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.
When I first set out on my quest to understand office politics several years back, I read everything I could find on the topic…and quickly found that lots of them give really horrible advice! I came across one article, in particular, that gave me pause: How To Win At Office Politics Every Damn Time. But, being the diligent student, I read it anyway, only to have my anxieties confirmed when I got down to his final point:
“There are only losers in office politics, never winners.”
This is what gives office politics a bad name – people feel as though there is a losing side. However, the reality is that when you play office politics well, there are only winners. And that brings us to our next principle:
Office Politics Principle Four: Always look for the win-win.
Being successful at work does not mean that you have to look for ways to defeat others. You can always make the choice to look for ways for everyone to win. Remember, you are all on the same team regardless of what your title is or which department you report into. You have to decide which is more important to you: Being a person that helps your team achieve their greatest potential, or engaging in an internal power struggle? You can do one or the other but you can’t do both.
Another word for the term “win-win” is compromise, or giving up a little of what you want so that someone else can get a little more of what they want. In today’s climate especially, the art of the compromise seems especially lost. Everyone is digging in their heels, refusing to give the slightest ground, both on the big things and the small things that don’t really matter!
So, we don’t have great role models to follow in this regard, but that’s no excuse. We just have to go back to basics. What does compromise even look like?
I had the pleasure of attending this talk with Arnold Schwarzenegger at South By Southwest 2018. The entire talk is worth watching if you get a chance but one section stuck out to me specifically: It starts around minute 15:30 and he discusses bringing together all the different stakeholders in California to reform their healthcare system. Before they even started discussing how to do it, Schwarzenegger made it very clear to them that not a single constituency would leave that discussion with a ten out of ten. No single group would get everything they wanted from the discussion. Instead, he urged them to set the goal of everyone walking out with a seven out of ten – everyone would give up a little bit of what they want to make sure the collective whole can win. That’s the only way to make progress.
No one wins when everyone digs in their heels, and there is no easier way to make an office politics enemy for life than to derail someone’s pet project because you refuse to budge. Remember principle number two: You have to get people to like you. It is better every single day of the week to get 70%, or 60%, or even 50% of what you want and to hand someone else a win than it is to get 100% of what you want and to piss someone else off. People will carry around that slight in their back pocket for years, just waiting for an opportunity to return the favor.
Try to understand what people think they are losing.
When co-workers are resistant to coming up with a compromise, a common explanation is “well, they’re just afraid of change.” Not true. Things change around us all the time. People get married, divorced, start new jobs, the kids go off to college, we buy new houses and move, the Pumpkin Spice Latte comes back at Starbucks. No one is running down the street screaming in terror when those things happen. In fact, many times they are cheering the change on!
That means it’s not the change that people are afraid of – it’s the impact of the change. Since everyone is giving up a little bit, there is a very real sacrifice involved in compromising. The people you’re working with may have a strong emotional connection to the thing you are asking them to give up, and when emotions come into play, things get tricky. In principle number one, we established that people make decisions emotionally and justify them rationally. Therefore, you have to take care of the emotional part of the brain that believes that compromise equals loss.
So, what do they believe they are losing in the process of the compromise? Control? Power? Approval? Recognition? Influence? Stability? Their job? True or not, any one of these factors could be something that might prevent them from opening up to a compromise. This is where you have to put them in control and to help them feel safe. Let them take the power position by asking “What would you need to move forward?” or even throw out some options that explore different ways to compromise. “What if we did it this way? What if we did it that way? How would you feel about those options?” You’re not trying to sell them on an idea as much as you’re trying to figure out what the true sticking point is. Just talk about it, human to human, and let them open up to you without trying to push them in a specific direction.
Give them a golden bridge to retreat across.
If you’ve never read Sun Tzu’s Art Of War, you’re missing out on a wealth of advice that is highly relevant to our office politics discussion! But one quote specifically is perfect the current conversation: “Build your enemy a golden bridge to retreat across.”
The best way to defuse a stalemate isn’t to fight it aggressively or to throw up your hands in futility declaring that you’ve done everything you can. It’s to give your opponent a way to retreat that allows them to keep their dignity intact. So, once you know what your enemy wants, and what they think they are losing if they don’t get it, then your best next move is to find a way to give them a win. Give them some, or even all, of what they want. You want them to be able to hold their head up high when they walk out of that discussion. Sometimes the real sticking points in these discussions aren’t large concessions – they are private assurances or small gestures that affirm specific steps in the process won’t change. Don’t dismiss the value of these small compromises, particularly if you’ve followed our second principle of building better relationships.
In a professional world where many people are guarding themselves against being thrown until the bus by their boss or their colleagues, the person who makes it their business to hand out win sets themselves apart as someone that can be trusted. And the more you do it, the better your relationships will be and the more you can look forward to people repaying the favor. It’s the law of reciprocity, plain and simple. We’re much more inclined to help people succeed when we know they will do the same for us.
And sometimes, handing out wins is as simple as being pragmatic about the battles you choose to fight.
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