Can you get to the top without playing office politics?

Office politics is as much a part of work as drawing a salary. And yet, I don’t know anyone who wants more of it.

In fact, many clients come to me because they feel stymied in their career advancement goals because they perceive “office politics” to be getting in their way. People blame office politics for everything from making them unproductive (e.g., sitting in unnecessary meetings cozying up to the “higher ups”) to putting up barriers due to favoritism, bias or “baggage” of various sorts (e.g., gossip sullying their reputations.)

Throughout most of my career I have felt the same way about the peculiar interpersonal group dynamics that dominate the way people interact in an organizational context. When I started coaching and heard so many other people citing office culture and interpersonal relationship dysfunctions as a career hurdle, I started paying more attention. 

Photo by Vlada Karpovich

Shouldn’t businesses be a meritocracy?

I certainly used to think so. But with miles on my odometer, I’ve come to realize that unconscious bias trumps merit more often than the reverse. And it’s probably going to be that way for a long time because organizations are just groups of humans who come together to make things happen. Human group dynamics require communication and emotional intelligence, but they also offer us opportunities to be our whole selves. Along with all this comes the constant struggle to balance bias and flawed judgments with merit, productivity, and outcomes. 

The office: A perfect petri dish to see what a drop of human insecurity plopped into a base mix of miscommunication, misalignment, and differing objectives might brew.

I had originally thought of office politics as simply a derogatory word to describe human and group dynamics among people forced to spend too much time together. But with observation I now think of these group dynamics, including the political elements, as a unique environment offering each of us the challenge to rise to our better natures.

Especially as our personal connections outside work trend towards tighter connections with people more like us, creating polarization and alienation at the level of civil society, the workplace is one of the few places left where we have incentives to get along with people who are NOT like us. Work provides us a rare opportunity to create spaces where psychological safety breeds creativity, inspiration and innovation.

And if we turn our irritation into motivation to improve our social skills and ability to influence others in complex social systems, we rise to our higher potential. This higher opportunity exists both in our own achievement and in positively affecting others. Of course, the skill of this is to do it without losing our values, our morals or our minds. 

Are office politics more detrimental to women’s careers?

Immediately upon beginning to observe office politics more closely, I noted more women than men articulating “politics” as a career dilemma. This surprised me because generally women are strong communicators, good at establishing relationships and adept at emotional intelligence. All these skills should help them survive and thrive in any group dynamic, so why would women struggle so much to surf the waves of interpersonal relationships in the workplace?

Over the years I’ve come to believe that many women struggle most in those office politics environments where a stereotypically male work culture permeates. Typically when women encounter highly competitive, ruthless and gender toxic environments, they feel less equipped, less tolerant and less interested in following the cultural norms than men. Because they don’t play by the rules of the male-defined culture, they’re more readily ostracized by it, facilitating their belief that they’re in a no-win situation. Penalized by the culture, they struggle to receive the kind of visibility and recognition needed to keep opening doors and receiving opportunities. 

This is true for men who don’t buy into cultural norms–or aren’t welcomed into a dominantly female office dynamic–as well. Plenty of men have complained to me that they are held back because they refuse to “play the game.” And indeed, office politics of any flavor is a game of sorts, as is business itself.

All that said, you can’t win a game you don’t play.

Playing the Game vs. Taking it Personally

Whether we like it or not, most business endeavors (including nonprofit and academic environments) are essentially games we play to try to accomplish some kind of goal. It’s a “game” in the sense that you have a limited set of players, pieces, rules, and a goal. The challenge is to reach the goal using the players, pieces and rules you have access to. If you can’t make it work, including by changing some of the players, pieces, rules and objectives, you have to put away the board and go play somewhere else.

Office Politics: You can’t win a game you don’t play. ⇐click to tweet.

Of course, real people’s lives and livelihoods get caught up in this game, and to most of us it doesn’t feel like a game at all. This is where office politics tends to factor in as our attention drifts from the business game and we jockey for interpersonal security and acknowledgement.

To make matters more murky, most of us don’t feel like players in the business game itself, giving us little else to do but play interpersonal (political) skirmishes on the sidelines. While board members and senior executives focus on the major business strategy, little of that usually reaches employees in ways that captivate them personally. Leaders have some level of strategic authority to roll the dice and make the moves in the business game, but most employees are just pieces on the board getting moved around, often without a real sense of the objective, much less the rules. 

Gender Dynamics in Office Politics

Here’s the gender dynamic: men tend to arrive in their careers already acculturated to playing the business game and sloughing off interpersonal dynamics, while women tend to have been acculturated to playing the people game with less investment in the business game. This makes women more vulnerable to being interpersonally ostracized and less skilled at seeing it all in the context of the business game. 

Of course, business is neither totally a game of objectives or interpersonal belonging, it’s both, and women and men need to balance these perspectives to succeed. Men who focus too little on the interpersonal dynamics can become isolated and/or hurt others. Women who overcompensate on people issues can find themselves taking some aspects of the game too seriously and too personally, and in doing so may be less effective or discredit themselves in the eyes of the game-players.

In the end, I advise my clients to play the game, and learn to navigate office politics adeptly, if they want to rise higher in the organization. 

I also advise them not to take the business game too personally and to play the interpersonal, office politics, game by taking the high road. This becomes an exercise in stretching themselves to grow emotionally and in learning to manage risk, manage the business issues and gain experience in setting boundaries, among other things. All good skills to have in the game of life as well.