Navigate office politics with this little secret

Politics is simply an architecture of information flow and influence in an office. Office politics being good or bad is only as good or bad as the intentions behind leveraging it.

You are likely frustrated with teams not aligning with your vision, stonewalling your progress, or outright trying to kill your innovation. Office politics? maybe not!

If you introspect a bit, there is a very good chance that the problem is you and not something outside.

Most often people operate with good intent even if it does not look that way. You have to believe in this basic tenant to have some ounce of peace in life.

With that in mind, If your data, arguments and requests are an obvious winner, you will likely get your way. Only when data, arguments and requests are ambiguous, the machinery of office politics kicks in.

If you want to leverage the architecture of office politics, here are two things to get trained on.

Subscribe the ‘architecture of Information flow’

Know all your stakeholders and peer teams that have an impact on your team. Subscribe to their newsletters, stakeholder meetings and all hands.

At any point of time, you should be aware of the current projects, upcoming projects and business goals of these teams. Build your networking with engineers, managers and senior leadership in these teams who can provide you regular flow of information.

Being well informed gets you thinking about ideas that will align and complement theirs instead of having a tug of war down the road

Develop an intuition of the architecture of Influence

Friends listen to the advice of friends.

In large organizations, various pockets of relationships are established. The most obvious ones are the top down reporting order of influence. There are also other lateral relationships and sphere of influence. These relationships could be across engineering, product, data science, hr and other roles.

Knowing who is the decision maker and who are the people who help them made decisions is a critical information to know when you want the right pair of eyes on your proposal.

Again, use this powerful information good. It is pretty easy to fall prey to greed.