The path to the corner office is laden with landmines. The most deadly of these is office politics. office politics can wreak havoc with realizing your potential if all your good work gets undermined by rumors and innuendo, and rubbing people the wrong way. In this lesson, you'll learn how to manage office politics. Zoeller and Preston authors of enhancing your executive edge to find workplace politics as the use of power within an organization for the pursuit of agendas and self interest without regard to their effect on the organization's efforts to achieve its goals. In other words, when we start thinking about ourselves, instead of thinking about the collective interests of the organization, executive presence is recognizing that you must always be managing the perception that we have of others that we have of ourselves and the impression that we convey to others financial exotic Seek to be understood, and our ideas taken seriously by those around us, by our superiors by our peers, and by those we manage directly.
When office politics get involved, it doesn't matter how qualified you are, or how great your ideas are, you will fail if you haven't managed the politics appropriately. This is one of the social intelligence situations that we discussed. In our first lesson. you demonstrate high social intelligence by not challenging your audience or trying to manage their perceptions of you. Instead, manage perceptions by playing to your audience. Playing to our audience requires us to communicate and their frame of reference.
Amy Cuddy makes a distinction between personal power and social power. social power comes from our position relative to another person. We can order our employees to do something, but we can't force them to like us or to become loyal and committed. would be an example of challenging our audience. Instead, consider using your personal power as we learned about in the course on confidence. personal power is a freedom from dominance.
When you tap into your personal power, you exhibit the best you have to offer in any situation. Playing to your audience means being more open and optimistic. It means being your authentic self. In turn, you display a higher level of social intelligence. Cuddy has discovered that when we feel powerful, it helps not only represent the best version of ourselves to others, but allows us to build trust in others. Trust is the foundation of relationships.
In the context of office politics, there is often a breach of trust. Someone is gossiping information they shouldn't. Someone is going around someone else to get ahead. When office politics is alive, and well, the assumption of trust erodes, let's give you a chance to play along. Consider this scenario. How Will you deal with this situation?
You are the CFO and have just committed a board meeting, when the directors have mandated a 10% cost reduction, which will mean significant layoffs across the company and in every department. The CEO has directed each executive to go back to the departments and figure out a plan to achieve this mandate. You're very well respected by your finance team because of your open communication and inclusive style. But in this situation, you recognize that some of your staff will need to be laid off. What do you do? Well, there's a number of options, you could hold a staff meeting to debrief them of the board meeting and place blame with the wishes of the board.
Number two, you can meet with the senior finance staff to devise a plan. Number three, hold this information confidentially and devise the plan yourself. Or Finally, number four, hold the staff meeting to debrief them and discuss the reality of the situation. Office Paul text will most definitely come into play in the situation. Who do you tell? And when?
If you tell one person, how can you be certain that the rumor will not be spread? Obviously, the first option exposes you should work it back to the board. The second option includes some people, but not others. So while this might seem like the best approach, there are all sorts of opportunities for leaks to happen and favoritism to emerge. The third option is the safest, but it too can backfire if your team hears of the news from someone else first. The fourth option is risky simply because you don't want to create unnecessary anxiety.
However, from an office politics perspective, it's the least risky and you are less apt to get blindsided being open and transparent. Which one did you think of when you went through this? Let me ask you a follow up question. What can you do to prevent office politics and here are some ideas Keep sensitive information to yourself. Be clear and concise with company updates. share news with everyone rather than select customers.
Don't show favoritism, which is easier said than done. Build camaraderie among your team. Keep records and document key meetings. Don't compare yourself with others and their accomplishments. That's always a tough one as well. Don't try and make yourself look good at someone else's expense.
They will come back to hurt you. in your workbook exercise for helps you self assess your susceptibility to playing office politics. See for yourself whether you just might be hurting yourself. However, don't mistake office politics for business politics. Executives spent a tremendous amount of time talking about the people aspect of the business. So what is the difference between talking about people in a business context versus office politics?
Business Success is Dependent first and foremost on people, it's necessary to cultivate the leadership pool to ensure the long term sustainability and growth of the business. gossiping is talking about personal aspects of individuals that have no bearing on job performance or organizational results. When we talk about people and their contributions to the success or failure of corporate objectives, these are not office politics. When you talk about people in a business context, be mindful to pick your fights very carefully. And always maintain your composure when dealing with people issues, and make sure that you're dealing with facts, not opinions. And in any business, there will always be challenging people issues to confront layoffs, poor performance, fairness among staff.
These issues must be dealt with in a straight forward, honest manner, to ensure the success of the business and your role as a competent executive with a better understanding of office politics out of the way Let's focus our efforts now on how we form positive perceptions with others.