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Monday, March 10, 2003
Antonio: Enemy in the office
By Kiko Antonio
Night Manager
SCRAMBLE. One of the casualties of a faltering economy is often the collegiality that exists among employees. Elbows get sharper, whisper campaigns more insidious, and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering more Machiavellian as workers scramble and scratch to maintain their power, prestige, and sometimes even their jobs.
This jockeying can go on at the lowest rungs of a company and continue right on up to the corner suite.
There are situations in which a company is already operating without constraints. People are being fired without notice and given until the end of the day to clean out their offices.
Other examples of the dark flowers of organizational dynamics include undermining the credibility of others, stifling their voices, and usurping credit for someone else’s work. Experts call such office politics “the enemy within.” We experiencethis enemy when we don’t feel safe.
Office politics occur when we discover that people who play by the rules don’t win after all and that people are rewarded for something other than merit. Whenever there’s a feeling that things aren’t fair, you’re going to get politics.
In the gathering uncertainty and gloom of a recession, employees naturally worry that they’ll be included in the next round of layoffs. Managers, anxious to secure
the necessary financial and human resources for their key projects, fight to keep their units intact. In such an environment, the negative politics intensifies at all levels. You can’t hope to root it out entirely, but there are steps you can take to dampen it and prevent it from spreading.
SYSTEM. Before the quality management era, firms tended to fix the blame on an individual when there was a problem with defect rates. Now, they’re taught how to fix the system that produced the errors.
The challenge with company politics in a downturn is very similar. Companies with infrastructures that minimize internecine jostling respond to turbulence much better than those firms that ignore the way that systems can
foster negative politics.
People’s knee-jerk reaction to negative politics is, “What can you do about it?” But if your leadership has this mindset, your company is sentenced to perpetuating the behavior.
Office politics fills a leadership void. It’s the absence of leadership that fosters a negative political environment. People are pretty quick to size up a culture. If they determine that there’s a benefit to undermining someone else’s credibility, they’ll do it.
In a downturn, fear drives people to act in more overtly political ways. So there’s a stronger need for leadership than there was before. The amount of leadership that works in good times is insufficient in a recession.
One of the most important things leadership can do is establish a strong and shared fact base about the company’s current competitive position. The problem is
that in many companies the rule is, “Keep your head down, and keep your boss happy.” Learning about how the organization works as a company is hardly emphasized.
To bring employees out of their foxholes, you often have to force them to talk openly about subjects they’d rather not discuss. In this respect, a downturn presents an opportunity: The burning platform, the sense of a crisis, has already been created for you.
(Kiko welcomes comments at kiko_antonio@yahoo.com.)
(March 10, 2003 issue)
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