Office politics can ruin you in many ways. It can cost you promotion and throw your career into disarray. It can even cost you your job. Worst of it all, your mental health can take a beating from the nasty organizational politics.
The good news is you can become political and learn to use politics to your advantage. In fact, if you want to prosper in corporate or bureaucratic world, there is no other way then to get political. These are the five tips that will build your political prowess.
If you are thrown into a mad fighting cage, will you try to reason with other fighters and play nice? Or would you rather quickly strategize and start fighting?
A workplace is a combat cage. And the game is politics.
Of course, this is not how most of us see offices and workplaces. In our idealized and even naïve view, offices and workplaces are where great things get done, where innovation sprouts and talent and hard work are rewarded with promotions and perks. At the surface, all organizations are covered in a skin of lofty organizational vision, elaborate SOPs, smiling leadership and everyone seemingly working towards common goals. But an inch beneath, the blue veins of all organizations pulsate with the red, red blood of politics.
Yes, you need to add value to the organization. Yes, you need to do your job well. And yes, hard work is necessary. But all these will amount to naught if you do not have a solid political strategy. You will be elbowed, thrown around, used and trampled upon, always playing a supporting role and lending your broad shoulders for other people to climb upon and rise. Your work environment will be hellish for you. And your mental health will take a beating.
You need the job. For whatever reason it is, you have taken the job because you need it. You need to survive in the job. In fact, you need to thrive in it as long as you need to. And you need to make your work environment as smooth as possible so that you deliver the value you bring to the table. The worst thing you can do is to quit a nice job because you couldn’t handle office politics.
If you don’t do politics, politics will surely do you.
The choice you have is clear: become a savvy politician and ride the waves of survival and success. Or take a pass and prepare for the relentless onslaught of being your organization’s human piñata! Any self-respecting person would not settle for the second.
Anyone can become politically savvy. Like all other skills, you need to identify the skills and practice them. And like all skills, once you learn them, you can use them in any way you see fit.
Here are five easy tips to help you deal with office politics.
Tip #1: Accept the reality of office politics
To most of us, office politics has a bad repute. It stinks. It is toxic, dangerous, demotivating. The blatant nepotism and favoritism disgust us. Gossips and backstabbing and gas lighting. All those small, dirty games that people play? Don’t we feel like choking these people till they turn purple?
Worst of all, politics have real, tangible effects. It can ruin your career and cost you relationships. Most importantly, office politics is horrible for mental health. A 2020 UK workplace stress survey by Perkbox found out that work-related office politics are the most common cause of work-related stress.
The reality, however much we may dislike, is this: Politics is the blood that runs in the veins of every organization.
In fact, forget office. Put two people together anywhere and they get political. They will feel each other for a moment and start playing political games. Most human interaction is political. That is because, everyone has different level of power to get what they want.
What is organizational politics anyway?
Think of a marketplace. In an economic marketplace, an individual’s worth is determined by the value she brings to the marketplace. The more value you bring, the greater your worth.
In a political organization, an individual’s worth is determined by the power she has. The amount of power determines how much you are worth.
Therefore, the first tip for you to master the game of politics is to accept this fact unequivocally: If you are a part of an organization, any organization, there is no escaping politics.
You may dislike the fact, but you can’t escape it. Burying your head in the sand will do you no good. Like most things in the world, office politics is just there. Without regard for your personal likes and dislikes. If you have a contradictory view, now is the time to make a mindset shift and accept it as a fact of office life.
Let’s revisit the cage analogy again. If you are thrown into a fighting cage and the only way for you to survive is by fighting, would you play the sweet soul spreading rainbows and unicorn stickers to others in the cage knowing there is no reward for being nice? Or would you start fighting?
It’s time to get in the game mode. Play political. For your career, for the perks and most importantly for your mental health. So, the first tip is to change your mindset about politics, adopt an attitude of radical acceptance of the reality of politics, and commit to become political.
Until you become a political animal, you will always remain a puppet in the hands of those who are more adept, a target practice for those who are political.
Tip #2: Build Appropriate Persona
You wouldn’t wear the same outfit on a beach by the Pacific and in the ice fields of Antarctica. If you do, you will die.
Unfortunately, naïve people go to work with the same persona they use for their family and friends. They have the same expectations from bosses as they do from their parents. They interact with coworkers as if they do with their friends, with the same level of authenticity. The take hurt and get emotional with silly things. They take everything personal. Basically, they are one-dimensional. This is not enough in the political arena of your office. To be a political force, you need to have a makeover.
Look at your organizational culture. Does it value position over performance? Does the office culture put a premium on good looks and prefer beauty over brain? What is the predominant idea of the organization? Liberal, progressive values or toxic masculinity and femininity? Are promotions and perks mainly dependent on family relations and personal connections rather than your productivity?
Your goal is to build an appropriate persona that is in tune with the predominant culture of your organization. This is the persona that you will present at your workplace. Not your genuine face, but the façade, the mask that your organization wants and values.
In this game of persona, everything is on the table. As Philip Eager and Troy Bruner said in their book The Modern Machiavelli, acting, lying, mimicry, flattery, horse trading, and self-promotion – which few would do in life outside office – should all be in your repertoire.
In your personal life, you may be affectionate, considerate, authentic and have all the qualities we admire. But in your professional life, you have to cover yourself in a different persona. If you don’t like your boss, you have to act and hide your disdain. Navigating office politics requires you to lie, mimic, flatter, trade horses and promote yourself. Try to be straight all the time and you will be the first to face the axe.
Some people say, “Let my work speak for itself.” As Carla Harris, Vice-Chairman at Morgan Stanley said: “You can’t let your work speak for you. Work doesn’t speak”. It is the people that speak. Starting with yourself.
Remember: when it comes to politics, the high grounds of rules, principles, ethics and morality are just words to be used as tools or traded like sheep. When you enter a political arena, your goal is to get your way, achieve the results you want. You are not going there to be guardians of rules, principles and morality. Those are for your personal life. Not in the cage fight of office politics.
Tip #3: Never Make an Enemy of Your Boss
If you are a court jester, would you pick a quarrel with the queen? That would be a shortcut to the gallows.
If a colleague hates you, you can smirk it off. But if your boss hates you, you are in trouble. Your boss will throw hurdles your way, set boobytraps for you to fall into, pit you against others and may even be shown the way out.
You should never make an enemy of your boss because the relative power is stacked disproportionately against your favor. The boss has the position, rules, people and resources which you have close to zero. To attract the loathing of anyone above you in the organizational hierarchy is just plain stupid.
If you can’t be your boss’s favorite, never ever become her enemy.
Of course, not all bosses are amiable. Like humans, they come in every variety imaginable. There is the hardcore degenerate boss, the kind who will go to extreme lengths to fulfill selfish goals at the expense of the organizational culture. This is the kind who will override and corrupt the system so that her daughter or an acquittance gets a good placement. She will split hair and crate caste system just to favor one or two individuals. There are bosses for whom arrogance is the perfume of choice. There are bosses who is crude and cruder than crude oil. There are bosses who take zero responsibility. And the most dangerous kinds are the ones thoroughly cooked in toxic and half-baked ideas: masculinity, femininity, socialism, elitism, superiority and such.
Through all these, you wonder how such people ever get to lord over you.
It is in moments like this that you bring out your toolbox of persona from Tip#2 and don the mask to fit your boss.
Remember: Your job is not to correct a degenerate boss even though you may sometimes feel like taking out a massive wrench from your toolbox for some brain correction. Instead, your job is to deliver results you desire, get that coveted perk and rise up the hierarchy smoothly so that you can bring the change that is necessary for your organization.
With that in mind, when you are dealing with your boss, let these three rules guide you:
Rule One: Never Outshine Your Master
This is the First Law of power in the seminal book by Robert Greene: The 48 Laws of Power. This rule of power was true in the court of the French King Louise the XIV and it is true now in the chambers of modern-day offices.
Insecurity affects us all and the bosses are not immune from it. They want to be seen as the good guys, doing all the hard work. If you steal that limelight from your bosses, you are in trouble.
An adept political animal will always put the boss in good light in front of everyone. You do the hard work and let the boss take the credit. If you are in a mid-level position, you take the credit of your subordinates but never of your boss. What you get from your boss in return is the goodwill.
Of course, you can’t take your boss’s goodwill and trade it even for an eggshell, you have never tasted the backing of a boss until you find yourself in trouble and a corrupt boss comes to your aid. She will fight like crazy for you. To have your boss’s support in difficult times is good for your mental health.
By any count, a boss who sees you as a trustworthy subordinate is infinitely better than a boss who is horrible and hates you at the same time.
Rule Two: When Bosses Fight, Never Take Sides
It is always a dangerous proposition to take sides in an organization. What you need is a broad base of connections as opposed to being a part of cliques. In your organizational hierarchy, you will have many bosses: immediate supervisor, mangers, executives and so on. You need to be in good books of all of them.
At one time or the other, your bosses will squabble and you will find yourself in the midst. Always play a balancing act and never take obvious sides. When you take sides, you will hurt the other one and the human psychology is such that our memory retains the hurt we suffer for a very long time. You never know when the tables will turn and the boss you hurt earlier will come after you like a wounded tiger.
When bosses spar, stay outside the ring. If you find yourself in the ring, play dumb, if you have to, and let them sort out their differences without you in the equation.
Rule Three: Agree With Your Boss in Public; Settle Scores in Private.
There will also come a time when you have to disagree with your boss. The rule to follow in such situations is this: don’t show your disagreement with your boss in public. Always take it up bilaterally when no one is watching. An insecure boss will make facts suit his opinion, no matter how much the facts differ from his opinion, if disgraced in public. No one likes losing face, especially in public. In private, however, people are much more amenable to suggestions and different opinions.
Keep the heart to heart talks with your boss in the private chambers. In public, you will agree with your boss and when you can’t, you will keep quiet.
Tip #4: Manage Sideways and Downwards
In order for you to be effective in achieving the goals you want, you need a broad base of political support in your organization.
In any organization, there will be tribes and cliques organized around gender, family connection, and other social groupings in addition to the formal grouping such as divisions and departments. You should never be seen as belonging to any one group or the other. You are an independent who gets along with everyone.
Among your peers, you should never be seen as too perfect so as to arouse their envy. Show harmless quirks that disguise your core strengths. Never show sides that you don’t want them to see such as being emotional, unless it is through design, to have a certain impact. Play tough when you have to mostly as a way to show you are not someone to be pushed around. Be willing to take a stand and put up a fight when you must and fluid and amenable in other times.
The second group of people you need to cultivate is the people in your industry. That is outside your own organization. The network you build outside your organization will help you be more effective in delivering results for your organization. When your reputation echoes back to your organization from outside, it will be a force multiplier.
One group of people in your organization you should never ignore: support staff. Some of them wield disproportionate amount of power because of their access to the leadership. A word for you or against you by a powerful subordinate will make a huge difference. Some subordinates are the gatekeepers to a storehouse of insider information: who is secretly going out with whom, who has done what and what the decision of the human resource committee will be. Know and be known to the Personal Assistants, drivers, security guards and even the janitors. Socialize with them, befriend them. In turn, they will feed you with all kinds of information that would otherwise be beneath your radar.
Tip #5: Never Take It Personally
If you are in a boxing match, and the opponent breaks your nose in a fair fight, will you stomp around the ring and cry foul? You wouldn’t.
Similarly, in the game of organizational politics, don’t take anything personally. If someone sneaks behind and stabs you in the back, don’t take it personally. You take measures to counter it, but don’t suffer from the hurt. If your favorite boss chooses someone else over you for promotion, you are not going to quit your job. There is nothing personal about it.
Like in all games, there is always rise and fall, almost with the certainty of the tide. Just as you should not take your rise personally and let it get into your head, you should not take any hurdles and challenges you face at work personally. Adopt an attitude of detachment. Don Miguel Ruiz says it the best in his book The Four Agreements:
Recap:
Here are the five tips again:
Tip #1: Accept the reality of office politics.
Tip #2: Build Appropriate Persona.
Tip #3: Never Make an Enemy of Your Boss
Tip #4: Manage Sideways and Downwards
Tip #5: Never Take It Personally
References:
- Mastery by Robert Greene
- The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
- The Modern Machiavelli by Philip Eager and Troy Bruner
- Miller, B. K., Rutherford, M. A., & Kolodinsky, R. W. (2008). Perceptions of Organizational Politics: A Meta-analysis of Outcomes. Journal of Business and Psychology, 22(3), 209–222. doi:10.1007/s10869-008-9061-5
- CROPANZANO, R., HOWES, J. C., GRANDEY, A. A., & TOTH, P. (1997). The relationship of organizational politics and support to work behaviors, attitudes, and stress. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 18(2), 159–180.doi:10.1002/(sici)1099-1379(199703)18:2<159::aid-job795>3.0.co;2-d
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