Aryanne Oade - Managing Politics at Work: The Essential Toolkit for Identifying and Handling Political Behaviour in the Workplace

Managing Politics at Work

Aryanne Oade

Director, Oade Associates Limited

Aryanne Oade 2009

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First published 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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ISBN-13: 978-0-230-59541-5

ISBN-10: 0-230-59541-3

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Printed and bound in China

This book focuses on how you identify and manage other peoples political behavior at work and, to some extent, how you manage your own political behavior as well. In writing the book, I am not seeking to advise you, the reader, on how to handle your workplace relationships, but rather to offer you my experiences and know-how as someone who has coached and worked with hundreds of clients on these issues. In addition to reading this book, you might want to seek the services and professional advice of a coach, business psychologist or consultant, each of whom should be able to offer you tailored, detailed and impartial counsel on the more challenging interpersonal and intrapersonal issues you might face at work.

I would like to acknowledge a number of people who have played a part in my work and the writing of this book.

Firstly, my thanks and gratitude go to all the clients who have spoken with me about their political experiences at work, sharing with me their successes, frustrations, reactions and strategies for managing and using political behavior in the workplace. These are perhaps the most stimulating and complex of issues to deal with and I have enjoyed every coaching meeting and workshop which focused on them.

Next, I like to thank the many clients and contacts who allowed me to pick their brains at the start of the writing process for this book. These conversations, about clients and contacts political experiences at work, were valuable in helping me make decisions about how to structure and focus the book. I am indebted to each of you and send my thanks to you gratefully and anonymously.

Also, my appreciation goes to my actor colleague Gina Rowland for her skills in re-creating believable business characters in coaching meetings, and for her helpful critique of seven chapters at the draft stage of the book; and to Eileen and Michael Scott for their timely and helpful review of Chapter 8.

Finally, Im grateful to Stephen Rutt at Palgrave Macmillan for his speedy decision to publish this book and to the entire publishing team for being such effective and enjoyable co-workers.

Politics at work is a fact of life. If you want to have influence in your workplace it is vital that you accurately identify, interpret and react to the political context around you. This is a book about how you handle politics in your workplace. The book focuses on how you manage the political situations and the political behavior you encounter at work. It is about your political behavior, and the political behavior used by the people you work with and for. It is also about the impact productive, destructive and unexceptional of political behaviors used by your colleagues and by you on other people, on yourself and on the department or team you work in. It is written for anyone who is struggling to understand, make sense of and respond effectively to the political context around them at work.

I wrote this book out of a firm conviction that how you behave at work how you conduct yourself and handle other people is what ultimately matters most. At the end of the day, its the relationships that you build at work that count. Its not simply a matter of whether or not you possess the technical know-how your role requires. How you handle the people you work with is what will differentiate the adequate from the effective employee, and no more so than when other peoples behavior or your own is partly or wholly motivated by political considerations. No matter how talented, intelligent, qualified or technically competent you are, without a comprehensive range of political skills and more general people-handling skills you wont perform as effectively as you could do in your role, you wont get the influence, promotion or projects youd like and might well deserve, and you might not be seen as the effective, capable pair of hands your knowledge and technical skills suggest that you are.

I am a Chartered Psychologist. I began working as a business psychologist in the late 1980s. During the following five years I worked for three consultancy firms. My experience of working for these firms was that I needed to expend much energy managing the relationships and political agendas of the people I worked alongside. I found myself as much a part of the political landscape as anyone else, and became caught up using political behavior as much as everybody else. I didnt like some of the behavior I saw around me, and I didnt like the fact that I ended up using some of it too. The working culture in each of these organizations was prevailingly political, and I found myself joining the party, much as I would have preferred to focus wholly on working productively with clients. Eventually, I wanted my energy and commitment to go solely toward delivering effective coaching programs and professional skills workshops. To that end I decided to work as an independent business psychologist.

Some of my initial projects were carried out as an associate to smaller consultancy firms. Then, in January 2000,I set up Oade Associates to design and deliver bespoke executive coaching programs, tailored professional skills workshops and custom-made conference scenarios. In this work I combine business psychology with the skills of professional actors to create real-life scenarios that reflect the leadership, management and political issues that my clients deal with in their work.