Three steps to manage office politics during difficult times

Distrust the leader who says “politics don’t exist here — we’re a happy ship.” He’s either lying or in denial. Politics are inevitable. All businesses have them. They’re a consequence of the different, sometimes competing, agenda points that an organisation needs to balance in order to make progress.

Tension between agendas can be healthy: it can force open debate about priorities, keep people on their game, and inspire new ways of thinking. But when politics aren’t managed correctly, huge, momentum-sapping inertia is often the consequence.

Organisations will struggle to navigate through the problems they face without learning how to manage the politics that exert sway on their decision-making. This means that unhealthy politics have an unfortunate habit of coming home to roost at difficult times. This is partly because problems bring with them a very real risk of failure. They also create the very real risk of radical, uncomfortable, long-term change. Change threatens survival — and, as any psychologist will tell you, survival is the biggest motivational driver of human behaviour.

Even if they don’t directly affect survival, unhealthy politics can also interfere with employee engagement, satisfaction and loyalty. So, how do you manage your politics well during difficult times? Here are three simple — if often challenging — steps you can take.

Step 1: Get real

Openly acknowledging that you have unhealthy politics in your organisation might be daunting, but is often a moment of great liberation for leaders and their teams.

There are two reasons why people live in fear of calling them out. The first one is obvious — doing so can feel wasteful, uncomfortable and self-regarding. Surely time would be better spent identifying and solving the “actual” problems at hand? To which the answer is: the trouble with elephants in the room is that they tend to block out the light and limit room for manoeuvre.

Change creates survival worries.

The second reason is less obvious, and is to do with control. Some leaders like to indulge in a divide and conquer approach, believing that careful, Machiavellian manipulation of the political context will drive people to perform at their best. In some situations this may be true — although it is debatable whether the human cost of such a sadistic approach to management is ever worth it.

But this approach does not work in any situation which relies on an organisation harnessing the ingenuity of its people — for example, problem-solving in a crisis. Politics become healthy when light, not heat, is brought to bear on them.

So, that’s where to start: by acknowledging that unhealthy politics might be damaging your collective ability to address the problems you are facing.

Step 2: Go hunting

Politics are also a function of how a leader behaves. Unhealthy politics are often a manifestation of an individual’s blind spots, insecurities and worries. And pointing this out to a leader can be challenging for team members, who are often incentivised to keep quiet by virtue of the influence that the leader exerts over their careers.

Pixar CEO Ed Catmull drove this point home in his book Creativity Inc: people will hide things from leaders precisely because they are leaders, and being honest can feel risky for the individual.

But it is essential to look at the issue from the other end of the telescope. In what ways might you be encouraging your teams to hide the truth from you, because you have no facility to deal with it? What’s the brutal truth that you need to face, but can’t?

Hunting down, and acknowledging, the unhealthy contributions that you — possibly unwittingly — are making to your politics is a vital step on the road to recovery.

Step 3: Open up

Next, try and encourage open conversations about this issue. In your next strategy meeting, ask each of your team what sort of politics they feel exist in your organisation. Hunt down the problems. How are your politics helping or hindering you making progress? What type of politics is most prevalent? And how are they contributing to your current difficulties?

Depending on how politically stifled your team has been, some coaching around these sorts of conversations may be necessary. But the sheer freshness of this sort of exchange can create a huge momentum for organisational change.

This simple three-step journey — get real, go hunting, open up — is uncomfortable but essential emotional labour. There are few greater liberations for a team than curing unhealthy politics. It stops energy being sapped in unnecessary battles, and instead allows it to flow where it’s needed: into human ingenuity, where the real problem-solving power lies.

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