Office Politics

Author, psychologist and broadcaster Oliver James however, takes a different view. In his 2013 book Office Politics: How to Thrive in a World of Lying, Backstabbing and Dirty Trick he argues that not only is office politics something that everyone engages in, it is something we should all be striving to do more often and far more effectively.

In this interview, Oliver James talks to us about the key themes and ideas of the book and the wider role of office politics in the workplace. I began by asking Oliver to explain the definition of office politics.

Oliver James: It’s defined based on four characteristics office politics.

Astuteness; that is, being able to read other people, yourself and the organisation you’re in.

Effectiveness, in which you use that astuteness to choose which tactics or strategies to employ on which people at what moment.

And then the third defining feature of office politics along with astuteness and effectiveness is networking. It is very, very important to get out there and meet people outside your organisation. In the modern commercial environment most people move between organisations quite a lot. You need to have a network both in terms of moving upwards but also once you have moved upwards being able to decide who to bring with you.

And then, finally, the appearance of sincerity. Without people at least thinking you may be sincere, you haven’t got a hope.

Those four office political skills are regarded as being key ones.

Female interviewer: Why does office politics have such a bad reputation? How do you think this needs to change and why?

Oliver James: Office politics has a bad reputation because it’s been misconstrued as meaning being nasty, to put it simply. The reality is that we all engage in it and my mission is to try and persuade people to understand that they do engage in it and to try and be a bit more deliberate and self-conscious in the way that they engage in it. The vast majority of us are in service industries and in a great many fields it is very hard to measure precisely what your contribution is.

We all know very talented people who don’t get nearly as far as they should and this is nearly always because they haven’t acknowledged that they need office politics and taken time and effort to be better at them.

Female interviewer: In his book, Oliver argues that astuteness, one of the four key components of office political skills, has three distinct facets. I asked Oliver to explain what these are, starting with the first element: being able to read others.

Oliver James: You look at somebody’s body language and from that and from what they say of course you infer what is really going on here and obviously the better you are at that, the more you can work out the ramifications of what is being said, the hidden agenda if you like, that other people have got when they communicate with you in an email or verbally, the more you will be in a position to be able to make good judgements about how to respond.

Equally, though, of course you need to be astute about yourself. You have got to be able to read how you are feeling, notice the way people are making you feel and let that inform you and take distortions that you might be introducing into the situation out.

And then finally, you need to be able to read the organisation. Whatever their story about themselves, you have to always check the reality of what the organisation is like. And within your part of it you have obviously got to work out who really has the power and who may hierarchically seem to have the power. Being able to read what’s going on around you in the organisation in general and in your part of the organisation is terribly important in terms of astuteness.

Female interviewer: How can we go about improving our astuteness?

Oliver James: There are things like, for example, mindfulness. If you do a mindfulness course it will greatly increase your capacity to know what you’re feeling and thinking at any particular time. One of the things that I argue in my book is that acting is terribly important - the capacity to be able to perform - and people have a horror of this, but actually we all engage in pretence all the time.

Nothing to stop you joining a local amateur dramatic society and get some actual experience of acting. And if you do that you will actually become more astute about seeing that other people around you are acting, other people around you are not what they seem to quite a significant extent.

Female interviewer: So how can leaders and managers balance this need to act with the need to be authentic?

Oliver James: It’s through acting that you can achieve authenticity. We all do have personae, we all are different people in different settings. You know, the person you are when you are in the office is not the same person as the person you are when playing with your children or sitting with your friends. We have different aspects of ourselves that are activated by different environments.

Authenticity is about knowing who you are and having a sense of what’s real and what’s true for you. And my argument would be that if you know what’s real and true, from that sound anchorage, you can afford to be quite playful. You can afford to express what you feel is real and true according to the situation. Everything is situation-specific and acting is an important component of your being able to properly convey yourself and project yourself and express yourself within any particular environment.

Female interviewer: Can you tell us about some of the more extreme forms of political behaviour that you examine in the book?

Oliver James: New research shows that there are three interlinked traits and this is known as the dark triad. The first is psychopathy, cold, ruthless, unimpassive, callousness. The second is Machiavellianism, a compulsive game playing where you are only comfortable if you feel you are in some kind of game in which there is going to be a winner or a loser. And what is very puzzling about them and the psychopaths is that quite a lot of what they do is often actually pointless. They are constantly trying to deal with very uncomfortable feelings through psychopathy and through Machiavellianism. And then the third characteristic is narcissism which is grandiose, me, me, me, self-focused, bigging yourself up because you feel powerless and worthless. The proportion of people who are triadic has increased in the last 30, 40 years and what’s more they are overrepresented amongst senior managers and also some measure of triadic characteristic is necessary for many people in order for them to become a senior manager without them being fully triadic in the sense that I have defined.

Female interviewer: If we identify these characteristics in a senior manager we are working with, what strategies can we adopt to deal with them more effectively?

Oliver James: If you come to the conclusion that you’ve got a manager who is triadic, first of all try and work out which kind of triadicism is primary. So are they primarily narcissistic, Machiavellian or psychopathic? Now the easiest one to deal with of those three of course is the narcissist because a narcissist is a sucker for ingratiation. Having said that, you have to be pretty clever. If they are a successful one, they will be smart because they will be Machiavellian, so they will be able to spot you coming if you try to be ingratiatory in too obvious a fashion. So if you are dealing with a psychopath or a Machiavel, you start on the premise that most of what they say is going to be deceitful or if they are telling the truth, that’s only as a strategy to confuse you. That’s your best bet in dealing with them.

Female interviewer: In the book you state that office political skill is an important component of true emotional health. What exactly do you mean by this?

Oliver James: By emotional health I mean things like living in the present, experiencing things at first hand which you might think we all do. We don’t. A lot of the time most of us live in a rather detached state and find it quite hard to really wake up and smell the coffee and, you know, really experience what is going on.

The second defining feature of emotional health is fluid two-way communication. An emotionally healthy person is actually able to be alert and listen to what other people have got to say and equally able when it’s their turn and when they have got something to say and they need to assert themselves, to be assertive.

Insight is the third characteristic of emotional health. You have got to be self-aware, you have got to be aware of how people are making you feel, how your past is affecting the way you are reacting irrationally to the present. Insight is hugely helpful for making a better office politician.

Vivacity is the fourth characteristic of emotional health. Being positive, being an upbeat, lively sort of person is always going to be advantageous to somebody in a work environment.

Playfulness, the fifth characteristic. Terribly important for being able to perform effectively, to be able to act, to be able to pretend. And also playfulness is a crucial part of having a fulfilling, enjoyable experience.

Female interviewer: And finally, are there any steps we can take to improve our own office political skills?

Oliver James: I think it’s a great mistake to imagine that there are any single tactics that are more important than others in office politics. When you are with a really smart office politician, it seems like they have got this wonderful box of tricks. It’s not that; it’s that they’re actually very astute and they’re very alert and alive to the possibilities. So it’s really all about the kind of person you are rather than any particular tactics you’re using.

And as I say, I think the absolute key, the argument of my book is, first and foremost, the most important thing that you need to accept is that office politics are vital and that once you have accepted that, then everything else follows.

Female interviewer: Thank you for listening to our interview with Oliver James. To find out more about office politics and what shape your own office political skills are in, why not take a look at some of the other resources in your toolkit?