By: Zforce

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Coupon Binder

As I am no longer involved in Corporate Office affairs I am conscious in writing this article I am in danger of sounding like a grumpy old man. But in relation to corporate office politics I saw something this week that astounded me.

In The Times of London on a management and business page there was a write up with photograph of a chap who coaches people in how to succeed at office politics. I only glanced at the article but it stayed with me.

As someone who has run major corporate businesses and eventually went on to found my own businesses it caused me to reflect. My style of management was to be open to avoid confusion and office politics by keeping everyone in the business informed on what we were attempting to achieve. It was their lively hood after all.

We worked hard at a structured briefing method, departmental groups were informed by the head of department what the latest issues were. The heads of department had been briefed by me and it was mandatory that any questions were answered there and then. If an answer was not possible the question had to be fed back to me and I would give the answer. The meetings were monthly.

This method of communication worked brilliantly, as we were able to bring about major change and re-organisation including job losses without any repercussions that threatened the business. There could be no corporate office politics because every one was fully briefed and all knew what the situation was.

The article about coaching people how to succeed at corporate office politics is the opposite of what is needed. To succeed we all need to work together with common goals. This applies in any business and honest open communication is an essential in this process.

However, I also have another take on it. The chap who has developed the course is obviously selling to the large corporates and getting coverage in one of the top newspapers. Which shows that there is a market. So best of luck to him for having the initiative to spot the opportunity.

Which leads me to another point that you have heard me go on about before. When you have your own business you see opportunity every where. Just another reason for escaping the office politics and exploiting the opportunities which are there for us.

By: Michael Harrison

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Business Marketing

One common and prevalent method used in my particular group has been “divide and conquer.” And, I was the one who was ousted.

What are ways to get around this type of behavior and abuse?

By: heavy heart

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business marketing plan

In a conventional office, it is always the boss who has the say over every decision that has to be made. It has been said that full accountability is on a boss’s shoulders. The future of a company depends much on the ability of a boss to leverage the business that it will survive that will sustain its employees financial needs. In addition to the given responsibilities of a boss, power comes with it. The boss has the power to decide who to hire and who to fire. Indeed, the boss is the most powerful entity inside an office. That said, most of the people’s goal is to ensure that the boss notices their presence. That way, on every career advancement opportunities, they will be on top of the list. It makes sense so sadly. Someone the boss knows is most likely to get the position. No matter how the company reiterates equal opportunity for everyone, the fact remains that a boss would always prefer somebody he knows. That is because most companies are performance based. An excellent performance and a good working attitude are always the criteria for selecting somebody for a position.

The truth of the matter remains, if you want to stay longer in the company or if you want an early promotion, you have to tell the boss you exist. Looking at the positive side, it is every boss’s prerogative to choose someone with experience and a good working attitude based on his preference. This is so due to the fact that whatever decision has to be carried on will be passed along hence if trust is not established between you and the boss, you are less likely to pop that champagne after getting a note that says ” you got the position”. So its really up to you how you take it. If envy lingers your mind over somebody who just came in yesterday gets promoted while you have been sitting there for quite sometime now, these are certain realizations that you can think of before you feel bad and leave your current work. Its not always a bad thing to think of office politics. It should motivate you to excel in performance and to show a good working attitude. Those in effect would certainly ring a bell on the boss’s ears.

A major example of office politicking is a simple getting-close-gesture with the boss. Not anyone is made alike hence there are people who has the ability to stir up interest from the boss’s eyes. Maybe what you need to do it so to ensure that good performance and working attitude go a long way with camaraderie. Its not a bad thing to rub elbows with the boss just as long as you keep your values. In some cases, people who wants to get close to the boss would do odd things like volunteering to be a nanny for his kid or be a chaperon to his teenager something like that totally ridiculous!

More than the bad perception towards office politics what you need to bear in mind is the idea that camaraderie, good performance and work attitude when combined together can move you a long way to the top of the corporate ladder. Go on say high and be nice to your boss! Enjoy the office politics.

By: Frank Carbon

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marketing excellence

By: The Positronic Pimp

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Marketing Strategies

In his book, Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics (Book Surge, 2007), U.S. Marine turned business professional and university instructor Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts takes you inside one of the greatest team building organizations in the world – the United States Marine Corps – to examine and discover the strategies that business leaders must be willing to learn, use and employ for building ordinary groups into extraordinary teams; leading the right team of commandos who understand what it takes to win on the business battlefield and defeat workplace politics using warfare as the key to experience a significant win. He defines workplace and office politics as “the path to smart growth…using the power to accelerate the careers of high potential future leaders and teams power in the workplace.” He implies that office politics are not always negative, but offer opportunities for greatness. And while workplace politics aren’t necessarily avoidable, people can learn to understand their purpose, find their voice and understand how-to strengthen and build the teams dynamics and interpersonal communications skills – all while managing responsibilities with tact, poise, and polish. The game of politics, when understood how-to use it as a strategic weapon, helps to successfully chart the path of personal and professional growth as the essential task to achieve personal mastery from the results of peak performance. Organizational politics also offers the hidden treasures that allow people to stand-out from the crowd. They learn to demonstrate their ability to navigate the maze of successful team building – a task that is viewed as positive organizational behavior from the individual that is perceived as an extraordinary leader. This is the type of person that others seek to follow and emulate for the greatness they wish to develop for themselves.

Workplace Politics vs. The Battlefield Engagement

Just as in any military engagement, in order to win one must know the rules better than his/her competitor to outsmart them on the battlefield. It also is beneficial to be a part of the right team for controlling the elements of the battlefront. However, some might claim the workplace and the military are very different in many ways. Thinking from this approach causes significant missteps in organizational politics. There are significant issues that are similar in the workplace and on a military battlefield. For starters, the one constant is “people.” Any time that people are involved in a scenario, decision-making must play a role in the ability to win. Using the strategies from the United States Marine Corps, people are responsible for making critical decisions from the highest ranking officer down to the lowest ranking enlisted – and the decision could mean life or death. Well, the same goes for the workplace. People are responsible for making critical decisions that could mean that the organization acquires strategic assets (executive suite decisions) or that a customer is treated in a way that causes them to continue doing business with the organization. Both can be seen as life or death for the organization. As seen with Wachovia bank, a decision from the top level leadership was made to acquire Westgate Financial to boost their mortgage business. When the U.S. mortgage markets and industry imploded during the financial crisis, the organization was effected with incredible implications – it became the beginning of the end for one of the country’s largest banks and people lost careers and more. Similar to the likes of a military battlefield engagement and a series of wrong decisions made by leadership, loss of life was experienced.  

But what most people fail to realize is that the workplace is too a battlefield. Business is warfare and those who understand how to navigate the politics always win. Consider the game of chess. Chess can be low-key and quiet, a friendly game between friends. Or it can be explosive and highly competitive, set amid a crowd of observers, where the ultimate winner reaps world-wide accolades. Consider the skill behind the game of chess. It requires well-planned strategy and a great deal of mental acuity and patience, not to mention years of practice to reach an elite status.

These are the same skills required by a great leader, one who has the ability to guide an organization and one who understands the world of workplace politics. On the other hand, while playing a game such as chess, there can only be a single winner where there often can be a more neutral outcome in the world of workplace politics. With the proper skills of negotiation and influence, savvy leadership might be able to create a win-win situation.   

The Truth about Politics in the Workplace

Politics will always be part of an organization because people are people. The dynamic relationships of individuals who run a business enterprise play an important part in how the business operates: How the mission map, posture statements, vision, values and organizational culture is forged. And while the average Jane or Joe might feel like they are being run over by co-workers who manipulate the system, bully, gossip, backstab and brown nose to get what they want, there is more to workplace politics than those negative daily encounters. The quintessential aspect of organizational politics is the team. Building great teams’ hits at one of the most discussed topics in business media and the workplace: Organizational Behavior, transformational leadership, organizational renewal and inter-office politics. The day of the individual worker is over, as today’s business arena demands that workers possess the ability to effectively work as team units that consistently produce extraordinary outcomes from their performance. It is a scenario all top leaders and managers knows well: The organization, their people, and their systems all require efficient and effective processes to remain constant in its approach to move quickly toward new and innovative ways of reaching mission-critical objectives.

Good leaders are a thing of the past, as global economies now require more than good – they seek greatness and ordinary just does not fit the bill any longer. They now require the ordinary to be “extraordinary.” The new battlefield in the workplace requires the extraordinary leaders’ understanding of workplace politics and the accompanying landscape to be significant. They can no longer work in the old silos of the past that was developed by the silly political conflicts. No, these extraordinary leaders can no longer exhibit the behaviors that ultimately invite disaster. This is not to say that leaders of the past demonstrated the behaviors that put-up with negative politics that caused disastrous outcomes nor does it imply every good leader has found his/her way to the top of the heap by climbing over the bodies of crushed co-workers. It simply means that leadership understands workplace politics well enough to use them as “strategic weapons” to produce positive returns without the mud slinging and backsliding of unethical and immoral actions.  

Understanding how-to chart the path of organizational politics means being able to maneuver using political warfare to enhance the organization’s ability to rise to the top of its industry, without leaving one of its warriors lying wounded on the battlefield. It means having a well crafted Battleplan, understanding the players, building positive alliances and coalition of forces, using the art of war as a significant warfighting strategy that all stakeholders understand and buy-in to for winning, and finally, developing a compelling case study for the associates of the organization to understand the comprehensive approach for integrating strategic human capital and team development initiatives into the fold.

Convert Uniqueness into Ultimate Power

The best leaders are the people that understand the nature of warfare in dealing with and overcoming workplace politics. These are the men and women who have a tone on the pulse of the workplace – internal and external – and know what it takes to remain on task “ethically” to lead others into greatness. Here are five important things to know about politically savvy leaders:

°          They understand the critical importance of the team associates to be “LeaderShaped” into GREATNESS. They understand the “what” and “how” in developing a GREAT team.

°          They make decisive decisions for the benefit of the Future Picture

°          They understand the “culture” in the system that the team must influence.

°          They know what it take to strategically “execute” and win as a team.

°          They know how-to use the “Six Political Signs of Business Leadership” to achieve professional mastery to the people and organization: 1. a clear “Vision” of issues. 2. Understand the “Value” drivers within the team. 3. “Behavioral” influence of leadership to the Future Picture. 4. “Strategy” Modeling (Enterprise Decision Making). 5. Strategic “Execution” (Governance). 6. “Duplication of Protocol” (learnable-teachable methods for future engagements).

Engaging the battlefield that is influenced by workplace politics, for many, may mean asserting their power, pushing and shoving like the elementary school bully until they get what they want. But that’s really just the toxic behavior and conduct that eliminates the possibilities for leadership and the organization they influence to win. One of the best ways to lose power is to overtly use it. Instead, the best leaders know that power comes from influence – and influence is subjective to behavior, character and the value system that drives the people responsible for charting the pathway.

In this great read, Pitts also outlines how, in most cases, team leaders never hit their goals – not because they lack talent within the associate ranks, but because they are naïve to the complexities of team dynamics. He outlines the strategic-execution methods that smart leaders understand and use to determine what type of team model best suits their specific environment, what key skills to look for (and which to avoid), and how to coax top performances from everyone starting from day one.

Author Robert Dilenschneider explains in his book, Power and Influence: The Rules Have Changed: True power and influence means accepting responsibility, taking the heat and keeping your word. So even if someone supports the supposition that leadership is just another way of playing political games, it doesn’t necessarily mean this is a bad thing. When properly played, workplace politics can lead to great achievements and outcomes. Pitts believes that extraordinary teams that are great engage politics well. They are LeaderShaped and driven by extraordinary people who make a distinctive impact – they deliver significant and superior performance over a long period of time. There are some striking characteristics of great teams who achieve sustained success within their mission across its life cycle. They experience an increased level of professional mastery in developing and executing as great teams do. These teams have gone through a process; a process that is forged in a furnace of professional development, transformational thinking, and strategic-execution.  

Workplace politics, good or evil, are a very real part of the work environment. Whether people subscribe to the belief that leadership is just another way of engaging the political battlefield or not, it is important to keep in mind that as long as there are people working together as great teams do, there will be politics, but the outcomes will be far different from the results of the past. Great teams are the way to successfully engage the battlefield – greatness from the team is how to engage politics well and win it using fair tactics.

By: Damian D. Skipper Pitts

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Coupon Organizer

By: Budmash

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Coupon Binder