All organizations are political—and to some degree, they always will be. The underlying reasons are psychological. First, work involves dealing with people. That means finding a compromise between what they want and what we want.
Second, humans are emotional creatures, biased by unconscious needs and riddled with insecurities.
As a result, office politics tend to eclipse formal organizational roles and hijack critical organizational processes, making simple tasks complex and tedious, and organizations ineffective. Politics also account for a significant portion of work-related stress and burnout.
It’s important to recognize that untrammeled politics have a corrosive impact on an organization. Because most organizations promote individuals who are politically savvy, managers and senior executives tend to perpetuate office politics. But to most employees, politics signal a discrepancy between what should be done and what is really done, defeating their own efforts. This leaves most employees demoralized and united only against their bosses or senior leadership…not a good position for a company to be in.
In less toxic companies, leaders manage the tensions within groups to enhance team performance and organizational effectiveness. The best managers manage the way they themselves behave. People who are perceived as apolitical display high levels of congruence between what they say and what they do. They reward others for what they were required to do, while holding them accountable for what they fail to deliver.
Good leaders focus on social skills, emotional intelligence and intuition. They are driven to come across as competent, transparent, approachable and altruistic.
They avoid pitting employees against one another and instead focus on outperforming the company’s competitors. They do this through articulating a meaningful mission—a vision that resonates and motivates people to achieve a collective goal. This keeps the team focused on beating their competitors, rather than each other. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the vice president of research and innovation at Hogan Assessment Systems, and author of Confidence.