by Michael O. Church.
Well, the first question to ask is: Where do office politics come from? They come from systems that provide incentives for people to play political games.
Such incentives might be:
- Severe disparities in outcomes that appear to come more from popularity than actual contribution
- Job insecurity
- Work allocation protocol that doesn't adequately match people with work they'll find interesting, forcing people to gain control of the division of labor (i.e. become managers) if they want work relevant to their career aspirations
- Large "ball of mud" projects that make employees' architects and leads look good while grunts do all the work, and because individual performance is often hard to demonstrate, receive little to no recognition
- Importance attached to job titles and position in the organizational hierarchy
- These are just a few of the toxic elements that foster political nastiness, but there's one big one that runs through all of them: Companies, even small ones, have a tendency to hire before they trust. This is bad.
Trust has degrees, of course, and I'm not saying that new hires should be trusted with the whole business. However, many companies get into a mode where the default attitude toward the average worker is one of distrust. You have the higher-ups and managers who are trusted and given autonomy, and the "everyone else" category, which isn't really in the club. People don't want to be in this latter category and will do all kinds of nasty things to lift themselves out of it.
These aren't "big company" illnesses exclusively. In fact, large companies have more experience dealing with this kind of thing than do small firms. These problems can appear in five to 20-person companies easily; they can occur in a two-person company if the relationship is one-sided and toxic.
So how does one prevent this devolution from happening? Below are a few suggestions.
Open allocation. There are some great explanations of this concept here: Software Development Methodologies: What is Open Allocation?. In short, as long as people are working on things that benefit the company, let them work on whatever they want. If someone wants to transfer to a different team, let her move her desk to their section that afternoon. Once the division of labor is no longer a political favor to be "allocated," people don't have to play politics to get good projects — so they don't. They just work on the things that interest them, and are too busy to screw around or gossip.
The main stakes should be doing something cool. A lot of startups think their profit-sharing programs are progressive, while employee #106 gets 0.04% when a VP hired at the same time is offered 1%, or 25 times more. People always find out about these inequities, and it's really bad for morale. Compensation shouldn't be uniformly distributed (that itself would be unfair), but it should be allocated in a way that's reasonable, and so that climbing the corporate ladder doesn't improve a person's compensation that much. Pay for achievements, not positions, and keep the main motivation to do cool work, not to reach X title in Y years. Pay for achievements, not positions, and keep the main motivation to do cool work, not to reach X title in Y years. Corporate ladder-climbing is the source of most politics; that's the bulk of what provides the incentive for them. If you reduce the benefits of climbing, you're more likely to get real leadership instead of narcissistic game-playing.
Never cold-fire. You may have to fire people. In fact, you will need to do it at some point because, if nothing else, you'll have to fire toxic people to protect your environment. Give them a generous severance (enough to get to their next job) that includes a good reference (unless they're awful; then stick to name and dates) and the right to represent themselves as employed. Even if you hate writing severance packages (out of some emotional aversion to "rewarding failure"), just do it. Severance isn't a reward: It buys you insurance against litigation and disparagement, and gives your company a reputation of treating people well even upon termination. If people aren't worried about getting thrown out on the street, there's less anxiety and they can focus on their work. If you write severances, chances are people will never find out that a firing occurred (a win-win face-saving).
Take mentorship and career growth seriously. Everyone should feel as if they are learning more from their work than they would if they were given a comparable amount of money, but left to direct their own time. The work should be additive to their educational process, not subtractive. When people start to feel like they're falling behind, educationally speaking, they start to get nervous and suspicious. If people feel like they're learning more working with you than they would elsewhere, they tend to be happy. Career coherence is taken care of, and they can focus on the task at hand.
Grow slowly, hire selectively and hire honestly. Don't hire a person if you aren't ready to trust that person with, at least, full autonomy over her own time. Don't grow so fast that you have a different company every week. Don't grow so fast that you have a different company every week. Finally, be honest about the culture you have and want to maintain when you hire, and especially make it clear to executives that they'll probably have less power than they're used to (they can't just intimidate people into doing stuff). Hiring is the most important thing to get right when it comes to preserving a culture, and it's hard to reverse.
Everyone participates in belt-tightening. HP, in its glory days, would cut salaries 10% across the board instead of laying people off, and compensate by offering non-executives one day off every two weeks. People trust and like the executives more if this is how difficult economic times are handled.
Keep projects small. If you're a software company, make the programmer-to-program relationship one-to-many instead of many-to-one. Everyone should be able to own something, even if it's small, in order to have a sense of real contribution. This keeps the impostor syndrome and suspicions of, "Just what does he do here?" at bay.
Encourage workplace friendships. I tend to think that extravagant outings (team trips to Hawaii) are expensive and don't do much for team-building — everyone is still on guard, and most people would rather go on vacation with family than officemates. Encourage cheaper, smaller and voluntary workplace outings, to baseball games and museums, etc., or even just hold board game nights. The goal is to make it possible for real companionship to form. People are less inclined to play underhanded political games when colleagues — whose opinions they actually value — are watching.
Avoid "managerial mystique." In many companies, managers make decisions and don't explain them. Avoid this. Explain sensitive or difficult decisions, especially if they affect the way people work. Managerial mystique creates bilateral distrust that leads to the two-class company.
Having a great culture is unlikely to happen by accident, because bad cultures aren't always a result of bad people. You have to actively manage it to prevent people from falling into old patterns, and there's no formula for this, but I hope that the above advice is a good starting point.
Well, the first question to ask is: Where do office politics come from? They come from systems that provide incentives for people to play political games.
Such incentives might be:
- Severe disparities in outcomes that appear to come more from popularity than actual contribution
- Job insecurity
- Work allocation protocol that doesn't adequately match people with work they'll find interesting, forcing people to gain control of the division of labor (i.e. become managers) if they want work relevant to their career aspirations
- Large "ball of mud" projects that make employees' architects and leads look good while grunts do all the work, and because individual performance is often hard to demonstrate, receive little to no recognition
- Importance attached to job titles and position in the organizational hierarchy
- These are just a few of the toxic elements that foster political nastiness, but there's one big one that runs through all of them: Companies, even small ones, have a tendency to hire before they trust. This is bad.
Trust has degrees, of course, and I'm not saying that new hires should be trusted with the whole business. However, many companies get into a mode where the default attitude toward the average worker is one of distrust. You have the higher-ups and managers who are trusted and given autonomy, and the "everyone else" category, which isn't really in the club. People don't want to be in this latter category and will do all kinds of nasty things to lift themselves out of it.
These aren't "big company" illnesses exclusively. In fact, large companies have more experience dealing with this kind of thing than do small firms. These problems can appear in five to 20-person companies easily; they can occur in a two-person company if the relationship is one-sided and toxic.
So how does one prevent this devolution from happening? Below are a few suggestions.
Open allocation. There are some great explanations of this concept here: Software Development Methodologies: What is Open Allocation?. In short, as long as people are working on things that benefit the company, let them work on whatever they want. If someone wants to transfer to a different team, let her move her desk to their section that afternoon. Once the division of labor is no longer a political favor to be "allocated," people don't have to play politics to get good projects — so they don't. They just work on the things that interest them, and are too busy to screw around or gossip.
The main stakes should be doing something cool. A lot of startups think their profit-sharing programs are progressive, while employee #106 gets 0.04% when a VP hired at the same time is offered 1%, or 25 times more. People always find out about these inequities, and it's really bad for morale. Compensation shouldn't be uniformly distributed (that itself would be unfair), but it should be allocated in a way that's reasonable, and so that climbing the corporate ladder doesn't improve a person's compensation that much. Pay for achievements, not positions, and keep the main motivation to do cool work, not to reach X title in Y years. Pay for achievements, not positions, and keep the main motivation to do cool work, not to reach X title in Y years. Corporate ladder-climbing is the source of most politics; that's the bulk of what provides the incentive for them. If you reduce the benefits of climbing, you're more likely to get real leadership instead of narcissistic game-playing.
Never cold-fire. You may have to fire people. In fact, you will need to do it at some point because, if nothing else, you'll have to fire toxic people to protect your environment. Give them a generous severance (enough to get to their next job) that includes a good reference (unless they're awful; then stick to name and dates) and the right to represent themselves as employed. Even if you hate writing severance packages (out of some emotional aversion to "rewarding failure"), just do it. Severance isn't a reward: It buys you insurance against litigation and disparagement, and gives your company a reputation of treating people well even upon termination. If people aren't worried about getting thrown out on the street, there's less anxiety and they can focus on their work. If you write severances, chances are people will never find out that a firing occurred (a win-win face-saving).
Take mentorship and career growth seriously. Everyone should feel as if they are learning more from their work than they would if they were given a comparable amount of money, but left to direct their own time. The work should be additive to their educational process, not subtractive. When people start to feel like they're falling behind, educationally speaking, they start to get nervous and suspicious. If people feel like they're learning more working with you than they would elsewhere, they tend to be happy. Career coherence is taken care of, and they can focus on the task at hand.
Grow slowly, hire selectively and hire honestly. Don't hire a person if you aren't ready to trust that person with, at least, full autonomy over her own time. Don't grow so fast that you have a different company every week. Don't grow so fast that you have a different company every week. Finally, be honest about the culture you have and want to maintain when you hire, and especially make it clear to executives that they'll probably have less power than they're used to (they can't just intimidate people into doing stuff). Hiring is the most important thing to get right when it comes to preserving a culture, and it's hard to reverse.
Everyone participates in belt-tightening. HP, in its glory days, would cut salaries 10% across the board instead of laying people off, and compensate by offering non-executives one day off every two weeks. People trust and like the executives more if this is how difficult economic times are handled.
Keep projects small. If you're a software company, make the programmer-to-program relationship one-to-many instead of many-to-one. Everyone should be able to own something, even if it's small, in order to have a sense of real contribution. This keeps the impostor syndrome and suspicions of, "Just what does he do here?" at bay.
Encourage workplace friendships. I tend to think that extravagant outings (team trips to Hawaii) are expensive and don't do much for team-building — everyone is still on guard, and most people would rather go on vacation with family than officemates. Encourage cheaper, smaller and voluntary workplace outings, to baseball games and museums, etc., or even just hold board game nights. The goal is to make it possible for real companionship to form. People are less inclined to play underhanded political games when colleagues — whose opinions they actually value — are watching.
Avoid "managerial mystique." In many companies, managers make decisions and don't explain them. Avoid this. Explain sensitive or difficult decisions, especially if they affect the way people work. Managerial mystique creates bilateral distrust that leads to the two-class company.
Having a great culture is unlikely to happen by accident, because bad cultures aren't always a result of bad people. You have to actively manage it to prevent people from falling into old patterns, and there's no formula for this, but I hope that the above advice is a good starting point.
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