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acknowledging the challenges of office politics
Understanding office politics doesn’t mean you’ve sold your soul; it means you’ve bought a better map.
The key points to get along with office politics include forgetting fairness, managing one’s boss, acting like the person others want to see, being visible, accumulating allies, and handling adversaries effectively. 1
We need to understand this game to get ahead. I know, it’s gross. But we’re not here to save souls; we’re here to get a raise and better health insurance.
You’re probably not gonna like everything you read below but I don’t make the rules. It’s time to learn how to play the game better, how to be smarter with our behavior, and, above all, to be strategic. 2
- Forget Fairness, Look for Leverage
- Fairness is not always a determining factor in career advancement and that having leverage, such as a higher position, access to resources, or a good reputation, can significantly impact one’s career.
- Leverage is the ability to get people to help you achieve your goals.
- It’s less about what you know and more about who owes you a favor.
- Manage Your Boss
- Art of managing one’s boss. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the boss’s needs, priorities, and communication style to build a strong working relationship.
- The goal is to make managing you the easiest part of their day.
- For political success, you need to stop worrying about how your boss treats you and focus on how you treat them. Your goal is to make your boss feel like managing you is the easiest part of their day.
- You don’t need to be a superstar; you just need to be really, really good at pleasing the person who decides your fate.
- Know their likes and dislikes, their priorities, how they like work done, their preferred communication style and frequency, etc. Don’t know? Ask.
- Produce quality results, respond to people quickly, and never, never, never complain to others about them.
- Sound hard? Oh, it is. But the biggest mistake people make is not thinking about all this from the boss’s perspective.
- Act Like the Person You Want Them to See
- Let’s be clear: while “being yourself” is an excellent strategy for therapy sessions and writing snarky blog posts, it is not a mainstream career strategy.
- The importance of perception in the workplace suggests that being oneself may not always be the best strategy and that acting like the person others want to see can be beneficial for career advancement.
- Perceptions are reality in the workplace. And successfully managing perceptions = political skills.
- Want to know how to act at the office? Look around. Don’t listen to what they say will get you ahead. Watch what the successful people do.
- See who gets recognized, praised, or promoted and act like them.
- This is where you get to witness the truth in all its ugly glory.
- Be Visible
- We all want to believe that good work speaks for itself, but it’s not enough to be good at your job; you have to be good at making sure everyone knows you’re good at your job.
- Prioritize your work based on visibility to upper management. It’s not “work smarter, not harder.” No. It’s “work smarter, and also louder”:
- Emphasizes the need to prioritize projects based on their visibility to upper management.
- Accumulate Allies
- People who avoid interaction have fewer allies. And people without allies are vulnerable.
- Prioritizing interactions with people who can help achieve goals and being proactive in offering help to others.
- Handle Adversaries
- All adversaries are bothersome, but not all bothersome people are adversaries. So make sure to ask yourself the question: Is this person really my opponent or just someone I find annoying?
- Never, ever forget: expending time and energy in an unnecessary war is for fools, especially when things are not zero sum.
- Machiavelli said it’s better to be feared than loved.
- Machiavelli also said that you want to be feared–but never hated.
- How do you commit career suicide?
- Being seen as someone who makes life more difficult.
- Being a good person in a not-good place.
Understanding office politics doesn’t mean you’ve sold your soul; it means you’ve bought a better map.