Management Leverage Blog

Do others’ perceptions become more important than results as you move up the corporate ladder?

I don’t think so.

Social capital becomes more important as you move up the ladder than it was at the beginning of your career.

Why? Because as your career progresses,
1) Your results are harder to measure, and
2) You are competing for promotions against others who produce results, and have taken the time to build social capital. In the beginning of your career this isn’t necessarily the case.

But even if perceptions are more important now than they were before, they’re not more important than results.

For the sake of simplicity, lets divide the corporate world into three buckets. In the first bucket, we’ll put the “results should speak for themselves” people. In the second bucket we’ll put the “it’s not what you know, but who you know” crowd.

Everyone in both of these buckets will hit a ceiling sooner or later.

The people in the first bucket are the best kept secrets in their organizations. They are the ghost people. We may know their name, or their face, but no one is really sure what it is they do.

In Texas we call the people in the second bucket “all sizzle and no steak”. They spend so much time working the crowd and promoting themselves, that it doesn’t take long before the perceptions of their abilities far exceed their actual abilities. They have spent more time worrying about what others think about them than actually developing themselves.

It won’t take long before they are put in charge of something and fail miserably, and very publicly.

Sure. We all know people who succeed in spite of themselves. But put these people in the same group with the 325 year old woman who has chain smoked for 324 years. Or the high school drop out who starts a
computer company and becomes a billionaire before turning 30.

If you want to work your way up, put yourself in the third bucket with those who manage  results AND others’ perceptions of them.

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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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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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