the balance of power between you, if you feel too awkward about raising it and would rather leave it alone, it doesn’t rise to the level of something where you have to intervene.

I generally try to apply a “is this really what I would do in real life?” test to my advice (because otherwise it’s easy to fall into giving advice that sounds right but isn’t actually realistic, given humans and politics and all the strange pressures of work life), and I’ve gotta say, I’d almost definitely leave it alone and just enjoy it as the very strange spectacle it is.

The exception to that is if you have the kind of relationship where you could comfortably say, “Dude, it’s getting weird that everyone is complimenting you so much every morning — I think we should try to stop that” — but I’m guessing that if you did, you already would have said it.

This would not be my advice if you were seeing favoritism toward the team members who compliment her or any chilliness toward those who don’t. If that were happening, as her deputy you’d have more of an obligation to speak up (although still not an absolute one, given the power differential). It would also be different if you were her manager; in that case, you’d really need to point out that she’s creating a weird dynamic and should stop it.

All that said, if you are comfortable speaking up, you could say something like, “Have you noticed we’ve developed almost a ritual of everyone complimenting you in the morning? I worry about people feeling like they need to curry favor with you.”

But man, it’s hard to say that without sounding like you’re saying, “You are not that pretty and they’re just sucking up to you.”