How to Minimize Politics in Your Company (2010)

Summary seems to be :

- Hire people who want the company to succeed and trust that they will be rewarded when it does - Keep the upper management "political pain points" under clear transparent and fair rules. never ever deviate.

Sensible but it misses one utterly vital thing - the iron clad trust that must must exist from the employees to the CEO - that they will only and ever be evaluated on clear criteria, that the company has their back and will not fire them because it just needed to. I do not remember trusting any employer except one to that level.

Look at Facebook " You can either be good at hiring of good at firing. I'm good at firing"

We glibly talk about the death of the job for life, even in Japan. But without that contract everything Ben talks about here is words written on the wind.

When you hire someone be sure that you will keep them through Hell, reward them with your daughters hand in marriage and half your kingdom. Then you can believe they might trust you back.

Buffer is doing a really good job on this. I believe complete transparency is the only way to minimize politics in your company.

[1] - http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffe... [2] - http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/radical-transparency-and-ho...

This reminds me of Ray Dalio's principles by which he runs Bridgewater: http://www.bwater.com/home/culture--principles.aspx

"Radical openness" should reduce the amount of politics, in theory. I'd be interested in hearing how it works in practice.

Pretty sensible article. I think political problems in a company become more likely as companies grow and add more people. A dozen close-knit people who trust each other will have less trouble than a 200+ person company with layers of management and numerous colliding ambitions.

If possibly perhaps the best thing is to keep your company small? We don't all have to try to be Facebook. I like to dream about starting a small company that offers a simple product that just does one thing well so that me a handful of others can just run the thing.

Caustic internal politics in my experience seem to come from two things:

1 - lack of a clear direction and focus

2 - lack of good clear and transparent communication

No matter what, you are going to have politics in an organization, a good leader needs to direct the tone and shape of those politics.

With #1 - you end up with multiple people jockeying for ad hoc positions of leadership in an organization. A clear organizational structure (it doesn't have to be a complex hierarchy) with clear and transparent methods for moving up down and across it, prevents this. I see this mistake being made often with "flat organizations" where that's a code word for "no organizational structure" and you end up with powerful personalities in charge of little fiefdoms they've carved out in the company each with their own set of rules and politics. Nothing sucks more or wastes more company time and resources than playing Game of Thrones with all the assertive personalities in your company.

Some "code words" that might mean a place suffers or will eventually suffer from this: "flat organization", "no manager titles", "hands-off leadership", "management that gets out of the way" etc.

I'm not saying these are always indicative of a cultural problems, a flat organization can still be well structured and have strong focus, or a manager may have gifted the mantle of leadership onto somebody else for the duration of a project and taken a "hands off approach". But in my experience this is pretty rare.

This doesn't eliminate politics, but it makes it take the shape of people who want to align with the focus and people who want to go a different direction. This becomes a high level metric you can use to evaluate reports. If they aren't with the program then perhaps they should go work elsewhere?

With #2 - information vacuums breed rumors and rumor trading/gossiping becomes information control, another kind of leadership metric. The kind of backstabbery and reputation ruining gossip only breeds in organizations where intentions and direction and expectations of the company are not clearly communicated.

I remember one place I worked at, over a 6 month period, a bunch of senior managers all left. There was zero communication about this and rumors started running around "the CEO has lost his mind!" "I heard this guy was having an affair with the receptionist" "this group is going to be next!" "I be we're running out of money!" etc. etc. turns out two things were actually happening, the technology platform was changing and many of the senior managers weren't comfortable with this and wanted out. The CEO thanked them for their years of hard work and gave them a few weeks to find something else as a token of thanks. The other was that he wanted to grow the company and needed a different team to get him there -- his previous team was excellent for early stage growth, but the kind of loner term growth just needed a different set of skills. These two events coincided, were easily explainable and would have squashed most of the rumor trading. But the company had a culture of secrecy, starting at the top, and rumor trading became the cultural norm in the company. People probably spent as much time gossiping as they did getting work done, and it wasn't an effective organization at the time.

In other cases, I've seen this used specifically as a proxy for keeping the employees well managed. Spread disinformation from the top and watch the employees fight with each other over conflicting stories. They won't be fighting for actual positional authority and you, as the CxO, can be free to do what you want. It's called "Machiavellianism" and they make probably with worst places on the planet to work outside of a traditional leather factory.

This is great. Where can I find other practical "manage the managers" advice like this?

>You might even give the employee a raise. This may sound innocent, but you have just created a strong incentive for political behavior.

...and if you don't, you just created an even stronger incentive for all your talent to quit so you're left with the people who coast, knowing they are paid their actual value at most or who feel they would get less in another job. People who are good at what they do always, ALWAYS keep an eye on their value vs pay. Not to mention word of mouth - if you pick up a reputation as underpaying or unwilling to give deserved raises, it will affect who applies, reducing the quality pool by limiting applicants to people in an even more underpaid job, unemployed, or otherwise desperate, while anyone better will be seeking to use it as a stepping stone to somewhere that pays them fairly for their skill.

I've worked at a company that followed that 'advice' before and as a result, everyone was grossly underpaid and there was a high employee churn rate, despite themselves advertising in their job listings (which they still do) as having good career opportunities.

>>> By conducting well-structured, regular performance and compensation reviews, you will ensure that pay and stock increases are as fair as possible.

Simply installing formal processes won't solve the problem if it's widely known that those processes have to be bypassed in order to get anywhere. It doesn't take long to figure out that all real career advancement activity occurs out-of-cycle.

looks like GitHub is in need of this article!!

Reject MBA culture.

Replace people with robots.

I'm only partially joking.

office politics is a shelter for incompetence.

There's good politics and bad politics. Good politics seems to emerge when people really care about the greater mission, but disagree on how to go about it. It's still frustrating, because there are disagreements to be resolved, but usually you can get everything out in the open if there's good management. Bad politics is when people are out for self-advancement and will continue with disruptive behaviors until terminated. Bad politics tends to be personal, as decisions about unrelated matters become referenda on the people the topics are associated with.

If you don't have the good politics or bad, it means that people don't really care. However, the stakes in white-collar America are usually high enough that the bad kind of politics will typically emerge no matter what.

What I think is important is keeping enough transparency that the good kind of political activity doesn't devolve into the bad kind. That's a fairly common scenario. Usually, people get tunnel vision about the specific victories they need (or think they need) and start lashing out at the people they think are blocking them (often, without telling anyone why they're doing it) when it would be better to figure what the actual conflicts are and how to make everyone win, as much as is possible.

What's the best way to translate a meeting with one executive complaining about the behaviour of another executive into a meeting with both executives? Even if you schedule the meeting, aren't you admitting that you can be swayed by the influence of the first executive whispering in your ear?