The Power of Floss and Other Right Moves
by Rebecca Dannenfelser, Certified Coach and Maggie Anderson
Workplace politics -- It’s like flossing. Why bother? Your future depends on it! A top tier executive of a Fortune 500 financial services firm thought his achievements should speak for themselves when his company was acquired. Surprising only to him, he wasn’t called for interviews when the new management began meeting with top talent. A champion at the company warned not to stay safe in the shadows, out of the fray -- “show up!” he urged.
The dynamics of personalities and conflicting agendas in the workplace can seem daunting, distracting or simply disinteresting, but, like flossing, skip it at your peril. Develop a few new moves and it may even improve your smile.
In an age of globalization, companies are starting to coach high potential employees on how to navigate the dynamics of rising in the company, managing projects, and championing innovative ideas. In today's work environment, being politically savvy is no longer a "nice to have" skill, says Dawn Lewis, Macy's South- VP Merchandise Planning, but a "must have" skill. The ability to read your internal company cues and translate those into positive actions that move initiatives forward is key to maintain a competitive edge. In the gathering talent war, if political understanding makes people more confident, they will surely be easier to retain. Recent research points to the value of putting company resources into improving the political savvy of key employees. Ken Dychtwald, CEO of Age-Wave and author of Workforce Crisis says that most companies, blissfully unaware of the coming crisis, think there will be an unending supply of young workers. But some forward-thinking companies are responding to the coming 5-10 million worker shortage expected over the next decade. They are making their company a place where high caliber people want to go to work and want to stay.
Finding political balance is both art and science, and frankly it is only recently that politics in the workplace has been seen in a positive light. If you are looking for action steps you may want to skip to How Do You Win at Work?” later in this article. First, I’m going to talk about three types of political situations that I think should be of keen interest to companies: unproductive competition; something I will call “the stress of doing well;” and the politics of winning streaks and losing streaks.
Maximizing Talent by Looking at How they Compete
Stanford University economist Muriel Niederle co-authored a study: “Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?” 1
Her answer to the first question and maybe the 2nd is “Yes.”
Niederle and her co-researcher economist Lise Vesterlund did a controlled experiment in which male and female subjects indicated a willingness, or lack of willingness, to have their work rated in a competition -- in this case a tournament involving the solution of simple math problems. Men and women performed the tasks equally well, they found, but women at all ability levels were less likely to choose a tournament setting. Why were women of equal ability less likely to choose to compete? There were many subsequent theories, one being that because the participants could see each other, although not each other’s scores, the men’s confident or assertive body-language may have influenced women to back down. The question for companies, however, as they look to maximizing the effectiveness of their people, is whether to teach traditional leadership skills, or to focus on building confidence and assertiveness in employees whose talent may not be showing up.
Interestingly, the same study showed that 75% of men in the study, when asked to rate themselves, guessed they were best in their group. Only 43% of women guessed they were best. So not only do high-performing women compete too rarely, but men compete with unwarranted confidence, even in areas where they are low performers. One take-away for managers and HR departments is to rely more on objective assessments when hiring and promoting, recognizing that while confidence is a valuable asset, you may pass up talent for the person who competes well, but won’t necessarily perform well. Another is to recognize the value of coaching women and men with talent to master the politics of competing effectively.
Is Promotion Punishment as Well as Reward at your Company?
Almost 60% of 600 managers surveyed by global HR consultancy DDI rated promotions as second only to coping with divorce, both were rated as very or extremely challenging.2 Once someone has learned the ropes and produced results for the company, we move them up. To a new group difficult to break in, challenging to learn and balance the new personalities. Learning a new job, it is difficult to produce the kind of outcomes that build credibility and how productive can they be? And is this a reward? A promotion rarely comes with the kind of coaching that would help someone quickly recognize and manage the political dynamics in a way that is productive for the team and the company. You have to ask whether competent managers might even avoid promotions that could benefit the company because they know what perils lie ahead.
Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks
Confidence, or lack of it, is not just a characteristic of individuals, but applies to organizations and their external stakeholders as well. Confidence, or positive expectations for success, produces peak performance: a willingness to invest, commit, work hard, persist and persevere, making confidence a highly desirable trait, urge Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Robert Kiechel.3
In their article How Leaders Create Winning Streaks they define four levels of confidence in companies, with each level building on the prior one:
- Self-confidence: the belief that "I can do it."
- Team confidence: or confidence in each other, counting on each other, giving and receiving respect and support, and giving and taking responsibility.
- System confidence: which entails people in organizations having confidence in the organizational structures and the routines for accountability, collaboration, and initiative.
- External confidence: This is confidence that external stakeholders, based on their positive expectations produced by the previous three levels of confidence, will invest to provide resources (money, time, energy, etc.).
Confidence and winning is a cyclical process that feeds off of itself, say Kanter and Kiechel, as does lack of confidence and losing. Companies that support a good mood and positive work environment can anticipate positive behaviors from their employees such as open communication, self-scrutiny to continuously improve, respect, and cooperation. Positive behaviors lead to good problem-solving based on information and facts, teamwork and speed, and creativity and courage; in turn, good problem-solving leads to disciplines and practices that take organizations to a higher level of accountability, collaboration and initiative. Each of these factors lead to winning, and winning reinforces the actions and leads to greater confidence.
Winning also yields positive attention from the press and stockholders, say Kanter and Kiechel, which increases the likelihood of attracting investments, and financial success. Successful companies also attract the best people who like to work for winners. Winners get better deals and are left alone by others who don't want to disrupt the winning.
Kanter and Kiechel describe the culture of losing as one of low energy and self-doubt; there are dysfunctional behaviors with blame and infighting; lack of information and less teamwork that results in poor problem-solving; and disciplines and practices that are eroded. These losing behaviors in turn cause the organization to lose even more, which also translates into a decline in external confidence. Negative attention and bad press lead to fewer and less loyal fans and to declining external resources; losing teams get less favorable deals; and the effects of losing cause disruptions and distractions. It seems obvious that companies, executives, managers and HR departments would choose the spiral of winning, but how to go about it may not be as clear.
How do you Win at Work?
Individuals will commonly hire a coach and train themselves to respond differently to those around them. One person responding mindfully can change the dynamics and cause everyone in the group to re-evaluate their responses. But in any case having an advocate and an alternate perspective of a coach can quickly move you to a new level of play in the group’s dynamics.
Companies who want the benefits of a positive political environment can pick up on this trend from a few benchmark organizations that have proved it’s good for the bottom line!
Whether implementing a company-wide strategy, or coaching individual executives and managers, the best strategy for employers says Workforce Crisis author Ken Dychtwald is to take your human capital seriously.4
Why is Google so Great? From the beginning Google’s founders made it a priority to get and keep the best talent by creating a work environment where people love to work.5
Managers at Best Buy may show up after lunch, or work from a laptop beside the pool. An innovative work group at Best Buy secretly developed and tested a radical prototype work model that evaluates performance on what is accomplished rather than how much time is spent in the office.6 Overcoming the fears and objections of upper management would have been more difficult if the results had not been so convincing.
Two other 2007 winners in the annual “100 Best Places to Work” competition were companies who re-evaluated and improved their political culture to improve the bottom line. At Volvo the theme is respecting every employee as a “self-employed person responsible for his/her task.”7 At the Oil & Gas multi-national Valero it is building credibility by listening from the bottom up, and keeping promises made to employees, even in times of change.8 In all four of these examples, and many other companies, the trend is toward enhancing work environments to build loyalty, trust, feelings of respect and responsibility as a means to developing and getting the most from their talent pool.
For you as an individual who may not have the clout to move your organization in this direction yet, author Kathleen Kelley Reardon advises not to disdain or avoid office politics, because at the office, it’s all politics!9
Hard work and talent are simply not enough. If you want to realize your potential and find fulfillment in the jobs where you will spend one-third to one-half of your time, you need to learn how to read people and situations to determine how and when to push your own agenda. To determine how politically savvy you are, Reardon offers this quick self-assessment:
- Do you and your ideas get noticed and responded to the way you want?
- Do you know how to create allies for you and your ideas?
- When you enter a negotiation can you manage the outcome?
- Do you have different communication styles for different personalities you need to influence?
- Do you know when and how to present your ideas to get a fair hearing?
- Are you in the loop?
“People pay attention if they perceive that you are powerful,” says Reardon.
“To influence them, you have to know what makes them tick.”
To be an astute politician in the workplace you must:
- Be intuitive -- stay aware of people and events around you
- Listen without immediately saying (or thinking) yes or no
- Ask questions
- Gather all the information and re-assess it for new and better outcomes
- Be flexible -- adjust your goals, or change your approach when necessary
So get out the floss and get political!
When backstabbing, unfair competition and trickery are the only definition of workplace politics, employees might understandably avoid politics altogether. But so doing will also limit their output and their advancement. Alternatively, they may perpetuate the company’s pattern of destructive dynamics, aiming to win. But both research and successful benchmark companies are providing a new definition of office politics that can advance companies to a higher level of productivity by capitalizing on the unrealized potential of employees. People contribute more, and more creatively when they learn how to be effective in an environment where political infers more wisdom than war.
- Knowledge at Wharton “Do Women Shy Away from Competition, Even When They Can Win?” November 16, 2005
- www.personneltoday.com Thursday, 22 February 2007
- How Leaders Create Winning Streaks, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Walter Kiechel, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, December 13, 2004
- Workforce Crisis - Ken Dychtwald, CEO Age-Wave interviewed in Videoviews, Businessweek, 2007
- www.greatplacetowork.com/best/100best2007
- Michelle Conlin, BusinessWeek Online, 11/30/06
- www.greatplacetowork.com/best/100best2007
- www.greatplacetowork.com/best/100best2007
- It’s All Politics Kathleen Kelley Reardon, Ph.D., Doubleday, 2005
