Management Leverage Blog

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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