The Promotable Manager

Imagine you have an opportunity to move up in your company. To your surprise, your boss gave the promotion to a much less qualified co-worker. My guess is you would feel disappointed—probably even frustrated.
 

Now imagine you discover that the opportunity never really existed, because your application was never given serious consideration. If you are the best kept secret in your organization, you might want to get used to this kind of abuse.

But What If I Don’t Like To Toot My Own Tuba?

Me either. In fact, I hate it. Do you work with people who constantly draw attention to how great they want you to think they are? Am I asking you to become a braggart? Of course not. Just don’t blend in. Let your brand shine, or become one of the ghost people at work.

Why It’s Not Your Boss’s Fault

Her brain isn’t wired to promote you. Here’s a quick pop quiz (modified from Max’s wonderful book):

The following 8 corporations were ranked by Fortune magazine to be among the 500 largest United States-based firms according to sales volume for 2007:
   
a. Apple, Black & Decker, McGraw Hill, Owens Corning, Bristol-Meyers-Squibb
   
b. American International Group, McKesson, Publix, Plains All-American
Pipeline

Which group of five organizations listed (A or B) had the larger total sales volume? 

Most people incorrectly choose A. Why?

When making decisions the human brain is wired to make mistakes in very predictable ways. We choose “A” because we hear, read, and see more about Apple Computer than McKesson. We choose motor vehicle accidents for the same reason. Yet each year about twice as many people die of stomach cancer than car wrecks.

Is Your Career Like a Car Wreck?

So what does all this have to do with your career? In the words of my two kids, “mucho”. We tend to give greater weight to those things we can recall easily. That’s why your boss grimaces when you leave work an hour before she does. She wasn’t around when you got to work (two hours before her), so it’s much easier for her to recall you leaving early. She saw you do it!

When it comes to promotions, don’t blend in. You want your boss to easily recall your positive traits. Standing out doesn’t necessarily mean bragging. Find a way to promote yourself that fits your personality, your strengths, and your company culture.

Or go ahead and make yourself comfortable in your cube. You aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

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Just thinking about office politics is enough to drive most managers to the Pepcid AC they keep in their desk drawer. And for good reason. Office politics is one of the most emotionally and physically draining aspects of work. But have you noticed how promotions mysteriously appear before those who play the game? Wouldn’t it be great to get the credit you deserve without having to play the game their way?

What if I don’t get involved in that kind of thing? 

Good for you. Especially if you don’t mind the consequences. Imagine your boss is retiring and you are her obvious replacement. You are efficient and productive, and you know the business better than anyone. But a more political and less qualified person is now your new boss. How can that happen? While you have been quietly producing in your cube, your new boss got credit for your ideas. You got credit for her mistakes. While you were working through lunch to put the final touches on an important report, she was selling her idea to increase productivity. Even though your idea had more merit. As a result, your former boss took away some of your responsibilities (“We want to give you projects that take advantage of your strengths”), and assigned her to lead a “plum”, high-profile project. 

You were shocked when you weren’ t promoted. No one else was, though. 

Shouldn’t my work speak for itself?

Of course it should. Poor work certainly does. But you may be overestimating how easy it is to measure performance. Or how much time your boss spends thinking about you. Or how rational people are.

So who loses?

If you stay out of politics, you do. But so does your organization. The less qualified are promoted, while the more qualified become frustrated and dedicate less energy to their jobs. 

Suppose tomorrow’s headline reads “O.J. SIMPSON STABS FOUR UNARMED POODLES”. Would you throw all your steak knives into the Gulf of Mexico? Of course not. Office politics are only a tool—a means for accomplishing a specific task or purpose. The task or purpose can be ethical, or it can be unscrupulous.

Mistake the baby for the bathwater and everyone loses.

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My four-year-old stayed home from ‘school’ the other day with a cold. The next day the other kids’ parents asked me if he was feeling better. I guess his ‘friends’ told their parents he had been sick. Remember, these are four-year-olds we are talking about. I have this image of the other kids standing around, not knowing what to do because my son wasn’t there. He was born with a very powerful personality…which may have something to do with my receding hair-line.

People with powerful personalities also work in your organizations. It’s called charisma. They have different power sources than the powerful in  my last post. Their power stems from who they are, not their perch on the organizational chart.

But I don’t want to knock the organizational chart too much. It can be a great resource for you. It is an excellent place to start if, before dipping your toe into the political arena, you want to get a grip on the power terrain of your organization. The chart reveals three sources of power: legitimate, reward, and coercive.

But the naïve get themselves into political hot-water when they stop with the organizational chart. There are three more sources of power.

1. Expert power – Valued knowledge or information gives people power over those who need this information to do their jobs well. Knowledge is power. Maybe the knowledge is expertise. But it doesn’t have to be. Managers, for example, may have knowledge that their subordinates lack simply because they happened to be in a meeting, or received an email, with information that was withheld from the general public.

2. Referent power. This is charisma—the power my four-year-old seems to have been born with. These people are able to obtain compliance simply because people like them. The power of charisma should not be underestimated. Neither should the power of kindness.

French and Raven proposed these sources of power about 50 years ago. And they are still an excellent way to map power at work. Now I’ll add another power source.

3. Network power.  You work with people who are connected. We all understand networking. And most of us know we should do more of it. There is enormous power in a thriving network.

Though there are many ways to look at it, you can fit most power sources into one of those six buckets. In the next post I’ll give you a tool for mapping these power sources to better understand where you stand in the political arena at work.

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I got into a power struggle with my four-year-old this morning. He wanted to wear his new rhinoceros shirt to school, which would have been fine with me, if wasn’t so dirty that it now had a texture. I could have scraped crud off with my fingernails. I won the argument, but it wasn’t pretty. Just like at work, victories are often awarded to the more powerful.

Anyway, that got me thinking about the relationship between power and office politics. My idea at this point is to write about legitimate power today, personal power in the next post, and then provide a template of a Power Map as a tool,

If you buy into this notion of ethical office politics as a necessary skill set of the promotable employee, before entering the political arena it is a good idea to understand the power terrain of your organization. A good way to do this is to draw up a Power Map.

The organizational chart is the first place most would look to find the powerful and the powerless. One important source of power available to managers is tied to their position in the organization. This is known as position power. Several bases of power are available to those with position power.

1. Legitimate power: Power based on one’s hierarchical position in the organization.

2. Reward power: Power based on one’s ability to administer valued rewards.

3. Coercive power: Power based on one’s ability to administer punishment

But if your Power Map stopped here, you enter the political arena in a very dangerous position. There are surely very powerful people in your organization without the title on their business card.

These people have what is known as personal power. I will cover several types of personal power in the next post.

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It looks like this blog is finally on the map! Five spammers have found it so far. I AM really somebody now.

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I recently gave a talk about personal branding. I had hardly finished speaking when someone rushed up to me and shook my hand. “This stuff is great”, he said. “I have to develop my brand at work.” I explained how he needed to manage his brand, not develop it. He already had a personal brand. Maybe not a good one, but he had already been pigeon-holed by the people he worked with. His brand, and yours for that matter, falls somewhere along the following continuum (Thanks to John Daly at The University of Texas for this continuum).
 

1)      Rejection brands. A rejection brand does not necessarily mean that a person isn’t liked. It just means that you wouldn’t want to work with them. Maybe they are competent enough, but they have been on several projects in the past that failed. Just to be safe, let’s stay out of their way.
 

2)      Non-recognition. These are the ghost people in an organization. You see them wandering around at work, but you really aren’t sure what they do. Milton, the guy with the red stapler in Office Space, is the perfect example in Office Space is the perfect example.
 

3)      Association. Goes with. Guy Kawasaki is a VC. When I think of him, I think venture capital. She is a CPA. When I think of her, I think accounting.
 

4)      Preference. A preference brand is a stronger degree of association. Not only do I associate you with something, I prefer you to other people with a similar brand. For example, if I am going to work on this marketing project, I would prefer to have Seth Godin on my team.

 

5)      Insistence. An insistence brand is even stronger. I associate you with a particular attribute and I cannot imagine anyone else working on a project (for example) than you. If I am going to work with someone on my personal finances, I instist on working with J.D.

 

So which brand do you want? Insistence? Not necessarily. I’ll write about that soon.

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I like to look on Technorati for blogs I haven’t discovered yet, and I finally found someone who put a positive spin on office politics—or at least a neutral one. The truth of the matter is that office politics is simply a tool to get things done in an organization. Politics has to do with strategic influence. It’s about how to make sure your ideas are considered. Its about how to have an impact at work.

Office politics and a knife have a lot in common. Both are useful tools or destructive instruments, depending on the intentions of the person using them. If the intentions of the user are ethical and beneficial for the organization as a whole, there is nothing inherently evil about office politics. 

You don’t have to like office politics, but you do need to accept it as part of organizational life. You also need to learn to use it for ethical purposes if you are going to be promotable. Employees who learn how to make politics work for them are promotable, pluggers aren’t.

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There was an interesting post on Ask a Manager yesterday. A reader with a
“just get it done, within budget, on time” work style, stomped on the
turf of a “dark bureaucratic force” in the HR department. Fed up with the obstructive service of the HR director, this manager now does his or her own hiring and follow-up. The evil HR director responded with a “deep-freeze” in all but public forums.

I see this a lot. What is the true source of the conflict? Incompetence? Turf -stomping?

I doubt it.

I suspect that the colleagues’ different political styles (see Survival of the Savvy by Rick Brandon and Marty Seldman for a great intro) are the true source of conflict. The frustrated manager seems to be extremely under-political. This type of results-oriented employee plugs away, head down, producing for their organization. They are ‘pluggers‘.

They have the greatest respect for other pluggers, and hold very little regard for those who don’t produce. They are promotable in the eyes of other pluggers, but only those that are aware of, and involved with what they do all day. Employees with moderate levels of ‘pluggerness’ can be very beneficial for your team. They get things done.

In a large organization, however, they can remain fairly invisible (most of the other pluggers who work there aren’t directly involved with their product). And at an extreme they are the ghost-people of the workplace. We see them walking around, but no one is really sure what it is they do. Eventually, pluggers become frustrated with the lack of respect people seem to have for their results, and may even give up putting forth so much effort.

The evil HR director in this case seems to be more political. At an extreme the overly political are slick, slimy, and extremely adept at controlling their environment. These are the Paris Hiltons of the work place–they are famous, but no one really knows why. But people with more moderate levels of political savvy can be a huge asset to your team. They know how to work the system of formal and informal rules to get things done. (In reality, people with moderate levels of both styles needed, and would benefit from learning some of the other side’s skills.)

Ask A Manager was correct in advising the less political employee to meet with the evil HR director…but with one caveat. It won’t do any good to logically explain how the HR director is getting in the way of results. This is not how to influence a more political person. The organization, as they see it, doesn’t work like this (they have different perspectives, as Ask a Manager points out). The more political person is a student of perception and informal power. When dealing with this type of person, drop the name of a powerful person in the organization, or point out how both of you are dependent on the other to look good in the organization.

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By its very nature, you shouldn’t have to look too hard to find an example of an employee with a robust personal brand. Let me introduce you to Dan Schawbel, a 23-year-old marketing specialist at EMC².

Poke around on his blog and figure out why Fast Company magazine calls him a ‘personal branding force of nature’. Like all examples, not all of what he does will fit your personality or situation (it doesn’t fit mine), but that doesn’t mean you should write him off completely. Study him and learn. What aspects of Dan’s strategy can you adopt into your own career? Tweak them to fit your own brand.

Where do you think Dan’s career will be when he is 33? I’ve been on this planet almost twice as long as Dan, and I am humbled.

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I taught two executive MBA classes this summer. One at SMU and the other at an amazing university called Universidad Francisco Marroquin in

Guatemala. The hard-work-fallacy seemed to frustrate the execs in

Dallas. They didn’t deny it, but habitually ignored it in their own careers. The Guatemalans, on the other hand, did not embrace it, but accepted it and worked within its confines. Every class has its own personality, and this difference between these two classes was startling.

If the world were truly just, a gifted writer would land a lucrative publishing contract. A talented actor, with the gift of moving us to tears or laughter, would be a shoe-in for the red carpet. A mind-blowing rock band in

Austin, TX would be an MTV staple (if MTV still showed videos).

And a hard-working, productive employee would be promotable.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

We know that hard work and talent don’t guaranty prominence in Hollywood, on Broadway, on iTunes… or in

Washington, DC. So why do we fall prey to the hard work fallacy where we work? Why do we think that if we just keep our head down, keep plugging away, one day we’ll get the recognition we deserve?

Is hard work, productivity, efficiency (etc.) necessary for career success? I sure hope so. But these qualities will only get you so far. Eventually, its not who you know, but who knows you, not what you know, but who knows that you know it, and, of course, who likes you. Only then are you promotable.

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