Is It Possible to Have a Company with No Office Politics?

It's impossible to have anything involving people that doesn't have some kind of 'politics'.

Replace “no office politics” with “functional office politics”, the answer is yes.

The problem isn’t politics itself. It’s dysfunction, aka “dark patterns” aka antisocial behavior. The other problem is headlines like this one which, as other commenters have already pointed out, create confusion around an otherwise worthwhile topic.

Doubtful, but office politics can be reduced by correctly aligning incentives. For example, when everyone had the same incentives (e.g., increase profits) then there were fewer misalignments because you could at least try to point everyone in the direction of greater profits. I've seen a lot of organizations do silly things like make promotions purely dependent on how many direct reports you have (rather than impact/output/production)-- this creates a bad incentive -- people hire more and reduce profits however, increase their personal profits.

(Obviously there is another set of politics of how those profits are split, but that is a separate topic.)

Politics is being given a bad rap but in reality politics is probably one of the best inventions of mankind. It enabled humans to organize large groups to the benefit of all involved.

What you mean with "Office Politics" is dysfunctional politics. They exist everywhere but to a different degree. I would be really scared of a company that claims to have no office politics.

Most everyone's job, at pretty much every company, is to make life easier for their coworkers.

Let's say you're asked to build a signup-with-facebook button.

The task is not to build a signup-with-facebook button. The task is to make it easier for people to sign up. Presumably the signup-with-facebook button is a good way of doing that. At least some people in the company think it is.

But the task isn't to get more signups either - it's to gain an audience - potential sources of revenue.

Your company wants to gain the revenue because, well that's what companies do. Companies aren't people. Doesn't matter what the company wants.

But your co-workers want to gain revenue because either it will make their work lives easier (less pressure. Possible promotions) or their personal lives easier (bonuses. Raises. More PTO. Less stress at work).

The Facebook button was never the job. The job was to make your co-workers lives easier.

If you keep your head in the weeds and view the sign up button as "the job" - you'll be surprised if you build it, it underperforms and you don't get recognition or rewards.

But if you view "the job" as making lives easier for those around you - and optimize to do that well - then you'll be surprised much less often by the results of your work. Even if there are some surprises

Higher powers might still make decisions that throw you under the bus. Though this is essentially outside of your control. Regardless of how good at your job you are.

This has one exception - If you are at a non-profit organization full of selfless people. Then the actual job might be to make the biggest impact regardless of the well being of your coworkers

A more relevant question for me is whether it is possible to provide 80 % of your time to 'actual work' and yet have a fulfilling and successful career. Especially if you are introvert, not able to sell yourself, not using fancy jargon.

No. I used to work at a company with an alleged meritocracy, rather than office politics. They claimed to value opinions based on the quality of the opinion, not who it came from or how senior you were. Somehow the senior people always ended up having the "best" ideas, and because this was a "meritocracy" it obviously meant those who were higher up were there on their merits, not for political reasons. I left for other reasons, but the constant need to pretend that what would be described as office politics in any other organization was a result of this company's superior culture was frustrating.

I'm pretty sure Office Politics is like bugs in code.

The only way to not have a bug is to not have any code.

"Politics" are simply an expression of differing world views. Unless your startup is a cult, you will have drastically differing world views.

Is it possible to have a group of people interact for a lengthy period of time with no politics? Even family units have politics, and no bond is greater than the ones established by blood.

No. Not if humans work there.

There will always be politics, and what's more, they will be significantly impacted by factors seemingly as trivial as location and geometry.

For example, if you have a large open workspace with square cubicles, flanked on either side by balconies with longer and narrower rectangular cubicles, you may find that the balcony employees will affect an air of cliquish superiority over the floor employees, and will furthermore form a rivalry pitting left balcony against right balcony.

Then, whatever mad scheme it is that forms organically out of the workspace geography, it will be propagated via the personnel, even after you move to a new office. There will always be something that subtly influences all the decisions not having a direct impact on the work. Whenever you try to extinguish one that has been allowed to grow toxic or rotten, another may creep up behind you to supplant it.

The dangerous thing is when a player consciously influences the natural politics to gain power over the workplace beyond that granted by the organizational hierarchy, or to secure a promotion. The probability of such an individual joining your group and upsetting the previous homeostasis during a given interval increases with the size of the company. If it is possible for someone to transfer in, cause chaos, and get promoted up or out, then that pattern will eventually be exploited.

There's always some kind of politics, but the worst kind happens when you have technical frauds.

I'm of course talking about firms with a lot of technical staff, that are providing some sort of expert service.

What is a technical fraud? A person who on paper has technical chops, but in fact does not. I used to work with a guy who had a Phd but didn't know what Kuhn-Tucker conditions were, or the rank of a matrix, or version control.

What's so bad about them compared to other staff? Most people are going to know that your sales guy who studied philosophy is not an authority on technical matters. He knows it too. So when it comes to influencing decisions, he doesn't pretend he has authority over such matters. He says stuff that you generally don't need anything other than common business knowledge to think about.

Your technical fraud tricks sales guy and other non technical staff into believing him. Things he say need to be carefully disassembled to be argued against, eating up time and effort. He seems confident because it's easy to seem like you've thought things through. It's like inverse proof-of-work: it's easy to say things like "we can guarantee ordering and once-only delivery". It's hard to deconstruct it, and it will certainly wear out the non technical decision makers.

I have two issues with this article:

"As companies scale, they begin an inevitable process of selling out their initial principles and sacrificing quality and purity."

This assumes small companies have "initial principles" and believe in "quality and purity". I've known some that focused on quality and purity, and they've almost universally spent a lot of money to no particular result. "Initial principles" tend to go out of the window as soon as you have a company.

It's possible in a small company to seem to have no unhealthy politics, by virtue of all agreeing on the same goals and values, in turn by virtue of sharing a "culture". The downside is that anyone who is not a "good cultural fit", who didn't go to the same schools and have the same life experiences and what-not, is most definitely not welcome. And, on the other hand, it's entirely possible to have healthy office politics and a drastically toxic culture.

"But knowledge work requires something different. It goes best when the people closest to the work make decisions."

The extreme extension of this is everyone doing their own thing. If you've ever worked in an environment where everyone does their own thing---usually because they don't want to get into the politics---, well, I believe you come to the conclusion that it isn't pretty.

Most people don't care who makes decisions, as long as those decisions are what they agree with; likewise, if they disagree with a decision, it doesn't matter who made it.

Yes, it's called a sole proprietorship.

Arguably, given politics is how we reconcile diverging interests, it is what you get when people are not aligned to the same principles. When you have peers without clear principles, you have politics.

Poor leadership causes people to reach for whatever tools they can find to ensure their personal interests prevail. In a startup if you have politics, it is because you don't have direction and you are basically burning cash while everyone re-negotiates how they relate to one another at each new interaction.

If you are in a company that is political without being profitable, I suspect they're already dead and would use it as a platform to get your next gig and split. If it is profitable and political, I would opt to take cash, as their stock will have more downside than upside because they are optimizing for survival not growth. No politics and no profit? Probably a cult. Profitable with no politics? Sell everything you own to buy options.

In a large company, you are basically the minder of capital or assets, with survival and continuity prioritized over growth. When it stops growing at a sufficient rate, it's going to stop producing value and growth and enter a cycle of pathological optimization. Setting people against one another in this fixed resource environment is economical when you have a stable business that needs optimization. Fittest survive, etc. But for growth, that misalignment just creates massive opportunity cost.

Where you have managers sitting on a pile of capital with no sense of how to grow it, they end up operating a death spiral as they switch from the growth strategy they were not equipped for, to more familiar optimization strategies.

Management anti-patterns are the effect of incentives, and clear leadership (vision, direction, alignment) has the ability to resolve those. Leadership obviates politics, and in places where it's good, people know what is expected of them and others, and where they fit in.

For this reason, I think professional managers often don't belong in startup environments because they are trained to optimize for fitness and not growth.

The better question is: is it possible for people to be diplomatic? (with empathy and care towards each other and the environment).

You have more then two people their is politics.

Work, home, school, government, church you name it.

Is it possible to suppress human nature in my office full of humans?

Surprisingly, no.

With a sole proprietorship, certainly.

With a partnership, maybe.

Anything bigger, unfortunately not.

I would hope so. My employer fucking blows.

Really good article!

I think the one point is really valuable. Decision making and who does it.

Practically every software engineer will debate SVN vs git; but when someone up the chain decides clear case, that's politics.

Also makes me think, "The Pheonix Project" book. The underlying thing they never really discuss was who made the decisions. I wonder if that's really the root cause.

I'm extremely skeptical if my anecdote has any value since I'm very young and only worked in a couple companies. But in the current company I'm working (which I've been working the last 7 months) we really don't have office politics. So, I suppose the answer to title is yes?