Office Politics
Useful notes from the Renaissance
As a coach, you find out what you’re good at by trying a lot of different things, noting what works for the client and what you enjoy. Over time, you develop skills that may be very different from what you expected you’d be good at. It’s an organic process, one that can’t be forced.
In my own practice, I was surprised to find that one of the things I was best at was helping people navigate the treacheries of internal politics.
The co-worker who tries to undercut you while maintaining a falsely sweet and innocent demeanor. The boss who plays people off one another. The manager who withholds vital information when you’re trying to complete a project. The direct report who goes behind your back. The gossip cabal that tries to discredit your efforts.
People tend to find these painful but all-too-familiar situations baffling. They invest serious time trying to figure out why their boss has suddenly become hyper-critical of their performance. They ponder at length why someone they considered a friend has turned against them. Or why a manager would make a habit of slowing down projects she is responsible for by not giving her team the resources it needs.
In other words, I see a lot of people expending energy trying to come up with rational explanations for destructive behaviors.
“You’d think he’d recognize how much I’ve been contributing.”
“You’d think she’d want to see our client project moving ahead.”
“You’d think he’d value a team that works well together.”
The problem is that office politics are less about rationality than about power, and the various ways people may perceive what would serve their interests. Looking at the situation through this lens—trying to figure out how a person causing problems might believe their behavior benefits them— is the key to understanding what, if anything, to do about it.
Take Dinah, the senior sales manager at a digital advertising firm. She’d been on the fast track, but shortly before she came to see me, she hit a major stall. Kevin, her company’s co-CEO, had become scathingly negative about her after an internal staff gathering at a resort at which Dinah had flirted openly with a co-worker.
“The guy I was flirting with and I are both single,” she told me. “And in any case, nothing happened between us. Plus stuff like this goes on all the time– most of our staff are young.’ Still, once Kevin let Dinah know he was upset, she apologized to him and to Steve, the other co-CEO.
“Steve told me he didn’t see it as a problem,” she said. “And when I met with the head of HR, she described it as ‘water under the bridge.’ But Kevin would not let it go. He actually told me he felt he couldn’t trust me around our clients. I was just stunned, because there had been no clients present. And because he’s never been a prude.”
Dinah was especially incensed because she’d been the company’s top sales performer for the last two years. “You’d think he’d see me as an asset, not a problem. Do I really deserve to have my career blown up over one silly night?”
What Dinah deserves, of course, is not the issue.
Kevin’s over-the-top and out-of-character reaction suggested that Dinah’s misguided flirtation might simply have been a pretext for him to attack her. So she and I dug down on what the real issue could be. As we talked, it became apparent that Kevin and Steve’s awkward co-leadership roles might be a factor.
Kevin had been Steve’s boss before the previous CEO retired, and Kevin had been expected to succeed to that role. However, he and Steve had been jointly promoted in order to head off a major board fight, since Kevin had a few well-placed detractors.
Since Dinah had previously reported to Steve, who was widely viewed as her champion, it would hardly be surprising if Kevin viewed tarnishing Dinah as a way to diminish Steve and boost himself with the board. Dinah seemed reluctant to consider this, not because she had such a high opinion of Kevin, but because she believed she had contributed too much to the company’s bottom line to be slighted in this way.
“He should value me,” she protested. “It’s in his best interest!”
Maybe so, but, as is often the case, that’s beside the point. What matters is that Kevin may well see diminishing Dinah as a means to enhance his own power. It’s not pretty, and people who operate this way often end up flaming out, but it’s far from uncommon. People can be poor judges of what actually serves their own interests, especially when they feel they’ve been humiliated.
This has always been true. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote an entire treatise on how to gain and amass power– often advocating cutting a rival’s supporters off at the knees. His book, known in English as The Prince, has been continuously in print since 1572. Always controversial, Machiavelli has been frequently denounced for the brutal realism of his counsel, with his name at times synonymous with untrustworthy, cutthroat, or even evil.
I however would argue that the great Florentine’s profoundly cynical view of human nature can provide a clear-eyed antidote to naïve expectations and easy moral judgments. Especially in the brilliant 2011 Tim Parks translation.
Machiavelli declares in his prologue that his central aim is always to describe “what men do rather than what they ought to do.” Or, I might add, what they say they are doing. This is one reason I’ve found Machiavelli to be a useful aid in coaching. People often miss the subtle ways that people they work with try to undermine others in order to enhance their own power. Like Dinah, people take situations at face value (“Kevin’s never been a prude”). Also like Dinah, they wonder why a person who is clearly dissing them seems not to perceive how their value.
In fact, it’s often precisely their value that makes them a target.
Dinah’s impulse was to confront Kevin, but this would clearly be useless, while talking to Steve or the head of HR– her other ideas– might well be seen as divisive. Better to ignore his presumably feigned outrage, continue delivering superb work, and put her efforts into building a broader and stronger network of supporters who could help minimize the impact of Kevin’s disdain.
This in fact is what Machiavelli, who always stresses the strategic value of allies, would advise. Both because allies make it harder for others to move against us, and because they usually provide us with advance warning when someone is trying to sabotage our efforts.
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