I have been thinking about writing something on Internal Politics in an organization. Inspired by politics at my work place, I had many faces coming to my mind when I started to write this blog. I would be doing injustice to my organization, if I publish this blog with their names. Hence, I am withholding the names. I guess, people who are concerned would understand when they read this.
For describing people, I have made use of the word ‘him’. This doesn’t mean that only men are into it. Please read ‘him’ as ‘her’, wherever applicable.
Many a times we see a lot of employees leaving their jobs because they find the work place politics affecting their normal life. Internal politics involving the people at work place not only affects the normal working, but also makes employees migrate to other organizations. This results in lose of human resource of an organization. To get good people for working in the organization in itself is a difficult task. However, ignoring the internal politics at work place can cost the companies dearly.
People usually want to remain in their own group; they do not like others to invade their territory. Hence, we can find a lot of groups in any office. The Groups try to promote the people in their group more, over others. Sometimes they try to let down the people from other groups. This creates inter group rivalries. The Groups tries to hinder the working of other groups, even forgetting the goals of the organization. Many a times, groups are also based on the region and language(s) people speak.
Many people try to be smart and play with the emotions of others. Now, these guys are not part of any Groups, but all the Groups think that he is their man. I wish to call them words starting with A or *, but my civilization and upbringing does not allow me to do so. These people can be called as Friend to none, Foe to all. They aim at and succeed in creating misunderstandings between the people. They also succeed in making their rivals look bad by destroying images (you know what I mean). These cowards never fight their enemies directly, but provoke others to take revenge for them. They most often isolate their main enemy from others, mostly through speculation. When the rival feels that he is all alone, this guy steps in. Master Tacticians… The next step is to make the lonely person confide in him and then use the secrets for individual benefits at the right time. This enables them to deal with the rival without fighting him directly. This can be called as the most dangerous phase of internal politics as it is difficult to know what others are plotting against us.
Even people who are not part of the internal politics are not safe. Most of the times, members of some or the other group try to woo people and if they don’t succeed, they tend to bend on destroying them.
It would be unrealistic to assume that any organization would be totally immune from politics. There are generally several reasons why politics exist and how much politics exist; however, politics is often ignored and viewed as a necessary evil. People split into factions, pull their organizations apart, make gaps to charge through, and generally act in ways that show a total lack of emotional intelligence.
Politics within an organization can be compared to several forces pulling in different directions as opposed to these same forces all pulling in the same direction. Anyone with some background in physics is aware that forces pulling in the same direction are additive while forces pulling in different directions are subtractive. The end result depends on the intensity of the forces at play and how well they are aligned and how badly they are misaligned.
Realistically, it is difficult to imagine that forces within an organization would always be perfectly aligned. However, it is management’s responsibility to monitor the forces at play and to jump in whenever these become too misaligned.
Internal politics seems to be present in very small organizations too. There might be fewer forces at play, but the intensity and depth of rivalry can sometimes far exceed what can be observed in larger organizations.
What can be done to minimize politics?
At this point, the solutions that can be put in place to minimize politics should be fairly obvious, i.e., they should be just the opposite of the behaviours that allow politics to exist. To summarize quickly, the following are some of the required steps to create an environment with minimal politics:
Creating and sharing vision.
Creating a shared mindset.
Hiring people with the right attitude.
Having people in leadership positions that can lead and be role models for the rest of the organization.
Having and executing a proper communication strategy.
Creating a proper organizational design to serve the best interests of the organization.
Aligning reward systems to make sure that they support the objectives of the organization.
Why do politics exist in organizations?
There are a variety of reasons explaining why politics exist within any organization and the intensity of the politics that exist. These can be classified in a number of ways; i.e., leadership, cultural and organizational issues, staffing, communications.
Leadership
Obviously, most issues that exist in organizations can be traced back to some form of failure at the leadership level. It is certainly true of internal politics. I look at politics as the failure of leadership to convince people to set aside their own immediate good for the good of the organization. In the absence of a compelling cause being shown to them, people create their own departmental, divisional or personal cause and this is what they fight for at the expense of the organization as a whole.
Politics are also the failure of leadership to sell their vision to the rest of the organization. Obviously, this assumes that a compelling vision exists in the first place. Whether it is that the vision is not communicated or people don’t understand the vision or people don’t buy the vision, the end result is the same, i.e., you have people in the organization not focused on company objectives and leadership must be accountable for this.
In order to have an organization moving in the same direction and performing as a single entity, there needs to be cohesiveness, and for cohesiveness to exist, there needs to be a shared mindset within the organization. This is what leadership gets paid to do; to create a shared mindset to optimize performance.
Interestingly enough, some leaders create internal politics voluntarily by creating tensions in the organization; this is done with the belief that internal rivalry is good to get the best out of people. I suppose it can work in some environments; however, to me it is similar to playing with fire. It can be fun, but once it is ignited and out of control, it can quickly become a big mess!
Cultural and organizational issues
Sometimes politics may be the result of faulty organizational design resulting in lack of clarity and accountability. People end up fighting to clarify what management has not clarified for them through proper organizational design.
Sometimes people don’t feel empowered and there may be a culture of not accepting mistakes. So people become calculating. They avoid taking risks and make sure they cover their tracks in case something happens. In that type of environment, people are generally quick at blaming each other for mistakes or underperformance, as opposed to focusing on recovering from mistakes and learning from them.
Closely associated with the previous point, some organizations don’t encourage and reward entrepreneurship and creativity; hence, people learn to become good bureaucrats and learn to become survivors as opposed to contributing to their full potential.
In many organizations, there is an imbalance between the so called ”staff jobs” looking after corporate type functions versus operational functions. People in staff jobs often initiate and/or execute projects that have not been planned for by people in operations. Then, it becomes an ongoing struggle between staff people who are trying to achieve their goals and operational people who are trying to get out of these unwanted projects and focus on the day-to-day operations. Not surprisingly, one might say that this is also a failure of leadership: to get everybody on the same wavelength, to avoid having people at lower levels slugging it out in an environment charged with politics.
Finally, one should never discuss politics without considering incentive compensation systems and their impact on politics. A number of incentive compensation systems are there to ensure that total pay is competitive, but ignore the damage that can be done to an organization when mixed messages are being sent through faulty incentive compensation arrangements. That is, if incentive compensation arrangements are in place, they need to be well aligned with the goals of the overall organization.
Staffing
Generally, politics are not attributable to specific individuals, but rather to some systemic failure within the organization. Sometimes they are due to the people running the organization and their failure to address the issue. However, it may well happen that certain situations are caused by specific individuals who cannot operate in a team environment. This can happen in organizations that focus their recruiting and promotions on individuals with good technical abilities at the expense of people with good teamwork abilities.
Communications
A contributing factor to creating a political environment is the absence of proper communications within the organization. One of the roles of leadership is to replace uncertainty with certainty and to replace confusion with clarity. Generally, when people don’t know, they assume, and when different people and departments don’t make the same assumptions, then increased politics is likely to result.
It’s up to you all, to make a difference. Hell and heaven are the creation of one’s own actions… You sow, you reap…. Beware.
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