Sometimes my clients start falling into a pattern, and it gives me an opportunity to look more deeply at common challenges we all face. Lately, too many of my clients have fallen into the “victim of office politics” trap. This looks different for each person, but in every case it feels like several people you work with are conspiring against you to undermine your credibility and impact.
What is Office Politics Anyway?
As I’ve written before about office politics, it’s little more than the human group dynamic associated with the particular “game” you’re playing with other people in your office. Every group of humans who take on a common cause–office, organizations, communities, families, countries–falls into patterns of behavior that dictate who gets ahead and who gets behind. The “political” dynamic we fall into reflects at least the following:
- What it takes to “win” (and “lose”)
- Who is most attractive and worthy of praise (physically and otherwise)
- What behavior is rewarded (and penalized)
- Who makes decisions and how they get made
- How do the rules get decided, changed and enforced?
- What are the “rules” for all the above?
Within these “rules”, people play the game of trying to get on top, or at least find a comfortable place to be somewhere in the middle. No one really wants to be on the bottom. These things are often written off as “culture,” but the political dimension is more observable and results in clear winners and losers. Office politics, unlike democratic politics, does not usually involve an actual ballot or vote, but it works by similar rules: the people who make the rules tend to get the most votes.
And when you’re in any political system that you feel doesn’t reflect your values, in which you’re at a disadvantage, or where you feel deliberately victimized, the idea of “playing the game” to try to win is pretty unpleasant. As a victim of office politics, it’s very easy to start to feel powerless and to act powerlessly. It feels terrible and causes you to question who you are, whether you’re in the right career path and what your value is.
Learning to Play the Game of Office Politics Can Help You
Even successful people fall into the office politics trap and begin to feel persecuted by both their colleagues and the Universe. Why?
I believe that these kinds of career experiences–painful as they are–help us learn lessons critical to our future success. Based on my own experience and the experiences of my clients, I think the office politics quagmire gives us a special gift, which is to learn to stand up for our values and grapple with forces out of our control. It gives us the opportunity to learn new games and new rule systems, which, once we master them, can help us get ahead.
Why learn to play the game? Aren’t games supposed to be fun? Too often, the game of office politics is not fun. It’s a fair question to ask yourself–whether you want to play the game of politics or not. But here’s the catch: every office you go to has games; the question is whether it’s the game you want to play. Too many of us quite the game before we start playing. We waste the opportunity to learn new strategies for winning and getting ahead. And that’s a shame.
Women, in particular, can opt out of a game they perceive to be advantaging “the white male standard,” and fail to learn important lessons for career success.
Lesson Learned: Trust yourself and ask for what you need
Office Politics and Decision-Making
One of the main areas office politics can affect is who gets to make decisions and how they get made. Organizations fall into ‘habits’ when it comes to decision-making. Decisions come with risk and many people don’t want to take risk, so some organizations make it easy to opt out of risk-taking. But just because the politics of the organization make it easy to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, for the organization or for your career.
One client I worked with – after a phenomenally successful start to her career managing big box retail business – went through a two and a half year lull where in two different firms, her business title was very impressive to outside parties but internally, she experienced serious micromanagement. Once the second job began to feel similar to the first, she sought me out and we began to unpack what was happening and how she could gain decision authority again to make the impact she wanted to make. She realized that after so long battling these challenging career and office politics dynamics, she’d lost confidence in herself and stopped standing up for herself effectively with her bosses.
Letting go of the triggers that kept her timid in the face of politics, she got back on track and started asking her bosses in very straight-forward ways for decision authority. To her surprise, her bosses did a 180 and pulled back on the micromanagement. Apparently, they told her, they were just waiting for her to step up and stop asking permission.
When I asked her what that long spell of disempowering work situations had taught her, she realized that she’d not only forgotten how to stand up for herself and her values, but she’d learned that she shouldn’t trust others to look out for her interests. She had to do that for herself. She placed her trust in herself and realized that the Universe had given her these chances to learn that very important lesson. She also learned that just because office politics can cower others into refusing to take risks, it didn’t require it of her.
Office Politics and Favoritism
Another client had a very different kind of office politics to confront. Her boss had pitted her against a coworker by taking sides in disagreements and redefining her job description to remove all client-facing authority. In doing so, he’d also crossed some ethical lines that my client felt strongly about. In our work together, she got clear on what was important to her, she let go of the fear of standing up for what she believed and released the anger that clouded her thinking so she could take a strong, ethical and personally meaningful stand. By standing up for the ethics that mattered to her, without anger, she was able to negotiate a successful redefinition of her job responsibilities.
Even though at the low point she felt like the Universe was conspiring with her boss, by the time she’d stood up for what mattered to her and thereby adjusted the office politics dynamics around her, she felt the Universe has conspired with her to put her in a place where she felt back in the driver’s seat of her career.
So if you’re feeling victimized by office politics (or anything else), and if you trust the Universe to be delivering you opportunities (even painful ones) to grow – what do you need to stand up for? How can you trust yourself more? If you trusted yourself more, what would you do on your own behalf? What would you ask for?
