The Truth About Office Politics
What We’re Reading
This week, we’re reading “Backstabbing is the new office norm” published in Fortune.
The article shares some pretty startling statistics from a survey of 1,000 workers:
40% admit they have sabotaged a colleague to advance their own career.
61% say they’ve been thrown under the bus at work.
Nearly 1 in 3 say they witness workplace backstabbing every week.
The most common tactic is blaming other people for your mistakes.
The second most common is sharing negative information about a coworker with leadership.
Those numbers are troubling on their own. But they also raise a bigger question for us:
What happens when people become so turned off by office politics that they avoid change altogether?
Our Take
We hear some version of this all the time from people: I see what needs to change, but I don’t want to play politics.
We understand why.
But we think there’s an important distinction between organizational politics and political skill.
Organizational politics refers to self-serving behavior that can harm other people or the organization. It’s the backstabbing, blame shifting, information withholding, manipulation, and maneuvering that give workplace politics such a bad reputation.
Chris Argyris described organizational politics as “designed mediocrity to protect against threat and embarrassment.” Think about it...it's so true.
But political skill is different. It’s the ability to understand other people at work and use that understanding to influence others toward personal or organizational objectives. At its best, it’s positive, sincere, and effective influence.
Unfortunately, we tend to lump both of these things together under the word politics. And when we do, people who want nothing to do with the first can end up avoiding the second.
But you cannot create meaningful change without people.
You need to understand who is involved, what matters to them, what they might stand to lose, where influence sits, and how to build the relationships necessary to move the work forward.
That doesn’t require manipulating people. It requires understanding them.
In many ways, the growing emphasis on emotional intelligence and other so-called “soft skills” is asking us to develop many of these same human dynamic skills. How well can you read a room? Understand another perspective? Build trust? Navigate disagreement? Influence without authority?
Political skill probably needs a PR rebrand. But the skill itself isn’t going anywhere because you’re never going to get the people out of the system.
Takeaways
If you’ve been avoiding trying to make a change because you don’t want to “play politics,” get more specific about what you’re actually trying to avoid.
You do not have to backstab, manipulate, take credit, withhold information, or step on other people to get something done.
But you do need to understand people. That means developing the emotional intelligence and human dynamic skills to understand how individuals and groups operate, build relationships, navigate competing interests, and influence people toward change.
The goal isn’t to become better at playing office politics. It’s to become better at working with people without compromising how you want to work with them.
If this is something you struggle with, we’re digging much deeper into it during our upcoming live training, Creating Change Without Playing Politics. We’ll focus on the human dynamic skills that help you understand resistance, navigate power and influence, build support, and create change without getting pulled into the games and drama of office politics.
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