
Our definition of what qualifies as “office politics” can be broad and vary person-to-person. But its existence is hardly a surprise given that we all work with other humans. It also easily one of those taboo topics that most of us want to avoid at all costs. Yet, it may well be a deciding factor in your career growth.
At a high level, it’s any unofficial effort to achieve your goals.
Most of us focus on the negative actions and look down on anything that could be labeled as “politics”. Without a doubt there are clear unethical versions of office politics that are toxic to the work environment. Like colleagues bad-mouthing each other. But we also include our feelings, like having no control over decisions as we feel they’re not being made in the open.
It might seem like this doesn’t apply to every situation. Especially if your day-to-day is writing software, generating AI prompts or building risk reports. But we all work within a social network (sorry meta) and not in isolation.
So, with the help of a few examples, let’s look at negative forms of “office politics” to avoid, then cover what’s in your control and how you can set yourself up for success.
What’s NOT acceptable?
One definition of office politics is — Activities performed by individuals to improve their status and advance their personal agenda — sometimes at the expense of others.
Clearly this definition points to negative aspects of office politics. Let’s look at some real-life examples shared by readers —
1. Interpersonal issues
“In a hierarchy structure of Me -> Director 1 -> Director 2-> VP, the Director 2 does not like Director 1 and continuously creates a situation where me and my team have to pick sides.”
This is clearly an unethical competition and should be raised to the VP as such. That’s the easy answer. It’s rarely that straightforward when talking to leadership about their direct reports. They’ll have their own preferences and might be less open to feedback. But inaction can lead to a situation that slowly devolves into distrust within your team and possibly worse, creates a more toxic culture where others start to emulate this behavior.
A more general approach here would be to gather some data. For example — do you have specific examples of this behavior, can others validate your impression and do you have direct stakeholder impact to point towards. In most circumstances, managers and HR reps will value data over feelings and take appropriate actions.
2. Unclear lines between teams
“Due to unclear ownership and accountability between teams, leadership on your side has a different view about your team’s role and responsibilities than what your stakeholder team thinks. This leads to a never ending debate about which team should be responsible for working on any enhancements or handling production issues.”
This is usually due to leadership indecision that results in team boundaries not being clearly defined. Sometimes, it’s an outcome of a messy reorg. Regardless, the result is that the teams have to face this conflict on the ground and make decisions that leadership might not fully support. Or worse, risk disappointing the stakeholders.
A good starting point is to show your leadership the impact to stakeholders. One clear example is your team’s roadmaps will start to feel more ad-hoc, instead of meeting specific stakeholder needs. It’s also possible that other teams in this structure feel the same pain. So if leadership help is missing, reach out across teams to come up with a shared roadmap (or shared production playbooks). This might bring more stability to your teams.
In your career, you might deal with even worse forms of office politics that leads to what we fear the most — a toxic work culture.
People are great at rationalizing their decisions. So there’s no guarantee that raising these cases would solve all the issues. Which ultimately leads to burn out and feeling disconnected with the rest of the organization.
So it might be worth considering if the way your company operates is compatible with your values. If the answer is no, it’s time to move on. Wasting your energy to bring change might not be worth it.
What’s In Your Control?
The biggest thing in your control is yourself. Specifically, only you can control how you achieve your goals. Everyone else also has goals they want to achieve. These goals are usually for getting some scarce resource like a promotion or investment into their project. So the challenge is — How do you achieve your goals without creating a toxic work culture?
Reframing Your Reality
Reframing others actions within your organization is an important first step. Maybe you have been judging others unfairly and attributing their actions purely “political”. This comes from understanding your own reality and being able to clearly see the intent behind others actions. Maybe spending time understanding leadership priorities isn’t “sucking up”.
Relationship Currency
Another way to look at “office politics” is that — it’s about building relationship currency and influence capital.
When starting our careers, the majority of us don’t spend much time thinking about influence. We’re too new to be worrying about it. Our main objective is to understand the job well enough to not make fools of ourselves. So we focus on building our “performance currency”. As we gain more experience, relationships and influence start to matter a bit more.
More impactful projects usually have more dependencies to keep track off. With those dependencies, you need to know “what’s the most impactful work” that needs to get done right now. Which you can only possibly know by building relationships across stakeholder groups. You can then further use your influence to create common or shared goals with other teams.
Investing in your network can help you achieve your goals.
Before I appreciated this fact, my gut reaction was to avoid thinking about it. When a project got stuck, I either expected my manager to use their influence or hope that things would eventually go my way.
Flexibility
One of the most important factors that I have seen for success has been “flexibility”. Simple put — can you work with others to reach common ground? This is very difficult for people from science backgrounds because we rely on data as a source of truth.
So when someone pushes back on our projects or doesn’t prioritize their work the way we want, our rational mind finds it hard to justify that. This leads to frustration. Whereas the reason for pushback could simply be timing or resources on the other team. When a team says “we don’t have the resources”, ask to review their roadmap and see if you can find some common pattern that also meets your requirement.
Understanding Context
Other important factor is knowing which battles to fight. Even if you’re known for being flexible and “easy to work with”, at some point you might feel like “I must say NO to this request or plan”. Most situations aren’t that. Understanding the situation and broader context comes with experience and is easy to see in hindsight. But you can start building that muscle.
Summary
So if you’re not in a toxic work environment, then
Understanding intent behind actions, being more flexible and knowing which battles to fight can help you reach your goals.
Investing in relationships and building a trusted network of supporters and sponsors (allies) is worth your time.
For influencing decision makers, try and understand the motivating factors for them and what you need to deliver to gain more influence currency.
If you’re in a leadership position yourself, build a transparent and inclusive environment, foster healthy debates and empower teams to focus on shared goals. Also, take time to counsel others if they’re making mistakes.
It’s safe to say that we should expect some form of “office politics” in every organization and that it isn’t going away in the age of AI. But like any other skill set, you can understand it better and make it work for you.
Would love to hear if you have any thoughts or stories to share. Please add them in the comment section below.
To support me, please click ❤️ or subscribe with the button below. This will help me write more stories like this one. 🙏
The office politics is a byproduct of Inter personal relationship and competitive approach at various levels from Boss to colleagues, in a way it’s necessary evil that brings best out of employees but certainly not at the cost of stepping on toes of others . To achieve the goals of organisation requires faith and understanding amongst workers and hierarchy to avoid one man up manship but through collective approach. An interesting read…well covered 👍