Office Politics

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we're looking at the bright side of things. We're trying to stay positive and we're looking at things that maybe they're negative, maybe they just bother us a little, but there's definitely pros and cons to every one of these topics we cover. This is one that this time around we're going to talk about office politics. This is one that you may find lots easier to find negatives than positives that come out of it. It is a, we'll say it's a challenging subject to tackle because a lot of us, I think we would be much happier, and this is whether you're a tech person or not, but we'd be much happier if there really weren't office politics to deal with in most situations anyways. As I was building out the topics for the season, as I was looking at our stuff, it essentially What are some of the things that could be considered negatives or complaints that people have had, whether it's myself or other people I've worked with over the years as I've talked to them about the good, the bad, and the ugly about their job? Office politics has definitely come up many times. I don't know how to say it was near and dear to my heart necessarily, but it is something that is a motivating factor for me to keep me in the consulting world most of the time because it is easier if you want to, to avoid office politics. Also unfortunately, it can be very easy to get into them if you want to because you don't necessarily have a dog in the race, a horse in the race or however they do that. You're seen as a neutral observer in some cases. There are situations where you have people share office politics with you maybe faster than they would if you were not a consultant or some outside vendor. Office politics as a whole is neither positive or negative. It's just a thing. It really is, when you think about it, it is the act of people within the company trying to push their ideas, their agendas, their even vision for the company. Now you may say, I know they have a vision statement and they have a mission statement. Maybe even in a company where they are more or less agreed on where they want to go, the challenge is that how you get there can be very different from person to person. Sometimes you have people that are very, we'll say adamant about or strong-willed about their approach and they see that their approach is the superior one or maybe in extreme cases, they see that their path is really the only one. There's other things that come into play. I'm trying to keep it more positive. There's definitely self-preservation and things like that that are politics, but those are we're not going to worry about as much because at that point it's scheming and things like that and I don't think that rises to the level actually of office politics. Those are just people that are worried more about their job than they are about actually getting things done. The office politics I'm thinking about is, and to give you a little more of a, hopefully a little more clear picture about what we're going to discuss here, these are the office politics where you are, it's the give and take, we'll say, of normal relationships that you have. If you're in a relationship where it's all give or it's all take, it's not very good. Professional relationships are no different. There are going to be situations where you may have two, let's say, department heads or team leads that have essentially the same goals, but they have different people or positions or roles that are their focus or that are part of their job to advance that specific agenda. The office politics side comes in when they're looking for ways to maybe leverage a you scratch my back, I'll scratch your kind of thing or other situations where they're trying to leverage what they can do for others and maybe what others can do for them into a way that makes it ideally a win-win situation for everybody involved. However, most of the time in office politics, it's something where it's a win and win more or worse, maybe a win-lose kind of situation where you're trying to do the best for your group, for your department, for your team, and maybe that comes at the expense of other partners or teams. Now part of the politics that gets us to the positive that I really want to look at is the idea of, I will call them, maybe they're, I guess loose cannons is probably not the best way or rogues or skunkworks or black ops or things like that. But these are essentially situations where somebody is either they find a way to do it for themselves or they are given the role, responsibility, power, whatever is needed to go in a different direction. And that's part of, sometimes what happens with, that's part of the whole office politics thing is that somebody has got a different path they want to take, but maybe even it's not necessarily a different path. It may be a fork that they want to take, a branch that they want to take a look at. This happens a lot of times when you see companies that have a, let's say a flagship product or core set of products or services and they decide to branch out. They decide, okay, we're going to go try this other thing. A good example early on, actually, first couple of jobs I worked at as I think about it, it was a consulting company first and foremost that I worked for. And it's actually, like I said, a couple of companies I worked for. They were first and foremost consulting. They were a services company. They sold time, they sold hours with their staff to go do IT projects for their customers. Well, they wanted to get something that was a little more stable, I guess, a little bit more of a recurring revenue, a little bit different revenue model. And they looked at what was out there. In one case, actually, I guess in both cases, it was essentially not everybody, but there was a faction or a group or a person that really looked at it and said, you know, I think a good way for us to proceed would to have software because then we've got licensed software and hopefully we get recurring license fees every year and we already have a technical staff that could essentially build software. And in both cases, it was not, this was not software that was against their primary line of business or even their why. This was essentially an extension of the services they offered. So this was in a way taking the problem of how do we present our processes and procedures to our customers? How do we make ourselves more efficient in delivering those? And they did so by creating software. And this is where the biggest positive I see of office politics basically. Because in these situations, there was definitely some office politics that were played, that were executed in order to get the project looked at by, we'll say, looked at by the CEO and the president. There was also some sort of negotiating that went on as far as getting the team and the resources and setting some sort of expectations even for the project. So all of this, there was some office politicking going on. Now the outcome and the big positive is that sometimes office politics actually leads you into a direction where you get to do some really fun or cool or productive projects. Sometimes the people that are playing the politics that are trying to maybe help steer the organization in a different direction, sometimes they're right. Sometimes the direction they're leading it in is a better direction. They're leading it to a better tomorrow than otherwise would have happened, which is the other side of office politics. Now I think we often look at the scheming and negotiating and all the other things. Sometimes it can get ugly and it can get personal or detrimental to the company. There's also times where it can be a way to get everybody or enough people to agree to take a chance to dip a toe into a new market or a new area of products or a new technology. I see this a lot, the office politicking, I see a lot when you have either a merger of companies or organizations or when you have just within an organization, maybe have departments or maybe departments merge or maybe have somebody that's a major voice in one group moves to another group. If they don't use the same processes and procedures and tools, then you'll still see people essentially lobbying for the use of their favorite tool, whatever that happens to be. This leads us to the second or third, however you look at these things, leads us to another positive out of office politics is typically what it does is it forces us if we're involved in these situations to essentially defend or debate decisions that we've made, positions that we've taken. While this can be exhausting and it can be a waste of resources, quite honestly at times, there are also definitely there are times where it's a good thing, where it forces us to really think through why are we doing what we're doing? Is there maybe a better way? Is it that maybe that there's always been a better way or is the steady improvement of IT something that has created a better way somewhere along the time that we've been doing this? Just because, and we've mentioned this again many, many times, just because it worked or was even the best way to go five years ago, two years ago, even a year ago, maybe it's not anymore. While there are costs to change gears and things like that, there's plenty of return on investment to do so. This office politics dance that we do is a way to sort of, can be a way to sort of have a steady sanity check and just regular review of what are we doing? Why are we doing it? Let's make sure that we are taking advantage of all the things out there for us to be as productive as we want to be. If there's something new, then maybe we have a chance to go out and do that, to take advantage of it and transition to it or whatever needs to be done so that that can become the new tool or the new process or the new procedure. So now, as we go look at it from this point of view, I would say that office politics, maybe it gets sort of a bad, has a bad name. Maybe it gets a bad rap for something that, yes, can be overdone and some people take it too far. Yet, there are situations where it's very important. It is that ongoing dialogue, that conversation that we have as a company, as an organization, as a team about how we do things and whether that is the way we want to keep going or is this something that it's time for us to make a change? It truly is the difference between being lemmings and being reasoning beings that every so often we say, hey, we've been following this path for a while. Are we sure this is the path we want to be on? We may look in a negative light and a bad light at the office politics around that, which is really the discussions that people have. I think maybe people have a bad taste in their mouth with just the word politics in general. Maybe we change this to instead of office politicking, it is office debates or organizational debates and there probably is somebody out there that's one of those think positive, put positive spin on things kind of people that has already come up with a nice little term or set of terms or phrase that describes this, which is better than office politics. But when we want to start from a negative and swing to a positive, it's easy to take the low-hanging fruit and go for something like this where you figure most people are not too happy with it. While this is time-consuming and can be distracting, it actually is a situation that is not completely different from when we talked about the bullpen seating arrangement for developers. Where you could sit there and you're doing your work and because of the arrangement, you will possibly be interrupted by other conversations. And yet, one of the things that helps with that that's a positive that comes out of that is that you can learn by osmosis. You can hear people have their debates, their discussions, and hear both sides of it and hopefully hear them walk through their different positions and get to a single position they agree on. We get the same thing out of office politics. If it's depending on, I guess, sometimes you don't because sometimes you don't get the whole picture. Sometimes you'll get bits and pieces of information, but if you're in a situation where you can both sides, hear what they have to say, see what they want to do, assuming there's two sides. There may be three, there may be five, maybe 50. But the more sides that you at least are exposed to, better yet that you understand, then the better you're going to be at understanding the problem that they're trying to solve, the potential solutions out there, and then even the pros and the cons, most likely, of the various solutions. Because you're going to hear people that are going to hopefully, they're going to promote their idea by highlighting the positives and maybe downplaying or ignoring the negatives. In the meanwhile, they're going to be playing up or focusing on the negatives of other options. And that's not a guarantee, but that's just sort of, it's pretty much human nature. If we're going to argue a point and we want people to agree with us, take the same direction that we do, then we're going to want to give them plenty of positives. And we're going to, if there's a strong opponent, we're going to want to point out the negatives of that opposing viewpoint or option. And that leaves us with the challenge of the week. This time around, I want you to spend a little time and think about either a, we'll call it an obvious office politics situation that you've been through in the last, say, three to six months. Or if you can't think of one that just jumps out, it's just, especially now after we've laid out a little more, a little different definition, we'll say, of office politics. Look at what's maybe in the last few months, what kinds of situations, what kinds of debates could be pointed to as office politics? And then take a look at particularly, even better bonus to this, if you can think of multiple situations, is take a look at whether the politics side of it was most likely a net positive or a net negative. Was there a very good decision made that everybody agreed on and that it was a good decision? Or was it maybe something where a decision wasn't reached, but a lot of time was spent, a lot of time and resources were spent on achieving that stalemate? And then I think just from that, just sort of going back through maybe the high points, the pros and the cons, that the various sides, whether it was both sides or three sides or all 10 sides that they made, see if there's, just sort of step back, take a look at that and did you maybe learn a few things about the options, about the choice that was eventually made? I think you'll find that it was an educational process, even if it may have been frustrating or time consuming or in some cases not terribly productive. Hopefully you at least learned something out of it. And that being said, I do hope that you've learned something from this episode as a help from all of these that you take some nugget away with you. But whatever you do, please go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers. The Developer Noor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoor.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developer Noor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer Noor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developernoor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.