Politics at work start early

Politics - embedded

Here’s four quick quotes from current jobs being advertised, spot the common word:

• “You will posses demonstrated leadership, influencing and negotiation skills”
• “…excellent communication and influencing skills”
• “..combine specialist knowledge with strong management and influencing skills”
• “Excellent communication and influencing skills at all levels”.

All of these jobs are operational or audit roles, not sales or business development.  Which means the people they are influencing are internal people in the same organisation.  We have set up a political organisation from the start.

Organisations exist to get work done.  We divide work into chunks called jobs, or roles.   Roles exist to produce outcomes, and the person in the role can be held accountable for these outcomes.

But..if we want to be fair, if we are going to hold someone accountable for an outcome, then we have to give them the authority they need to get this done.  (This is a crucial foundation of Elliott Jaques‘ study of the nature of work and how roles relate).   If the authority provided to a role is in any way less than what is needed, that gap will naturally be filled by influence.  And we are on the path to politics.

So here’s what we do – rather than requiring the person to  have the influencing skills to get their work done, we give the role the cross-functional  authority it needs to get the work done.  And we tell the others too and adjust their accountabilities accordingly. Everyone knows where everybody else stands.

We get caught up with cross-functional roles because we tend to see authorities as either all-or-nothing (‘I get to tell them what do to”), or we use models which, while better than nothing, are still crude and can create confusion (for example the RACI model).  Dissatisfaction with these concepts has led us to where we are: influencing being seen as a necessary skill and the rise of emotional intelligence.

I often use Jaques’ model, where seven different types of cross-functional authority are provided, giving us a starting point to allow roles to integrate across a business.  They range from the authority to direct others to the authority to merely have access to explain something (following the advice is optional for the other person).   These are the subject for a later post; my associate Andrew Olivier provides a great description and practical steps in his book on Organisational Design.

What’s the point of this?  Lets look at a typical job ad:

“Along with your considerable technical knowledge, skills and experience, influencing skills will be critical  in order to drive crucial outcomes across the business”

Here’s what we can set up using Jaques’ cross-functional authorities.

“You will be held directly accountable for crucial outcomes across the business for which you will be given the requisite authority so you can use your considerable technical knowledge, skills and experience.”

Which one would you prefer?