A consultant colleague called me recently to cry on my shoulder. He had upset one of his major clients and was asked to leave the assignment early. As someone strongly influenced by the results of his most recent project, he was feeling completely deflated.
Piecing the story together it emerged that, despite the quality of his work, my friend had failed to spot the signals preceding his demise. The managing director (MD) for whom he had been conducting the project had felt threatened by its conclusions and resentful of the direct manner in which they were delivered. My friend, not realising the prevailing ‘command and control’ culture in which people deferred to their MD, had diminished him in front of his senior team.
Gradually realising that he had been exclusively absorbed in the technical aspects of the task, my friend began to accept that he had another duty to himself and to his business – that of developing an intelligent, proactive approach to what he would, in the past, have referred to disparagingly as ‘politics’.
Meeting your own and others’ needs
So what is ‘politics’? Definitions include ‘the use (or misuse) of power to achieve goals’, and ‘the study of influence and the influential’. I like to define it as the interactive process through which people seek
to meet their own and others’ needs.
These needs can be professional and/or personal in nature, and they can change over time. People are not always consciously aware of their needs; and even when they are, they might not choose to articulate them.
The tool I offer below provides a method for gaining valuable insights into the unique cocktail of needs of each key figure in your political landscape, to optimise your ability to influence and collaborate. This is particularly useful today, when professionals have to integrate quickly and effectively within a series of organisations over the course of their career.
Furthermore, with progressing seniority one’s network of colleagues and stakeholders becomes more complex, so being adept at navigating through diverse organisational landscapes pays valuable dividends for
all. The approach I describe will help you decide with whom it is important to be connected, and how. In other words it can help you develop a high degree of political intelligence.
A rich network of threads
A useful metaphor for the political complexity in any working environment is that of a fabric composed of a rich network of threads between the various key figures. Each of these ‘actors’ (those active in your landscape) has a power position relative to that of others that is not necessarily obvious. In entering an organisation (eg as a new recruit or a partner/stakeholder), or embarking on a new project that spans parts of the organisation unfamiliar to you, you will need to grasp this and weave yourself into the existing fabric, choosing wisely which new threads to create such that your professional and personal objectives are best met.
Your own priorities
To begin with you need to be very clear about your own priorities, and your needs in relation to these. For each project or contract, you need to keep in mind your key objectives, the resources required to address them and the key obstacles likely to get in the way. This will make it easier for you to highlight the key players relevant to your objectives.
Win-win outcomes
However, this is far from being enough. The people whose support and input are critical to your goals may have completely different agendas from yours, even if they are working in the same organisation and towards the same goals. To maximise your influence and gain effective collaboration you need also to pay exquisite attention to their objectives and needs, and seek win-win outcomes together.
A pragmatic and powerful approach
The ‘political insight mapping tool’ provides a pragmatic and powerful approach to making sense of your political landscapes (see Figure 1 below). Here is an outline of how to use it.
- Think of a key project in which you are currently involved. List the main relevant ‘actors’. For each of them, consider carefully their ‘power’ in the project from your perspective, and make the size of the circle to represent them on your map reflect this. Then consider how easy it is for you to access them. They may be at a distant location yet your paths may cross regularly. They may be in the office next door yet rarely free to meet you. The distance you put between them and you on the map should reflect their ease of access for you in real life. Similarly if any actor deals frequently with another and/or they have a strong connection for other reasons, show this by placing them close together on your map. The key players are plotted around you at the centre, and you could colour code the specific stakeholders (or the team/department) to which they belong.
- With each player, draw a line between you and them, its thickness denoting the volume of communication traffic between you. Show the quality of the communication by the colour of the line, eg green for good, amber for vulnerable or shaky, red for poor or damaged. Your map starts to look something like Figure 1 (below).
- Look carefully at your map. It should now be possible to see whether all the ‘threads’ are optimised for the successful achievement of your goals. Straight away you can begin to see the areas of criticality. In the fictitious example below, you can guess that the poor connection with Pete poses a problem and that the relationship with the client (Chris) is less healthy than the ideal because the communication is sparse. In my friend’s example, he had underestimated the size of the MD’s power in relation to his own, and had assumed a good connection by virtue of his own sense of integrity and his quality work. You need to think of the quality of the relationship through the other person’s eyes.
Looking at the map again, you may spot that a key person has possibly been neglected. You may also spot positive opportunities, eg someone you know well may be close to a difficult-to-access key player and might offer an alternative route to them. On the other hand, you might realise that someone close to you who is not that vital to your goals may be taking an inordinate proportion of your valuable time and effort, highlighting that you need to manage your boundaries. The relationship is a joint creation between you, and it is possible to influence it yourself by what you choose to do from this moment on.
- Now let us add a level of sophistication to your map. Take in turn each of the relationships or ‘threads’ that require your attention, write down the name and job title of the person and try to answer the following questions for that relationship:
- why are they important to your goals (eg their possible access to resources; their relevance to the key obstacles)?
- what are the top three outcomes that the organisation expects the role this person occupies to deliver?
- what are the top three priorities and/or concerns for the person inhabiting this role at the moment:
– professionally?
– personally? - how might your goals be relevant to theirs?
- in their relationship with you, what might be their current needs and their hoped for desired outcomes?
- what are yours?
- Now do a reality check. In the relationships on your map, how well are each party’s needs and expectations actually being met? In light of this, do any of the lines’ colours need to be amended? An appearance of bonhomie does not mean that all are satisfied with the exchange. Likewise, a tough exchange does not necessarily mean failure to deliver what was required.
- Now prepare to act, first identifying the critical relationships. Management guru Stephen Covey talks about the ‘emotional bank balance’ of each party in a relationship. He explains how trust is built when each person makes deposits into the other’s account. A deposit is all the more valuable if it is chosen carefully to be of particular worth to the recipient. It is easy to make unintentional withdrawals – which, ironically, can occur through offering something that is not valued by the recipient, or behaving in a way that does not meet the expectations of the other party (easily done, if they are from another culture). So if you are finding a particular relationship challenging, consider whether there has been an unwitting withdrawal. If that is the case, it is critical that you put it right – even if it was not of your own doing, eg your predecessor having broken a confidence – or it may remain an ongoing barrier.
Another useful tack is to find common ground with the other person (eg shared goals of the organisation or project) and remind them that you ultimately want the same things. Given your understanding of their key needs, what can you offer them that they value? Also, look for latent opportunities. Has any ‘credit’ been building – and if so, what requests might you wish to make? It is important that you do ask for what will help you, so long as it is realistic, appropriate to what others have to offer, and not a demand. Be prepared to negotiate.
- Finally, after all your quality thinking, what do you conclude are the most important things that need to happen? And what are you going to do next?
(If, in the above exercise, you find that you have insufficient information then you need to undertake some further exploration.)
By now you should be getting a sense of how attractive it is for each of these individuals to engage with you in achieving your goals. Often their attitudes and behviours towards you will have little to do with you as a person and more to do with the wider span of what is going on in their world. If the attraction for engaging with you is low, you need to work hard to make it important and appealing enough by communicating its significance in terms of what matters to them.
Conclusion
Using the above approach you can gain vital intelligence about critical relationships in your political landscape. The resulting insights should then enable you to build more respectful, collaborative business relationships for the mutual achievement of desired outcomes.
