It would be easy to mistake politics at work for a bad thing.
Everyone talks about about it negatively, as though it’s something to avoid, but I don’t find that framing particularly helpful.
It's better to think about it this way:
Politics is simply the process of people with different views, interests and influence making decisions together.
It’s not inherently good or bad. It’s just an intrinsic part of any organisation.
We bring together people from different cultures and backgrounds, with different experiences, expertise, ambitions, incentives and points of view. Then we ask them to work towards shared goals, make decisions together, decide where to invest limited resources and agree on what matters most.
Of course there’s going to be politics.
Organisations are (literally) biological organisms. They’re made up of people, and all of the relationships, interests, behaviours and interactions between them. Politics is a natural consequence of that.
And it’s intentional. The whole point of bringing different people together is that they don’t all see the world in exactly the same way. We want the scientist, the marketer and the finance person to bring different perspectives. We want people with different experiences to notice different things. We want ideas to be challenged and decisions to benefit from more than one point of view.
Politics is a necessary medium through which shared work gets done.
Priorities have to be negotiated. Resources have to be allocated. People have to be persuaded. Different interests have to be reconciled. Enough people have to get behind an idea for the organisation to move.
On a bad day, I see ‘politics’.
On a good day, I see a design challenge.
Maybe the idea needs to be framed differently. Maybe someone needs to be involved earlier. Maybe the order of the conversations matters. Maybe two apparently competing positions have a shared interest we haven’t found yet. Maybe what looks like resistance is actually telling us something important about a consequence we haven’t considered.
Some people will wear ‘staying out of the politics’ as a badge of honour, but how many of those people are solving for the company’s biggest challenges?
If you aren’t making decisions with others then you’re making them alone. If you’re only making decisions with the people who have the same point of view as you, then that sounds like dangerous territory.
You don’t have to agree with every perspective, and you certainly don’t have to accept every behaviour. But you do have to work with the reality of the organisation in front of you.
Politics isn’t something to be avoided, it’s something to be embraced, even when it’s uncomfortable. So if it’s feeling a bit ‘political’ a the moment, learn to love it. Perhaps it’s a good signal that you’re working on something important.