The Silent Career Killer: Navigating the Dark Side of Office Politics

Episode #314 The Silent Career Killer: Navigating the Dark Side of Office Politics

YOU CAN’T ESCAPE THE POLITICS

Politics exist in every organization. Some companies tolerate it more than others and it’s not uncommon for ego-driven leaders to encourage poor behavior from their most ambitious people.

Leaders who tolerate or encourage political maneuvering will find that it has a direct impact on team culture, cohesion, and performance. But politics is so ingrained in human nature that it can be really hard to identify and to neutralize.

Politics is the path that many leaders choose when they can’t deliver results. What they lack in ability, they make up for in ambition. So, they find another way to climb the ladder, and that’s often by using politics to someone else’s detriment.

This is just a fact of life, and the rough-and-tumble of office politics becomes more intense with every layer you move up.

The $64,000 question is, “How do you lead at your peak and focus on the things that truly matter, without being blindsided by office politics?”

I begin the newsletter by clearly defining what a political player looks like, so that you can spot them more easily; I discuss how political slurs, no matter how outlandish, can often outweigh objective reality; and I finish with some tips for building bulletproof networks, as a primary defense against political attacks.

HOW TO SPOT A POLITICAL PLAYER

I think I can say with a fair degree of confidence that we have very few political animals, if any, in the No Bullsh!t Leadership community.

Our straight-shooting approach is like kryptonite to political players – they avoid self-examination and reflection like the plague. So we can talk amongst ourselves in confidence… the politicians aren’t listening!

We often talk about political players as if they’re nameless figures who hide in the shadows but, if you pay attention, they’re easier to spot than you might imagine. I want to describe how political players operate, so that you can see the signs more easily and tread carefully around them. Who are they?

• They’re the people who focus on increasing their personal advantage and power using manipulation and lies.

• They have high levels of ambition, but they typically lack the fundamental capabilities that they need to rise through the ranks.

• They spend the majority of their time on impression management, which is to say, they try to create a favorable impression of themselves relative to their peers.

• They embellish even the most insignificant achievements to pass them off as something remarkable.

• They try to discredit and undermine the people around them who they see as a threat or as competition.

• They spend almost no energy on leading for performance, and a huge amount of energy on whispering the right words in the right person’s ear.

• They don’t take issues head on, and won’t engage in discussions or conflict in a group situation, because they prefer to go one-on-one with the boss to try to quietly manipulate him.

• They can’t tolerate even the slightest criticism, and they deflect it ferociously, typically by blaming other people – which is why single-point accountability is so important.

• They are short on accountability and long on excuses.

• They’re always at pains to agree with their boss – I can’t count the number of times that I sat in a meeting trying not to throw up in my mouth as I watched a consummate politician sucking up to the CEO or a board director.

• They’ll tell their boss exactly what he wants to hear, and many bosses let it happen because it plays into their need for ego gratification.

In the worst cases, this results in the suck-up politician being bestowed with trusted advisor status. And once they feel really secure in that relationship with their boss, they sometimes sink even deeper into their dark side, becoming a kiss-up-kick-down leader – they don’t give anyone the time of day unless they can further their own ambition and their own self-interest.

The attributes I’ve just run through are like a mini checklist for spotting an office politician. Think of it like a list of symptoms for a medical condition. You know how it goes – “If you suffer from more than five of these symptoms, you may be at risk, so please see your doctor.”

If you know someone who fits a number of these criteria, just be careful of them.

I have to say, just talking about this makes me want to take a shower. I can think of at least a dozen people who, during the course of my corporate career, I saw do the most devious, manipulative things to try to curry favor at the expense of others. It really is the darkest impulses of human behavior on display.

If you’re thinking this is all a little over the top, I guarantee that at some point during your career, you’re going to come face-to-face with ugly office politics. It’s important to recognize that, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you! It pays to be aware, and it pays to stay awake!

RESULTS CAN BE DIMINISHED BY FRAMING EFFECT

How can politics outweigh objective reality? I used to think that it was enough just to deliver exceptional results. Not so!

Even if your team’s performance is a cut above the rest, politics can still tarnish the shine more easily than you might think. The whispers behind closed doors, which are designed to undermine and discredit you, can undo a lot of your good work. In my naivety, I didn’t really understand how it was possible to interpret clear-cut, quantifiable results in anything other than a positive light

But that was before I learned about the framing effect.

I’ve mentioned this in previous podcast episodes, but it’s really worth revisiting. The perceptions that you form about anything can be completely different, based on how the information is presented… even when the facts are identical.

For example, let’s say we’re listening to a news report on the latest job creation statistics. The reporter might be conveying credible data, which show that, say, 100,000 jobs were created in the last quarter. Our perception of whether that number of 100,000 jobs is good or bad is almost entirely dependent upon how it’s framed.

For example, if the news report says, “The employment market is finally rebounding, with over 100,000 jobs created in the last quarter.” Well, that’s pretty good, right!? It implies an improvement on previous results.

But the same news report would leave you with a completely different impression if it was framed differently. For example, “Although 100,000 jobs were created last quarter, this is still only a fraction of the 250,000 jobs that were created in the corresponding period last year.“

Framing effect is incredibly powerful. Once you become aware of it, you’ll realize how easily it can influence your interpretation of any given set of facts. Let me tell you, I listen to media reports much more critically now.

AN IMPRESSIVE ACHIEVEMENT, UNDERMINED

In the world of office politics, the facts about any achievement can be framed in different ways, and people who play politics to get ahead are experts in the use of framing bias. I want to briefly relate a personal story of how I was blindsided by office politics despite having achieved outstanding results.

I led a program as a sponsoring executive in one company, which ultimately removed over $2 billion in capital expenditure from the company’s infrastructure investment plan. Now, that sounds pretty good to me, no matter how you say it. But even that achievement was undermined by a political enemy who wanted to damage my reputation.

To achieve those savings, we found ways to introduce operational performance improvements, which would increase existing capacity without having to build new infrastructure. Those operational improvements weren’t overly ambitious, and they were proven out in pilot programs.

Of course, I’ll never know exactly what was said, but it was most likely playing on the fear of future risk. Based on the whispers that found their way back to me, it was probably something like this: “Well, yes, Marty’s program managed to save the company a lot of money, but these people aren’t technical experts, and they don’t really understand the risk properly. If those operating performance improvements aren’t achieved, we won’t have enough capacity to meet our contractual commitments, and that could be absolutely disastrous.“

This is the damned-by-faint-praise framing effect. It sows just enough doubt in the mind of someone who isn’t close enough to the action to really know what’s true and what’s not. And that can happen even when everything goes to plan, and you smash your targets.

So, what do you reckon is happening behind closed doors when things don’t work out the way you planned?

If you don’t perform, there’s bad news and there’s good news: the bad news is that it’s unlikely that you’re going to be on the career fast track, because performance is a prerequisite for that; the good news is, you won’t have to fend off any political attacks. The political players probably won’t waste energy trying to damage your reputation because you’re not a threat to them.

Even so, the postmortem after a failed project follows a predictable pattern:

• It starts with the search for the guilty; then it progresses to

• The punishment of the innocent; and it finishes with

• The promotion of the uninvolved.

And, as we’ve seen, it’s the politicians who are often promoted.

IDENTIFYING KEY STAKEHOLDERS

What’s the antidote to all of this? How can you build a network of relationships that helps you to neutralize office politics? The short answer is that you need a critical mass of supporters throughout the organization, who will outweigh any political whispers with their positive sentiment and support.

Having a direct boss who loves your work is necessary, but not sufficient. You have to know who your key stakeholders are. You have to build strong relationships with them, and you have to influence them to help you to neutralize any negative political attacks.

We produced a podcast episode about six months ago that covered off on many of these principles. It was Ep.290: Stakeholder Mastery. Remember, this is all about managing the office politics sufficiently to give you some clean air – enough clean air so that your results can speak for themselves.

Let’s do a quick inventory of the four critical things you’ll need.

1. You’ll need support and air cover from your direct boss. Without that, nothing else matters;

2. You’ll need a critical mass of senior people in different management lines who hold you in positive regard;

3. You’ll need a level of cooperation from your peers, who you need to help you deliver your work program; and

4. You’ll need a keen awareness of any potential negative forces that might be operating in the shadows.

Start by identifying your critical stakeholders – and you need to know more than just who they are. You need to know how important each of them is to your success. Think of this like a SWOT analysis. You can categorize your stakeholders based on their criticality. First, rate each stakeholder on how influential they are to your success. Then, rate them on how strong your relationship with them is.

My first-rate management education, and the many years I spent working with some of the world’s best and brightest consulting talent taught me one thing: virtually anything can be mapped on a two-by-two matrix.

Put together a simple two-by-two grid. On one axis, put level of influence, and on the other axis, put strength of relationship. You should begin to see a pattern emerging. Start by looking at your most influential stakeholders. Who are they? Are your relationships with those stakeholders strong enough? If not, you need to work on building those relationships.

After that, identify the stakeholders you have the strongest relationships with, but you’re not really able to leverage those relationships, because they aren’t in positions that are influential to your success. How can they help you to perform better?

For example, could you ask a highly supportive stakeholder to facilitate your relationship with another senior leader? Or, perhaps help you to resolve a dispute? This might sound a little bit calculating and look, maybe it is. But this is going to influence how successful you can be, and how well you can insulate yourself from office politics.

GAINING SUPPORT OF THOSE ABOVE

Like anything, you need to put some energy into your stakeholder relationships if you want to protect yourself and your team from political attacks.

Having supportive stakeholders feeds directly into your results, because you’re way more likely to be successful when you have high-level support and cooperation from those people above you. And it’s way more likely that these people are going to speak about you in glowing terms in the rooms that you aren’t in.

But what do you do once you’ve identified the key people in your professional orbit? Just remember rule number one: Results are still the most important thing and, as a leader, your job is to achieve outcomes through others, often without direct authority and control.

In complex organizational structures, even when you’re at the middle management layers, it’s rare that you have complete control over all the resources you need to deliver your outcomes. More often than not, you’ll need to rely upon other people in other teams to deliver something for you.

This is a relatively sophisticated process, because it requires attention to a few things: developing strong trust-based relationships; communicating with extreme clarity; maintaining strong boundaries; and, of course, using your power wisely.

You have to align your key stakeholders to your vision, objectives, and deliverables. Every type of influencing can be slightly different, with different techniques for influencing in different directions. So, of course, you’ve got upwards, sideways, downwards, and the externals that you rely upon.

Let’s focus on influencing upwards first. To influence your boss, you have to establish trust and credibility.

Just take a moment to think about this from the perspective of your direct reports:

• What are the qualities that cause you to rate one person more highly than another person?

• What do they do that establishes credibility in your eyes?

• Which parts of their performance and behavior do you most value?

If you can answer these questions in respect to the people who report to you, then it’s relatively easy to swing around the other side of that, and think about how your boss might rate you in those same terms.

Like anything in leadership, once you get below the bumper sticker slogans, there’s work required to be able to do these things well. It’s all about choosing to do the right things deliberately and consistently. So, focus on demonstrating your willingness to take accountability for outcomes, do what you say you’ll do, achieve superior results, and build a team of high performers. All of those are no-regrets moves!.

HOW DO YOU INFLUENCE YOUR PEERS?

This still ignores a major piece of the puzzle, and it’s arguably the hardest piece. How do you influence your peers? You need peer support to deliver on almost everything you do, even if it’s only a sign-off from legal, or some risk management support, or access to an IT system.

This means you have to build relationships and learn how to influence across boundaries. You have to demonstrate your ability to bring people together and play nicely in the sandpit. You have to be able to leverage other people’s skills, capacity, and expertise to produce the best possible results. You have to know how much stick and how much carrot to use. And you have to know when to take the gloves off and escalate issues to a more senior decision maker.

It’s incredibly important to know who you need to influence and to have a plan for how you’re going to do that.

Influencing your colleagues in other parts of the business to achieve common goals can be challenging because you lack formal authority, and their KPIs often aren’t aligned with yours. Companies generally conduct their planning processes in isolation, so the lack of alignment between teams is hardly surprising.

Which is why, when you go to another team and tell them that they need to produce something that’s important to you, they could be forgiven for saying, “Hey, Marty, I know you need my help here, which is fun and interesting, but I don’t report to you, and my priorities don’t include doing this work for you.”

Expertise in managing these conflicts and mismatches plays a big part in your success, especially if you’re in a staff role or you’re leading a functional support group. Resolving conflicts with peers over resources, priorities, or strategies requires sophisticated negotiation and communication skills.

RESULTS + RELATIONSHIPS = POLITICAL INSULATION

In an attempt to wrap up and simplify this incredibly complex topic – your ability to neutralize office politics is ultimately going to be a function of two things:

1. The tangible value that you can create for your company; and

2. The quality of your relationships with critical stakeholders.

Direct engagement with your political opponents is unpredictable. Just having to deal with them sucks the life out of you, because they’re fundamentally dishonest, and No Bullshit Leaders have little patience for their shenanigans: they’ll deny and deflect, or they’ll blame and reframe.

You’re much better off building a positive wall of support that they can’t penetrate, no matter how skilled they are in the dark arts of Machiavellian manipulation. Your results will speak for themselves… as long as enough people recognize this, and they’re prepared to speak for you.