How to Minimize Politics in Your Company

At least he used the term "minimise," rather than "eliminate." There are certain problems that exist among people, particularly in organisations beyond a certain size, that simply cannot be solved or mitigated entirely, no matter how much you may want them to be.

In the end, only the first piece of advice - "hire people with the right kind of ambition" - really matters. You have to build the right kind of organisational culture from the beginning.

A few points to add:

1) I would take a page from 37 Signals' general mantra and suggest that one should really try to avoid unnecessary hiring where marginal productivity of labour cannot be clearly shown to exceed marginal cost of labour, and try to keep the organisation as small as possible. Not only does the likelihood of "politics" increase proportionately with the size of the organisation, but there is a lot more room for strategic machinations and more time for people to contemplate how to grab a larger piece of the pie when they occupy roles or hold titles that don't _really_ need to exist, strictly speaking.

If a company people that would likely be trimmed in a downturn purely on the basis of general "uncertainty," rather than an objectively steep and protracted decline in sales, it's gone too far off the staffing cliff. This is particularly true in technology. Really, don't hire more people than you need just to feel like you're running something big.

This element tends to be well-considered when a company is very small, but usually forgotten once it gets to "mid-size" (say, 75+ people -- I know that's still "small" from many people's point of view, whatever).

2) One of the most persistent and agonising problems I have seen in my experience is small companies (say, 25 people or less) that--led by executives that come from mid-size or large-business management cultures--reproduce, in a fractal manner, the same kinds of pathologies that afflict large organisations.

Systems and processes that can be replicated at decreasing marginal cost are an essential and unavoidable aspect of significant business growth, but can be far more harmful than they are beneficial if enacted prematurely. I've seen companies of ~20 people with ~5 VPs, I've seen complicated and overblown and overly abstract departmentalisation methodologies imparted on companies of a dozen people, and, my favourite, the pervasive belief that if you blow big dollars on certain kinds of investments that are conceivably beneficial to a large company (six-figure accounting systems or project management systems), you will make big-company revenue.

I cannot believe how many times I have seen it claimed that a company of 1-2 dozen people should buy an enterprise-level project management suite because "that's what the big guys use." Yeah, well, that has no imaginable evidentiary relationship to what you should be using.

This idea that problems can be solved with ambitious throwing of fistfuls cash at them is naive and misplaced, and tends to warm the plate for a lot of political dynamics to play out.

Once people see that major strategy and/or purchasing decisions are made on the basis of bling or something read a half-hour ago on Delta in-flight magazine on return from Acapulco, they see the entire decisionmaking process of upper management as wide-open for gaming, as it is clear from that point that the primary objective of anyone seeking anything is to define and nurture a perception in the manner of textbook marketing.

Even worse, it even incentivises otherwise benign people to more cynical behaviour by setting undesirable common denominators; if you don't game the system, somebody else will. There are some people that have never had a cynical thought, and there are some people that always have cynical ulterior motives, no matter how benign and transparent the organisational culture, but it's the middle 80% of the bell curve -- the ordinary human being, who is pragmatic and given to occasional, circumstantial opportunism -- that you're really moving in the wrong direction by showing them that government-by-vague-impression, or worse yet, cargo cultism, does in fact drive most of the significant decisions.

3) In general, organisations with engineering-driven cultures (in the sense that engineering defines the primary discursive space and the central agenda) tend to do better with politics than sales-driven ones.

However, this must be balanced with the reality that to get high sales performance, you need to harness a lot of the kind of ambition and energy that only sales sharks have. If they feel marginalised or undervalued in an overly nerdy company that, from their point of view, spends much of its time on technical navel-gazing and twiddling its thumbs, they won't stick around long.

There are still some leaks in the advice given. One, it might well be that an employee's skill set has suddenly increased in market value, or that the employee has essential knowledge but genuinely has a better offer from a competitor. Telling her to "wait three months until the next review process" will probably lose that employee.

Two, the general tone of the advice is "plan things well in advance" (compensation, structural adjustment etc.). The fact is that you can never plan everything well enough in advance, especially things like structural adjustment. The article doesn't address what to do when your plans inevitably "collapse in the presence of the enemy".

Three, it is a fact that you can't simply fire an executive just because it is obvious to the wiser people in the company that he's incompetent. He will have plenty of friends and will be sure to raise hell for it. This is a sure way to get lots and lots of politics, and of the most unpleasant sort too. Oftentimes, the only reasonable solution is a "structural adjustment" - create a sinecure for the guy where he has few responsibilities and can safely slide into irrelevance.

It looks like you have to be a master in politics to minimize the politics in your company.

Keep your guard up at all times. Any attempt at being nice may be interpreted as permission for god knows what. It read a bit like "The Prince" by Machiavelli.

So, I'm missing something from here: be a leader. Lead. When CFO-guy starts telling people you're grooming him for COO, you'll have to reply that, no, you're not (unless you are, but it doesn't appear so in the article). CFO-guy will be let known that the leadership skills shown in his recent actions clearly shows that he's not mature enough to be the COO. But most likely, if you're a leader, he'd know not to tell people he's being groomed unless he knows that's the case and knows you'll agree with him letting people know.

A very real path to lots of politics is creating a power void for others to navigate in by not acknowledging and respect the power you have.

What about increased compensation transparency? Better communication? Fostering a collaborative environment in every sense possible?

Politics is always a misunderstood interpretation of other people's motives. "He's just in it for the money." "She only thinks of herself." These statements are too general and not true. A person could not live a whole life like that, it won't work.

People want to collaborate, they just don't know how. Seek to understand other people, then help them understand your perspective, and you start knocking out politics

> Similarly, if you manage a junior employee and they ask you about their career development, you can say what comes naturally and generally get away with it.

Somehow, the wording of that statement makes me reluctant to work for the author as a junior employee.

The author raises some valid points, but I would add another important basic principle: Maintain constant open and honest communication with the entire company.

Simply interacting with employees either in person or through e-mail updates every once in a while goes a long way toward making people feel appreciated. Employees do want to hear about the company's latest big sale, the possible new direction for the company, etc. in a personalized or semi-personalized manner. Furthermore, these things provide a motivation boost and unified company vision, as well as open up the possibilities of feedback from lower level employees.

"Man is by nature a political animal." --Aristotle

"As defined by Andy Grove, the right kind of ambition is ambition for the company’s success with the executive’s own success only coming as a by-product of the company’s victory."

I'm not sure I agree with this part. Yeah, I think it's important for the executive to not seek personal objectives at the expense of the company's, but it's unreasonable to expect them to look out for the company's interests before their own.

The biggest takeaways I got from the article are:

- Be incredibly thoughtful/diligent when it comes to new hires.

- Make sure to set compensation/promotion/responsibility expectations very early on.

If you can get all of the issues on the table during the hiring process (or shortly after the new hire starts), then you can probably preclude a lot of heartache down the road.

It sounds like his system for minimizing politics is to be inflexible, secretive and dishonest.

Key techniques from the article:

1. Hire people with the right kind of ambition.

2. Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate.

3. Be careful with “he said, she said".