The trouble with organisational politics and how to handle them ethically

Hi {{first_name|there}},

Over the last few weeks we looked at becoming a more strategic leader. This week we start a new series on leading up and across the organisation, and we begin with organisational politics.

Let's face it, organisational politics are a nightmare and, for most of us, they are something we instinctively want to avoid.

And that is no surprise when you consider these well-used definitions of organisational politics:

'Parochial', 'divisive', 'illegitimate', 'maximise self-interest'. No wonder this stuff can make your skin crawl.

So, it is tempting to keep your head down, do good work and hope that the work speaks for itself.

But staying out of politics does not stop it happening around you, and if you are not alive to what is going on, it can harm both you and your team.

The secret is to engage with the politics in a way that is consistent with your own values, and a lot of the ideas we have previously covered in relation to strategic leadership will help you here.

As a starting point it is worth making the distinction between a political climate in an organisation and political skill.

A political climate arises where people believe that key decisions about things like resources, appointments, work allocation and so on are driven by self-interest and favouritism. Studies show that perceptions of political climate are linked to lower job satisfaction, lower commitment, higher stress and intentions to quit (Miller et al., 2008; Bedi & Schat, 2013), and, in particular, to lower levels of trust in the organisation (Bedi & Schat, 2013).

Political skill, on the other hand, is very different, with different associations.

Political skill is "the ability to effectively understand others at work, and to use such knowledge to influence others to act in ways that enhance one's personal and/or organizational objectives" (Ferris, Treadway, et al., 2005, p. 127).

Note the absence of concepts like divisiveness and self-interest. Political skill is neutral; it can be used negatively but in the right hands it is a key leadership strength.

Political skill is associated with better performance, career success, job satisfaction and lower strain (Munyon et al., 2015). And it helps teams too: in one study of child welfare teams, the political skill of the team leader explained a significant part of how successful the teams were at placing children in permanent homes, even after allowing for caseloads and experience (Ahearn et al., 2004).

So, in my view, the best way to approach organisational politics is not to ignore them, but to develop and enhance your political skill so that you can satisfactorily avoid creating or contributing to perceptions of a political climate.

Gerald Ferris and his colleagues describe political skill as having four parts (Ferris, Davidson, & Perrewé, 2005):

The difficulty is that none of these is a technique you can easily pick up from a book. Even the researchers say the evidence does not yet explain very well how or why it works (Kimura, 2015).

What we do know is how leaders say they learned it. When Sophie Yates and Jean Hartley surveyed mainly senior public sector managers in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, the sources of political astuteness they valued most were unplanned experiences, rather than formal training (Yates & Hartley, 2021). NHS leaders told a similar story. They mostly built their political skill gradually, through the experience of leading and changing services (Waring et al., 2023).

So, we mostly learn this by doing it. But that does not mean you have to leave it to chance.

Here are four things you can do to speed up the learning.

1. Treat the politics as part of the work. Before your next important decision or request, take a few minutes to think about who cares about it and why. Whose goals does it help? Whose does it get in the way of? This is the perspective taking we looked at in our series on strategic leadership and in the post on managing up. But noticing is only the start. In the research, social astuteness on its own did not predict performance, while networking, influence and sincerity did (Munyon et al., 2015). So, use what you notice to have the conversations that need to happen.

2. Take on work that crosses boundaries. Since experience is the main way we learn this, it makes sense to look for the experiences that will help. You could volunteer for a cross-team project, offer to stand in for your boss at a meeting, join a working group with another function or take a small part in a change initiative. Pay real attention to how decisions actually get made, as opposed to how the process says they get made.

3. Find a coach or mentor and talk it through afterwards. The NHS leaders said mentors were important for reflecting on their own experiences and fine-tuning their approach (Waring et al., 2023). And, in another study, people who had a mentor reported higher political skill than those who did not (Chopin et al., 2012). Choose somebody who understands how your organisation really works, and after a meeting that went well or badly, ask yourself questions like:

Over time, you'll want to get to the position where you are asking these questions before the meeting, rather than after it.

4. Give yourself permission to talk about it. The same healthcare leaders said that where they did engage in relevant formal learning, it helped mostly because it gave them permission to discuss political issues openly, and a way of making sense of them (Waring et al., 2023). So, a course or a book can help, as long as you get the chance to discuss what you are learning in the context of your own situation.

As noted above, political skill can be used badly. It can help people hide self-serving tendencies from their colleagues (Blickle et al., 2020), for example. So, it is important to think carefully about how you use it.

Here are some ways to keep yourself honest:

Politics is, to a large extent, what happens when people see the same situation from different perspectives and want different things from it.

Used well, political skill reflects the idea of dialogue we looked at last week. That means suspending your own view for a while, understanding the other person's position properly, staying in the tension and looking for a bigger shared perspective that more people can support. It helps you get things done with other people in a way that they can live with too.

You probably won't learn it quickly, and you will get some of it wrong along the way.

But if you pay attention to what you experience and talk it through with somebody you trust, you will get better at it. And if you keep asking who benefits and how this will look, you will be able to feel good about how you use it.

And your team will be better off for it.

References are in the website version of this post.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Coaching. If you are finding the political side of your role hard, or you are not sure how to get what your team needs without compromising your values, I can help. Talking through what you are seeing with somebody outside your organisation is one of the quickest ways to learn this.

There are more details here.