Office Politics: New Hires Must Learn The Ropes
By Bernard Shaw
Summer 2008
Office politics are a fact of life. The group of people who work together – peers, managers, subordinates – hardly matters. Office politics, to one degree or another, will be ever-present.
When military veterans transition to the private or federal sectors, they must understand the impact office politics can have on their upward mobility and their paycheck.
In many white-collar environments, your progression will depend on many factors, including the four Ps: politics, performance, personality and potential – probably in that order. If politics truly is the primary factor in determining your success, you would be wise to monitor it to ensure that you are positioned to take full advantage of your excellent job performance.
We know that every organization maintains a formal power structure of directors, managers and supervisors. There is also an informal power structure of “decision influencers” who often play a major role in how an organization actually is managed – beyond the company organization chart. New hires have a short window of opportunity – 30 to 60 days after the starting date – to determine the informal power structure of the group.
To find this information, you must first uncover who interacts with whom on an informal basis, during and after-hours. You can use that initial window of opportunity to innocently ask questions of co-workers. For example, you could ask about the managers’ after-hours activities and who else is normally a part of those activities. These relationships will provide clues about who associates with whom while providing you with opportunities to become involved in the after-hours activities.
If you wait too long to ask these types of questions, the response may be, “Why do you want to know?” By the time you are an established employee, you may be regarded as a competitor and possibly even a threat. If so, the other employees will have little incentive to assist you.
Once you become familiar with the social alliances, you can use them to your advantage by engaging in positive conversation with decision influencers while avoiding negative remarks in their presence. Either way, this information is likely to be passed on to management.
For example, let’s say you are a new hire and make a fairly benign statement to a co-worker that the boss often wears ugly pants to work. Unbeknownst to you, this co-worker plays a round of golf with your boss the next day and he relays your comment to him. Perhaps a desired assignment is forthcoming, and it is the subjective decision of the boss to determine the recipient. Everything else being equal, your negative comment might be the tie-breaker. Knowing the decision influencers and the office politics will help you avoid shooting yourself in the foot.
Conversely, in many blue-collar environments, the four Ps are arranged with performance as the strongest influence, followed by potential, politics and personality, in that order. Although the line between the white-collar and blue-collar working environments is blurred, the blue-collar environment often encompasses unions and hourly-paid positions. Longevity is typically rewarded with advancement in the blue-collar environment, but politics can still play a major role in career advancement. To learn the informal power structure in the blue-collar firm, ask employees who have been around for three to five years.
In the white-collar setting, you may want to target the more tenured personnel, as long as they are not in management positions. They know the power players and may be open to sharing the information with you. The go-getters may not be as forthcoming because they do not want anyone, including you, to get ahead of them.
Every situation is different, so this information is general in nature and intended only to provide a basic strategy to position yourself in your new organization. Use your eyes and ears to understand your unique working environment, and you can improve your chance to position yourself for success.
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Bernard Shaw is a resume writer and transition coach at www.MilitaryResumes.com, which offers career advice and resume services for military-to-civilian transitions. He may be reached at bshaw@MilitaryResumes.com.
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Upward Mobility
In a white-collar position, your progression likely will depend of the four Ps:
- Politics
- Performance
- Personality
- Potential
In a blue-collar environment, the order of the four Ps changes somewhat:
- Performance
- Potential
- Politics
- Personality
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