Surviving Organizational Politics # 2

This is in continuation with the series posted earlier.

Part - 1 of Surviving Organizational Politics

7. Never ever take anything important verbally:

In this age, verbal communication is useless. Ask for a written communication, always. If (s)he is right and ethical, there will not be any problem. In fact, they will prefer it. Otherwise, highly political people never prefer written communication.

If you need an important commitment, have it written. If the other person is not doing it, do it yourself and ask for confirmation.

8. Treat politics as a type of problem solving

A programmer treats his or her coding work with intense discipline and creativity: similarly, a designer for building new auto components or an architect building a skyscraper. If you treat politics with the same discipline and creativity, chances are high that you will be able to manage politics well.

9. Recognize the best forms of power

There are many forms of power such as referral, reward, punishment, expert, legitimate etc. However, the best forms of power are two – expert and reward.

From prehistoric age to this day, every form of reward has been constituted to display certain user of power under the hood. Use it both ways – for your sub-ordinates and your seniors (not superiors!). Generally the later form of reward for seniors are not there in a company – but then, institute one yourself.

10. Have your cheat sheet handy

There will be many conflicting interests working in an organization such as self-interest, ego, dislike, etc. and also there will be true desire for a successful project or product.

You need to have your cheat sheer handy and ready and it should include questions like:

What are the goals for this project this month or week?

What are the criteria to make sure that decisions being made are good for the project?

Are we using our power to best serve the project?

People may disagree with the questions, but they are disagreeing or agreeing on the right kind of questions. Even the highly political people can not avoid pointed questions like the ones above.

11. Divide and rule

It works with products, marketing strategy and it also works with politics. A group is an illusion. Do not run behind the conclusions being driven in a group meeting. As a matter of fact, rarely things work out in any meeting – hence the name “meeting”! So divide the group into people – people with influence, people with knowledge, people with power etc. and follow them one by one, separately.

12. Know your battles and know your wars

Loss of many battles is compensated by a single war. You need to ask yourself if the battle that you are in, is worth that much as it might have been spent well in certain other productive activities. So, if you have to walk away from certain battles for a bigger war to win, do that.

To be continued . . .

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