How to Handle Organizational Politics

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

—Plato

The definition of leadership suggests that the leader go beyond self-interest and think of what's best for the group or organization. Politics, on the other hand, is often thought of as doing things for personal gain. Politics is another word, like power, that almost always has negative connotations. How does politics fit into a definition of leadership that suggests the leader goes beyond self-interest? Is the word politics associated with negative behavior? What words come to mind? Write down several things:

Politics is viewed in a negative light by many leaders. Words like favoritism, back-stabbing, and manipulation are frequent examples of what comes to mind. This leads many to think the best solution is to stay out of politics. Office politics can cause a number of negative effects to the organization, not just your career. “Employees who feel frustration, guilt, shame, anger, humiliation and contempt on the job adopt defensive behaviors that end up reducing productivity,” according to Henry A. Hornstein and Donald de Guerre.¹ Another study reports that women define success in the business world through values, corporate culture, and balance between work and family, while men define success by status, influence, profits, and market share.² Younger workers, Gen Ys or Millennials, enter the workplace with expectations for cultures that are supportive, open, and connected; they don't like conflict and negative political behavior.

So why not just avoid politics? Unfortunately, if politics is simply the use of strategies to gain power or influence, then it is essential that every organization or team has politics. Politics allows a leader to impact the corporate culture, the direct reports, and even the bottom line; so as a manager it is important to learn to manage politics. In fact, you can spend time on positive politics or work that improves your corporate culture and gain lasting benefits. The Gallup organization reports that the benefits of good corporate culture include “improved performance, profits and retention.”³ Employees engage and take a greater interest in their work when they are in tune with the politics of an organization. You may feel that you have no real control over the company culture, but every organization has subcultures, so at a minimum you can build a positive political culture within your group.

Over the last fifty years the cultures of most organizations have shifted from a top-down management paradigm to that of a more distributed leadership. Decisions made closer to the customer are faster and more effective because the data to make the decision is available to the people doing the work. With these shifts are changes in titles and organization structures. Recently, the CEO of a start-up said he purposefully did not use titles to designate power in his organization. Power comes from knowledge and expertise, not seniority or titles. This shift requires employees to form relationships and use their networks to accomplish things that are good for the organization; if they can accomplish this, they have used politics well. If instead they manipulate and leverage relationships to get their own agenda, they have used politics poorly.

When organizations engage in negative politics, they create organizational cultures with low trust where people withhold information, undermine one another, avoid responses to things like email, while spending a portion of their day working around the system. Conversely, politics with good intent leads to higher levels of trust and cooperation among employees.

The Positives of Politics

As a leader, you should have several reasons for using politics in your organization:

• Achieving the organization's mission: Managing your resources and human resources to achieve the organizational mission and objectives.
• Procuring needed resources: Making sure your team has the resources it needs to achieve those objectives.
• Protecting your constituents: Doing all you personally can to ensure your group's success and guarding against failure.
• Rewarding your constituencies: Ensuring their efforts are justly rewarded.
• Ensuring goodwill and respect: Making your group's achievements known so they get the recognition and benefits they deserve.

As you work to fulfill your responsibilities to those you lead you must participate in politics. So the next question is, How do you participate in politics?

POLITICAL SKILLS SELF-ASSESSMENT

To what extent do you….

1. get impatient with political process and make procedural errors?

   Always                             Sometimes                             Never

2. discredit the ideas, efforts, or accomplishments of others?

   Always                             Sometimes                             Never

3. make end runs around the boss because you feel it's necessary?

   Always                             Sometimes                             Never

4. burn bridges?

   Always                             Sometimes                             Never

5. challenge the boss's strongly held beliefs?

   Always                             Sometimes                             Never

6. criticize peers and others after meetings end and when they are not present?

   Always                             Sometimes                             Never

7. fail to anticipate consequences of your actions well?

   Always                             Sometimes                             Never

8. complain about your boss or upper management?

   Always                             Sometimes                             Never

9. give advice that is meant only to serve personal interests?

   Always                             Sometimes                             Never

10. subtly cut out of events, meetings, decisions, or plans?

    Always                             Sometimes                             Never

11. create partnerships with powerful people?

    Always                             Sometimes                             Never

12. defend your rights, interests, needs, and resources directly and assertively?

    Always                             Sometimes                             Never

13. negotiate, compromise, or even withdraw when appropriate?

    Always                             Sometimes                             Never

14. believe corporate politics are a necessary part of organizational life and work to adjust to that reality?

    Always                             Sometimes                             Never

15. anticipate where the land mines are and plan your approach accordingly?

    Always                             Sometimes                             Never

16. tell others what they are expecting to hear rather than what you know to be true?

    Always                             Sometimes                             Never

If you think you had too many answers “always” to the negative questions in the self-assessment (questions 1-10 and number 16) and you want to be a leader, it is time to shift some behaviors.

How Do You Learn Political Skills?

Organizations are politically complex and to maneuver through them takes a multifaceted approach. One way is to observe people who do it well. Another is to ask your mentor to help you understand things you need to know. Obviously, stop doing any of the negative behaviors you identified in the Political Skills Self-Assessment.

Make sure you are clear about your own integrity and your core values. One manager says that being honest and demonstrating integrity and respect in all he does is core to his leadership approach. It makes decision making easy when you have a view on how you will play politics.

Continue to work on your image. People differ in the impressions they make with others. People who have a positive impression get more things done through the organization than those who are not liked or leave negative impressions. Ask others for feedback about how you come across during meetings and times when you are attempting to influence a group; increase your ability to be self-aware.

Another part of being politically astute is anticipating how ideas will be received. Even if you do everything correctly, there will be times when you have to protect yourself or your group from the manipulations of others. There are five ways that you can increase effectiveness in these situations.

1. Watch for and protect against the devious political tactics of others.
2. Avoid making political blunders.
3. Create partnerships with powerful people.
4. Defend your rights, interests, needs, and resources assertively.
5. Negotiate, compromise, or even withdraw when appropriate.

How to Win at Politics

As a leader, you need to manage the political climate in your team. The culture in your group could include such things as openness and partnership; it could refuse to tolerate any of the negative political behaviors. As a member of the management team, you need to encourage the political climate and help transform your team as well. Team members today have a different role, too. In the past, most important decisions could be made by management. Today team members are called on to identify problems, think of solutions, create and implement changes, and develop innovations.

• Pinpoint what you want and why.
• Identify who controls what you need.
• Find out who can help you get what you need.
• Decide what you need to do to get what you need.
• Go for it with determination and resolve.
• Watch out for the harmful politics of others as you go.
• Protect yourself as you go.

Part of your role is to encourage team members to be proactive and take charge. Team members need to buy into their role in creating culture. One technique is to make a chart like the one shown in Figure 5.1, then share it with your team.

Figure 5.1 Proactive chart.

Create your own chart with negative attitudes and choices in one column and the behaviors you want to encourage in a second column. Have a group discussion and agree to a personal team list. Here are some suggestions to consider for the positive side of the chart:

• We give and receive feedback.
• We keep the needs of the organization in focus.
• We look for ways to make things better here, to innovate.
• We share our skills and expertise with colleagues.
• We maintain a positive attitude within the group.
• We have many voices inside the team, one voice outside.
• We demonstrate leadership within the team.
• We handle task conflicts immediately.
• We avoid personal conflict and seek solutions.
• We communicate information that others need, returning emails promptly (within 24 hours).
• We use email for short, task-related communication.
• We keep meetings short and to the point, have agendas with outcomes listed, and send the agenda out at least the day before the meeting so that others can prepare. A summary is made of our meetings.
• We develop team rules for our meetings, things like one conversation at a time, starting and ending on time.
• We work on building relationships within the team.

Add to this list as you see fit; delete what doesn't make sense for your group. The idea is to create the framework that will drive the culture you and the team want to create. Good cultures are not an accident; they are created and maintained by the group and its leader.

How decision making gets done in organizations is often reflective of the culture. There are at least four choices for the level of empowerment that you want the group to have. Each is appropriate in some situation. They are directly aligned to the leadership styles in Chapter 2.

• Stage One Leaders: Leaders decide without consultation with employees, they inform employees, who comply.
• Stage Two Leaders: Leaders make decisions, but get employee input first, then inform employees, who comply.
• Stage Three Leaders: Team members make decisions and recommend a course of action, but must seek approval from manager before acting.
• Stage Four Leaders: Team members are given full authority to make decisions, create action steps, and implement without any further approvals from management.

Think about the consequences to culture with each of these levels of decision making. If all decisions are made with a Stage One leader style, what would the culture look like? When is it a best choice of a style? For example, Stage One style is appropriate if the information is sensitive, team members lack skills or experience, and accountability can't be shared. Overuse of this style can create a very dependent culture.

At Stage Two, management may feel unable to share accountability for the decision, but they do want input from the team. This decreases dependency somewhat, but still creates a dependent culture.

At Stage Three, active participation is desired, but risk is high or the team is still lacks experience to make decisions alone. If this style is only used when risks are high or the leader feels the team is not experienced enough to make the decisions, the team will move toward Stage Four.

If a team has been together for some time and establishes a proven track record, it needs to be able to make most (about 60 percent) of its decisions at Stage Four. If this doesn't happen and the team needs to get approval for everything, then team work gets bogged down, innovations won't take place, and the team will be hampered in responding quickly to customer needs. The culture becomes demotivating and risk averse. However, the team may need to learn to make decisions as a group. There are three choices for members to consider:

• Majority rules: Decision with the most votes wins.
• Consensus: Agreement when everyone can work with or buy into the decision.
• One member decides: Person with the most expertise, experience, or ownership decides.

Figure 5.2 shows the picture of decision-making styles added to the Leader Styles chart. Note how the direction is from controlling to empowering.

One of the critical jobs of a good leader is to manage politics. Randy Williams, Managing Director of Redmond Williams (RWA), a firm that helps enhance compliance, governance, and issue escalation in corporations, reinforces that a mentor with a proven political track record is essential. In fact, in the 2008 Institute for Corporate Productivity and American Management Association study⁴ that Ms. Williams helped author, mentoring programs for new hires received the highest correlation between the cultural index and market performance. However, as Ms. Williams notes, only 17 percent of the respondents use mentor practices. This is an area for potential development in most organizations that can lead to improved cultures very quickly. This suggestion keeps appearing from different sources because this might be the simplest way to effect a positive change in your corporation or team.

Figure 5.2 Decision-making styles with leader styles chart.

Career Enhancement Tool Avoiding Political Blunders

The opportunity for political blunders is particularly high when you transition to a new job. This is a time when everyone watches you to see how you manage the new role. Some of you will be fortunate to have managers who are good coaches; others will not. One way to avoid the blunders is to prepare yourself for the transition into the new job. Do your homework!

In a new position, leaders focus on what they need to accomplish in their new job, what results are expected of them, who is on their team, and what are their skills. They likely focus on the culture of the organization before accepting the job and may note the ways work gets done and the corporate values. The thing that no one talks about is the politics. If leaders are lucky, they won't stumble into this problem. However, many leaders do innocently fall into situations. It's like traveling in a foreign country; if you don't understand the culture, you can inadvertently make mistakes.

Before your first day as leader:

• Make it your goal to learn how things are really done in your organization.
• Find out how your boss likes work to be done: email, written report, talked through. What works for the boss?
• Make sure you understand your boss's priorities and goals.
• Align your goals and priorities with those above you.
• Assess your staff.
• Address problems quickly.
• Assess the real leaders in your group.

As you transition into the organization over the first six months:

• Actively learn more about the organization and the people in it.
• Get to know everyone personally.
• Travel to other locations.
• Build relationships with all stakeholders outside your immediate team.
• Pay attention to challenges to your leadership, remember Chapter 2 and see it as “good” conflict, but do address it. Don't make any big changes until you really understand the organization.
• Build trust with others (see Chapter 3).
• Use this as a time to establish who you are and tell people what you value.
• Talk to your group about stages of group development and your vision for an empowered team.

Risa now understood that in this organization a better way to handle the challenge would be to ask a simple question after the Director challenged the content. She might say, “What do the rest of you think?” A more facilitative approach, rather than challenging, would have been more in keeping with the culture. Fortunately, one blunder in the first week on the job does not end a career, but to avoid the situation in the first place is the goal. Get off to a good start by understanding the real power structure in the organization.