WORK PLACE SPECIAL................... The Answer to Office Politics

The Answer toOffice Politics

Bureaucrats can be mean-spirited, but usually they are overly  enthusiastic organizers who lose sight of their roles in the  business. Office politicians, on the other hand, are far worse. They are people who harbour very bad and destructive ideas  about how  to get ahead. If you don't root them out of your business, they will destroy it. Indeed, office politics is a cancer that can destroy a business. I have difficultly liking any political activity because it is flawed. Politics is based on power.  And power, as we know, corrupts. How Political Employees Will Hurt You  People who think politically believe in power. They don't feel  comfortable operating in a free market because they don't have  the confidence to compete in it. Lacking that confidence, they want to control it. They seek to gain  that control with political maneuvers. Political employees will corrupt your business in two ways. Internally, they will mess things up by setting agendas about their  amassing personal power, rather than generating benefits for your customers.  Power play in offices Externally, they will hurt your business by trying to control the   competition. They'll spend their time fighting to control things  they cannot ultimately control, and worrying about market share. What they should be doing is helping you create and sell new ideas  to benefit your customers. To prevent political employees from damaging your business, you should recognize who they are (they will often be managers who  seem very good to you, precisely because they are political), and  either reform them or get rid of them. I've had very good success reforming former politicians, I am happy to say. I think that's because, fundamentally, a political life is an unhappy one. If you can show them a better way, they will be grateful to take it. Here are some signs of the political personality:  They come to you to complain about people, rather than discuss  problems. They jealously guard their titles, their prestige, and the products of  which they're in charge. They play favourites, and their favourites are those who support them. They want their employees to be loyal to them, not to the customer. They punish perceived acts of disloyalty, usually by firing or permanently freezing out the offending party. They are extremely supportive of you - to your face. But you sometimes wonder if they really embrace your ideas about the business. They get into frequent squabbles with their peers over territorial issues. They tend to hire employees who are good at following orders. They almost never hire people who are better than they are. The Solution to Politics  The best way to rid your business of the corrupting effect of  politics is to eradicate power mongering wherever you find it. You can do that by intervention - but that's messy and difficult.  Politicians are very good at rationalizing their power plays. A better way to destroy the spread of this cancer is to destroy  the environment in which it operates. That environment is control. The opposite of control is freedom. The ultimate solution to politics is freedom. The more freedom  you establish in your business, the more difficult it will be for  politics to thrive and spread. Freedom means giving your profit center managers and creative  people the opportunity to compete with one another in an environment where information is shared and restrictions on product  development and marketing are limited. Rather than using your time and intelligence to try to separate and  regulate product line barriers, teach your people over the long run.  They are all better off if they're free to learn from one another - and compete with each other - freely. What I'm suggesting is you take a laissez-faire attitude toward  product development and marketing. Some business gurus call this "free market management." When your stronger profit center executives complain weaker  ones are not contributing their fair share, tell them not to worry  about fairness. Tell them to worry about coming up with the next  great idea for your customers. As your business grows, you will find your stronger profit centers will thrive in this environment, while the weaker ones will fail. That shouldn't worry you. It's exactly what you want. You want the growth side of your business to be evolutionary,  where the strong survive and the weak extinguish themselves. In promoting competition, watch out for any effort to curb or  control information. Production leaders will naturally want to protect their positions  by keeping secrets and setting up barriers to make it difficult for  their internal competitors to catch up. Your job will be to make  sure those secrets are widely known and to reduce or eliminate  those barriers. This isn't something that can be done once and then forgotten about. It requires constant maintenance, so long as you are CEO. When promoting freedom and cooperation in your business, remind  your superstars that protecting what they have already done is  counterproductive. To continue to lead, they must be focusing on the next great product  idea or marketing strategy , not the last one. At the same time, you  have to limit abuse from the weaker profit centers. They shouldn't be allowed to steal trademarks or plagiarize marketing copy. Free-market-based management doesn't mean there are no rules or  standards. It means you must apply the common standards that  exist in all free markets. The main thing you can do is keep preaching the gospel: "Our mission  is to create new and better products for our customers." Everything your people do, internally or externally, must achieve  that end.  By Mark Ford