"I'm not playing this political game. If what it takes to do well in this company is to mount a campaign so that I get recognized, I'll find someplace else."
Few of us like to think of the workplace as an environment where politics is king. We'd prefer to believe that there are organizations where politics don't exist. If only we could find a job in one of those Utopic places!
I've heard many concerns over the years that sound like this: "I'm not going to BS my way into people's good graces." Or "This place is too political. I've got to get myself into an organization where I won't run into this type of politics." While people may not run into that particular brand of politics, they will encounter another.
Shift Your Perspective. There is no work environment without politics. And politics is really nothing more than people in the world, including you, wanting to get their professional needs met - and, well, in the end, feeling good about their careers and where they're headed. What if you took a different perspective on politics and began looking at it as "the way things are"?
This is politics without trickery, without stomping on others in order to get recognized, without stealing other people's ideas and calling them your own. And without selling yourself down the river or throwing others under the bus to get where you want to go. This is politics while keeping your integrity intact. It's politics as strategy. It's politics that starts with knowing where you're headed. And it's followed by knowing the political landscape inside your organization - cold. And that includes knowing both the power structure and the power people, which can be a very good strategy for your career.
Here are three ways you can do that.
1. Gauge the power structure. The simplest way is to track a few important decisions from start to finish. Check out who played what role in those decisions. This tells you who holds the power at every level and gives you clues as to how you can strategize getting your decisions pushed through with them in the future.
2. Notice what makes people successful in your environment. What behaviors are rewarded? Who doles out the rewards? What are the prizes, from big to small? This tells you what's acceptable and what's valued - the bigger the prize, the higher the value.
3. Watch who gets dinged, why, and by whom. This tells you what not to do and especially who not to do it around.
With this important information, you can be strategic in your career moves.
Being political in one sense means knowing how to get decisions pushed through. And while for some, it might feel uncomfortable at first to actively gauge the politics at work, knowing who has the power and what power they hold is crucial information to finding the most effective route to getting things done. And if ultimately your goal is to forward your work in the world, being political is simply being realistic.
(C) 2009 Denise Brouillette, San Francisco, CA. All Rights Reserved.
Denise Brouillette is the president of The Innovative Edge LLC and The Women's Edge in Leading.
