This article is part of a series explaining the psychology behind office politics. If you haven’t yet, it’s best to start from the beginning and read the full series.
In the introduction to the office politics playbook series, I told you that navigating office politics effectively is simply about adapting your behavior to gain influence in your professional environment. The more influence you have, the more you can get done.
But before we can get to the adaptation part, we have to take a step back and understand what makes people tick at work. To get to the core of it, there is one fundamental concept that you must understand in order to grasp the unwritten rules of office politics:
Office Politics Principle One: People are not logical and rational.
We desperately want the people we work with to be logical rational because that would make our work environment so much easier to navigate. Data would drive all decisions, and everything would be predictable, fair, and detached from any emotion!
However, instinctively we know that this is just not true. People do things that defy logic and reason all the time. Look at yourself as an example. Have you done something completely illogical in the last week? If you’re honest, you’ll probably answer yes.
Now, it’s not that people don’t use logic and reason in their decision-making. They do! It’s just that most of the time, they use it to justify decisions they have already made. This is called confirmation bias – when we subconsciously look for information that confirms conclusions we’ve already developed, perhaps without even realizing it.
To explain why that happens, I’m going to offer a simple way to understand how our brain is hardwired to work. For our purposes, I want you to think of the brain as being split into three different parts: The old brain, the midbrain, and the new brain.
The old brain was the very first part of our brain to develop, way back when we were cavemen. It’s only interested in three things: Food, survival, and sex. It’s constantly scanning our environment looking for those three things and when it finds one of them, it perks up like a dog that has just seen a bone and tells you to pay attention.
Think about a time when you got into your car at the end of the workday to drive home. You leave work, make your way home, pull into your driveway and are about ready to head into the house when it dawns on you: You don’t remember driving home. What happened? Did you fall asleep? Of course not, because you made it home. It’s just that nothing eventful happened on your drive and so your brain put you on auto-pilot. However, if a dog had run out in front of your car, or if the person in front of you slammed on their breaks, your brain would have snapped you back to attention in an instant because it perceived there to be a danger. This is your old brain in action.
What that means is that most of the work your old brain does happens on a deeply subconscious level that you’re not overtly aware of. While it’s scanning your environment, it’s taking in a ton of information: 11 million pieces of it every single second across all of your five senses to be exact. If you were conscious of all of that information, you would go insane. So, to be helpful, the old brain filters the vast majority of it out for us leaving us consciously aware of around 40 pieces of information every second. Remember that huge disconnect – 11 million pieces of information go in, but we are only consciously aware of about 40 of them.
And our old brain tries really hard to use those 11 million pieces of information a second to make all of our decisions for us. However, when the decisions do not relate to food, survival, or sex, it has to consult a friend. And that friend is the midbrain.
The midbrain is where we process all of our emotions and non-verbal cues. Just like our old brain, that information is processed on a deeply unconscious level that we are not overtly aware of.
Typically, the information we get from this part of the brain comes in the form of a gut instinct – it’s using all those same 11 million pieces of information a second to deliver us an answer, but it’s just not telling us how it got there. Here are a few examples of the midbrain in action:
- You walk into a meeting room at work and, before anyone has said anything, you just know something is wrong. There’s no logical reason to think that, but it almost always ends up being true.
- You meet someone and instantly “click” with them. It feels like you’ve known each other all your lives.
- Or, the inverse is also true. Sometimes you meet someone and instantly dislike them for no reason at all.
So, we have the old brain which focuses on survival and the midbrain which focuses on emotions. And then we have the new brain, which processes logic and reason. This is the part of the brain that gets us into trouble because it is the only part that we are consciously aware of. However, in terms of the decision-making hierarchy, it is actually the weakest part of the brain. If you think about it as an organizational chart:
- The new brain is the director.
- The midbrain is the vice president.
- The old brain is the CEO.
The new brain can make decisions. However, it can easily be overruled by the subconscious midbrain and old brain without us even realizing it. And that leads us to the most salient point to take away from this article:
Human beings make decisions emotionally and justify them rationally.
Take a moment to write that down on a sticky note, and stick it to your computer monitor at work because it is the explanation for almost every single “people problem” you’ll encounter in the office – we all make decisions emotionally, and justify them rationally. That’s true of me, you, your partner or spouse, your grandma, best friend, etc. Unless you are a zombie, your decisions will be driven by the parts of your brain that are interested in your survival and your emotions, and then confirmed by the part that processes your logic and reason.
That means that there is no such thing as an objective reality, because how we perceive “objective” information is going to be filtered through our emotional responses to that information. And when it comes to understanding office politics, we must approach it as a fundamentally irrational process. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most consummate politicians of all time, understood this when he wrote “Would you persuade, speak of Interest, not of Reason” in 1734. When we rely solely on data and logic to gain influence at work, we will fail because our emotions will always trump logic.
Of all the principles of office politics that I’ll explore in this series, this is the one that people have the toughest time with. You really have two choices at this juncture:
- You can fight against this principle with every fiber of your being and refuse to take the emotional part of the process into consideration at work.
- You can accept it and find a way to flow with how our brain is hardwired to get more done, be more effective, and create a better work experience.
If you opt for choice number two, continue on to the next article in the series and we’ll explore how you can tap into that emotional part of the brain to gain greater influence with principle number two: Relationships are your goal.
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