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It’s politics. How many times have you ended a conversation with that phrase and its accompanying sighs and deflated body language? We often wind up sounding bitter, resigned, defeated, and hopeless when we’ve lost a corporate battle. We feel powerless. But why fight it? The solution is to become better at playing politics, and to realize that politics is not a four-letter word.


Why the Bad Rap?
When things don’t go our way in business, we are often quick to blame it on politics. When things do go our way, we credit our skills, knowledge and superior effort.

What do we mean when we refer to something or someone as political? It usually involves:

• backstabbing
• game playing
• working the system
• posturing
• hidden agendas
• manipulation
• favoritism
• all of the above

“Being political” references this laundry list of negative interpersonal behaviors that is often erroneously attributed to the organization. Companies aren’t political, their people are. Politics are neither good nor bad, they’re neutral. It’s our personal and interpersonal skills that cause positive or negative interpretations.


Where Do Politics Come From?
Does your workplace suffer from scarce resources, or competition for them? Has your organization undergone any change or ambiguity in the past two years? OK, you can stop laughing/crying. If you answered yes to any of the above, your workplace is likely to be politically charged on many levels.

A workplace is often in a state where power is up for grabs. We workers attempt to collect power in order to accomplish tasks, achieve goals and augment our own feelings of worth and dominance. We labor within a power structure that is both formal (departments, job titles, hierarchy etc.) and informal (“we’ve always done it this way,” crazy work-arounds, “Bob/Sue has been here for 30 years and this is the way he/she does it,” etc.). We use political skills to help us navigate these power structures that exist in every workplace.


Playing Your Political Cards
We’ve all been dealt a political hand or skill sets. These skills are most closely equated with our emotional intelligence quotient (EQ). EQ consists of our willingness and ability to recognize and regulate emotion in ourselves and others in a variety of situations. Your personal EQ consists of four distinguishable elements:

1) Self -Awareness
• emotional awareness: recognizing your emotions and their effects
• accurate self-assessment: knowing your strengths and limitations
• self-confidence: strong sense of self worth and capabilities

2) Self -Management
• self-control: keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check
• trustworthiness: maintaining standards of honesty and integrity
• conscientiousness: taking ownership for performance
• adaptability: flexibility in handling change

3) Social Awareness
• reading others: sensing feelings and perspectives and taking interest in the concerns of others
• developing others: sensing other’s needs and bolstering their abilities
• situational savvy: reading a group’s emotional and power relationships

4) Relationship Skills
• influence: effective tactics for persuasion
• communication: listening and sending messages
• conflict management: facing and resolving disagreement
• building bonds: nurturing instrumental relationships

EQ is what makes the workplace so very interesting. We spend the majority of each day with others of unpredictable and varying skills in fundamental and important facets of human behavior. No wonder interpersonal difficulties are usually central to the “political issues” that plague leaders. There are so many places for things to go wrong.

But two key factors can turn your EQ into an effective political skill set: intention and sincerity.


Intention, Sincerity and Elephants
When we use political skills, the collation of power and subsequent achievement is generally for the greater good and everyone benefits (“we worked hard and applied our collective skills and talents and therefore we are justified in our success”). But our behaviors may appear to others as self-serving and our success ill-gained. Those individuals may chalk the success up to politics or even call us political (though rarely to our face). The interpretation lies in the eyes of the beholder.

Behaving in a political manner is like running along the edge of a canyon. Intention and sincerity are your rope and harness, and serve to protect should you fall. When you add intention and sincerity to your self awareness, self management, social savvy and your relationship skills, you begin the lifelong process of deserving the rewards and trust you earn.

But intent and sincerity are not easy to maintain. Sincerity is the external manifestation of intention; without intention, behavior is rarely interpreted as sincere.

Has anyone ever told you that something you did or said hurt their feelings? Have you ever responded that you didn’t mean to or intend to hurt them? Think back now, what did you intend? Unfortunately, we’re capable of doing, thinking and feeling so many things simultaneously that we often don’t know exactly what we intended; we just acted.

So what does this mean for me in my political life at work? Dr. Seuss summarizes most eloquently in Horton Hatches the Egg: “I said what I meant, and I meant what I said. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.” Words to live by.


Developing Your Political Skills
When you review the many elements of the political skill set listed earlier, you can imagine that further development is no small task. Because these skills are intensely personal and are basic to our very core in terms of personality and behavior, your best bet is to seek feedback first. Here’s how to get it.

360 Feedback. A 360 is a type of instrument used by leaders to solicit anonymous feedback on common leadership practices from individuals who work closely with the leader from a variety of levels. Because the 360 is a developmental tool as opposed to a performance evaluation, it is particularly useful in providing areas of opportunity to develop political skills.

Ask a trusted mentor. Is there someone inside or outside the organization you trust enough to discuss your performance in the area of political maneuvering? Finding someone like this may be a political operation in and of itself.

Video taping. I’m a big fan of using video to help leaders understand how their behavior impacts others. For example, how about taping your executive committee meetings as a common practice? After a while folks will forget about the camera and begin behaving as they normally do, and then you can debrief the play-by-play to evaluate the behaviors and their impact. I guarantee you will learn a lot with this practice!

Executive coaching. Executive coaching has grown dramatically in the past decade as a result of the increasing isolation and void of feedback which senior leaders experience. In fact, all a coach does is act as a sounding board for you—and hold up a mirror to tell or show you what nobody else will.

Training. The least effective method is also the most likely to be chosen. Why? Because it’s cheap, easy and makes us feel as if we are doing something. If you go this route, make sure your training is long-term, based upon your needs and competencies, and built to last in terms of application.


Managing Negative Politics
We all use political skills with varying degrees of intent and success. Nonetheless, as leaders, your task is to reduce the negative charges in the political atmosphere at your resort. Here’s where to focus your energy:

• Reduce ambiguity via regular communication, even when there is nothing new to communicate. In a vacuum of information, people will make things up, causing negative political behavior.
• Eliminate red tape by streamlining decision-making processes. Distribute power for decision making to the lowest and most capable level possible in the organizational hierarchy.
• Emphasize specific expectations with individuals. Let people know what their role is and how and when they’ll be measured; then provide continual feedback and correction along the way.
• Model the behaviors you expect from others, always.
• Act with intent in order to be sincere and straightforward.

If you are intentional and sincere in all your political behaviors, will you eliminate hidden agendas, power plays and other nasty things that happen at work? Not entirely. But you’ll be a more effective leader. And going to work would be a lot more fun, wouldn’t it?