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When I was teaching MBAs at the Harvard Business School, I’d sometimes have people say to me the equivalent of I hate organizational politics. And my response was always the same, “get over it,” or be prepared not to be effective. Politics is an essential part of every human organization, and there’s simply no avoiding it. How then do you engage in it productively? How do you do so with authenticity? How do you do so with purpose? Because I think intent and the kinds of activity you do make the difference between those who understand and use organizational politics to achieve great things and those who engage in self-serving behavior.
Political Savvy
One important thing I try to convey to the high-potential leaders I work with is that as you move to more senior levels in organizations, politics only becomes more important. You need to build alliances, of course, externally as you interact with governments, NGOs, social groups, but also internally. You need to build those alliances because there aren’t clear answers that data provides to the most important problems the organization is facing. And just to be clear about why you do this, this is when authority doesn’t get you very far. It’s when really the name of the game is influence, support, alliances, relationships. That’s the territory that you’re fundamentally operating on.
Influencing Others
Political savvy often also is associated with, you know, emotional intelligence, the ability to read the room, more a set of skills that are, you know, super important but emotional at their core. But what often gets missed is the strategic dimension of operating politically in organizations. Early in my career, I studied international diplomacy and got to work with some of the world’s great diplomats. I learned a great deal from them, including the fundamental principle of thinking always in terms of alliances and always in terms of coalitions and then beginning to do the analysis of what is the winning coalition I need to build. Given that you’ve got powerful players pursuing their agendas, you need to think about how you align yourself and mobilize the energy of the system.
It’s essential to recognize that there are certain tactics that you can use that will help you influence people. A classic example of this is what’s known as sequencing strategy. It’s about first and foremost being clear about who your stakeholders are, what’s potential support and opposition, who defers to who in terms of influence networks, and then crafting a sequence of interactions that you’re going to engage in. I’m going to talk first to Christian, and then I’m going to talk to Stephanie. And if I have Christian and Stephanie on board, then getting Robert on board is going to be easier. And I need to be careful in the process not to overplay things in a way that causes Trudy to feel threatened by what I’m trying to do and start to do things to mobilize, you know, potential opposition.
A related idea is the idea of progressive entanglement, and that’s about moving people step-by-step to a place that they wouldn’t have gone in a single leap. Sometimes that’s about defining a fair and transparent process such that at the end of the process, people can’t really argue that much against the outcome because you’ve engaged them with the process. Sometimes it’s about establishing the right set of principles that then govern what happens thereafter in similar ways. Sometimes it’s about just getting people to make small commitments that then turn into larger commitments. Regardless, just think about this process of pulling people along, getting them on board, but doing it in a way that’s really more progressive and not trying to go immediately to the answer.