My office is a breeding ground for office politics. In fact everyone is so concerned about what X said and what Y did that they sometimes forget they need to get on with their job. The constant round of infighting and backstabbing is exhausting, and while I try to stay on the sidelines I know it can be detrimental to career progress if you do nothing at all. So how do I get involved without getting caught up in what I consider time-wasting behaviour? SS, Abu Dhabi
My view on this is pretty simple: everything that gets done in today’s office requires interdependent action – people working together. None of us can achieve our goals alone. That means everything is political, because people have different agendas – some open, some hidden, some personal, some organisational. So for me, the question isn’t whether we get engaged in office politics, it is how we engage in them.
You can get involved in office politics and still protect your career. Here’s how: you can’t be afraid but you do have to understand how they work in your organisation. Who is active and what are they trying to achieve? Generally, people use office politics to try to achieve one of two things: the furthering of their team’s or their own or their organisation’s professional objectives, or the furthering of themselves personally. The latter, which is using office politics for self-interested ends, breeds bad politics. The former, using organisational politics to help meet organisational objectives, is good politics – politics with integrity.
So how do you tell the difference? People drift away from trying to meet the organisation’s goals and begin instead to focus on their own goals when they become dissatisfied with the organisation for some reason. People happy at work generally feel that the best way for them to meet their career objectives is for the organisation to meet its objectives. The success of the organisation provides the individual with success, satisfaction and career advancement. So in terms of you getting involved in office politics, if you are proud to work where you work and determined to see your company succeed by achieving its goals, then you are likely to engage in good politics – those which are designed to help the organisation’s progress. If you are disaffected with your company, or at best feel neutral towards it and what it is trying to do, then you will focus exclusively on meeting your own objectives, with no care for the company’s success. And the self-interested office politics in which you engage will be potentially damaging to the people who pay your wages.
The next question is what role do you want to take in the political life of your organisation? Some of us like to take the role of predictor, looking into the future of the organisation and assessing what is going to happen, who will succeed, who will fail, what will work and what will not, based on what we see as our deep understanding of how we do things around here. Others like to comment on the political activities as we see and experience them, assessing the roles and actions of other colleagues and employees who are in our view politically active. Others still like to initiate organisational political activity, becoming political movers and shakers who make things happen and generate change within the organisation as a result of their political activity. You can take any of these roles, or even more than one of them, but you must keep asking yourself: are you doing what you are doing in the arena of organisational politics to further the aims and ambitions of the organisation? If you are simply self-serving then you are a dangerous office politician who will need to be watched.
So before you do anything political, whether it is to initiate, to predict or to comment, ask yourself does your planned action have integrity – are you doing what you are doing to help the organisation meet its goals? If not, think hard before acting, because you will be doing nothing but adding to the infighting and backstabbing.
Use this same principle to decide who is playing good politics and who is playing the bad sort within your company. Who is being self-interested and who is actually trying to further the organisation’s progress? If the clever, self-interested people work for you, your job as a leader is to find out why their attitude to the organisation is poor enough that they are driven primarily by self-interest.
Doctor's prescription: If you can find the cause and fix it, then that clever, self-interested politico can instead become an individual of political integrity, using the inevitable politics of organisation life to help the company meet its goals – you won't be removing office politics but you will be improving them.
Roger Delves is director of the Ashridge Executive Masters in Management and adjunct professor at Hult International Business School. He is co-author of the book The Top 50 Management Dilemmas: Fast Solutions to Everyday Challenges. Email him at business@thenational.ae for advice on any work issues
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