Working Professional – “How to deal with office politics?”
Me – “Have you ever seen Big Boss”?
Working Professional – “Yes!”.
Me – “If I could use the Big Boss Analogy here, in a Big Boss House, even two friends from outside become sworn enemies.
Agreed?
Working Professional – “Yes!”.
Me – “Why?
Because of the tasks, ration allocation, hardship that the contestants are made to go through.
Big Boss is designed to create enmity, hatred, aggression, toxicity amongst contestants. And that brings out the vicious side in each of them in the house.
Are you with me?
Working Professional – “Yes!”.
Me – “It’s not that the people inside the house are bad people, it’s the contrived environment, that makes them look bad. I am sure, the contestants would themselves get embarrassed once they watch their performance, once they are outside the house.
Similarly, in a professional space it’s not people, more often than not it’s the environment that is behind the politics.
If I go down a bit deeper, in corporate space what creates all the negativity and toxic politics is, ‘Insecurity’.
In my book The PROcess PRO, I mentioned that ‘The mother of negativity in corporate space is Insecurity’.
The fundamental difference between the evaluation processes between a college and a workplace is, in a college, every student can score 100 out of 100 and come first.
But in a professional space, even for a as small as 20 member organization, regardless of their performances, end of the year 20% of the employees would be categorised as the top performers, 60% would be categorised as average performers and 20% would be categorised as non-performers.
The number might vary, but outline is the same in majority of the organizations.
You are a leader of a 10 member team, and all of them are selected by you and are equally good performers and you are forced to chose 20% non-performers among them, would that not create insecurity and trust deficit within the team.
Two colleagues in a workplace, seat adjacent to each other, who don’t see eye to eye could have been great friends had they met each other outside in a social set up.
So, to deal with the situation the first step is to accept, whether it’s the boss, the colleagues, the HR, the other members, the people, they are not bad.
It’s the insecurity, it’s the environment that is making them behave the way they behave”.
Working Professional – “What would be my role to change things better?”
Me – “ To answer your question, I would again go back to the Big Boss analogy.
If you take a look at the list of last 10 years’ Big Boss winners, you would find mostly the winners are the people who presented themselves as no THREAT to others.
And that’s the key in the Corporate space as well. You have to be perceived as
No Threat by your colleagues, your boss and all you work with.
So, if you feel your colleagues are hostile towards you, your boss is picking on you, mostly it’s the insecurity that comes from their perceived threat that you pose.
Blaming them or changing project or changing organization might not serve as the permanent solution to the problem.
The long term solution would be your performance and communication.
And taking help from a mentor or coach who would be able to guide you deal with these kind of workplace challenges.”.