Office politics are a law of nature
How I came to realize that politics are not a sign of organizational dysfunction but an inevitable part of human interaction.
What are the predictors for how much time monkeys spend grooming and delousing other monkeys? I would have assumed it depends on the monkey’s size and hair length. More hair needs more grooming. But it’s not. The best predictor for time spent delousing is the size of the tribe. The bigger the tribe, the busier the monkeys combing through each other’s fur.
This behavior makes sense when we consider grooming and delousing each other not as mere fur hygiene but as a primary way to foster relationships and - when push comes to shove - alliances. With size, the socio-hierarchical structure gains in complexity and dynamic, requiring more effort by each monkey to strengthen their position in these groups.
At the beginning of my career, I was convinced that politics is an organizational dysfunction. I saw politics as a game defined by pursuing selfish interests through unethical means such as coercion, deceit and lying. I also believed this was a game you could refuse to participate in, holding steadfast to my ideals of rationality and meritocracy. It still hurts me to admit - I was wrong.
On the upside, there are also positive types of political behavior. Volunteering for projects to gain more visibility and proponents for your next promotion can be considered political but is a win-win. Sucking up to a person you don’t like leaves a bad taste, but being friendly doesn’t hurt anybody. So politics isn’t all black and white.
At the core, political behavior is not about aggression and dishonesty but about building relationships. And no matter how often organizations pay lip service to meritocracy, large-scale studies show that personal feelings play a more important role in forming work relationships than is commonly acknowledged. It is even more important than evaluations of competence. We prefer to work with the lovable fool instead of the competent jerk.
And I would up this a notch: If your colleagues place you merely in the “meh - not much of an opinion section” of a likability scale, you might as well be a jerk. To oversimplify it: You can't expect any support if you have no relationship with that person. We are not different from the monkeys. If you haven’t groomed the silver-back, you are not on the team and left to fight for the scraps. We want to pretend this is not the case, but it is.
So, my first insight was that I needed to get rid of my childish and naive belief that it pays to be a good soldier and that doing the right thing would eventually prevail. Fairness is a core value of mine, but still, life is not fair.
Secondly, I needed to realize that as a manager of a team within a larger organization, managing those relationships is an essential part of my job. Refusing to play that game, as I framed it, equaled me not doing my job. And as a matter of fact, the entire team suffered because of it. Despite the objectively outstanding performance, I failed to get buy-in and the necessary resources. And I did so because I failed to build relationships with the right people.
Lesson learned: Politics is a law of nature, especially in large organizations where relationships don’t happen naturally through proximity. In these contexts, one must create proximity to build the relationships that will help you get things done.