Acting politically - An essential component of successful organizational leadership

According to conventional wisdom, people who act politically in organizations are ‘playing dirty’ - undermining the legitimate structures and functions of their organizations for personal gain. Despite this widely held view, it is important for leaders to recognise that successful organizations achieve high performance not only in spite of political behaviour but also because of it.

In-built structural tensions

There are two primary reasons why this is the case. First, all organizational designs incorporate two fundamental and opposing characteristics that make political activity inevitable: they divide up responsibility for carrying out the organization’s tasks and, at the same time, require these separate parts to act together to achieve its overall objectives. This simultaneous differentiation and integration accounts both for the functional value of organization and for its underlying political dynamics. In effect, you can’t have one without the other.

Personal 'frames of reference'

Secondly, we each develop and try to maintain a personal ‘frame of reference’, which is formed and refined continuously through our everyday interactions and experiences. This mental construct helps us to navigate our way through the complexities and uncertainties of life in ways that preserve our sense of identity, give us our feeling of competence and self-worth, and so on (see Culbert's Mindset Management, for example).

Each of us is motivated to interact with the world in ways that maintain the overall integrity of our personal frame (Conner argues similarly in Managing at the Speed of Change). This means that we tend to define – and try to shape – the challenges that we face in ways that suit our view of the world and the self-centred interests that this reflects. How we frame issues is critical to the way in which we view other people’s actions and act ourselves in the moment. It affects the sense that we make – alone and with others - of what is going on; and it influences the ways in which we make use of the sense that we’ve made. This ongoing, self-organizing process of joint sensemaking and action taking is at the heart of organizational change and performance. In the context of organizational politics, though, it is important to recognise that mismatches will inevitably occur between our own and others’ personal frames of reference, and between the particular perceptions, interpretations and actions that flow from them.

Tension and conflict inevitable

As a result of these in-built structural tensions and diverse perspectives, different interest groups form in response to organizational issues. And, since all significant decisions require choices to be made about how best to use limited resources, these differing interests and agendas make tension and conflict central to the ways in which organizations operate in practice.

Such differences can rarely be dealt with effectively through formal statements, plans and processes alone. However well structured these might be, they always have to be interpreted and enacted locally. In any event, even if these could be stated unambiguously and interpreted as intended, some of the resulting political activity would be directed towards changing these formally established ends and/or means, not just accommodating them.

Extra-ordinary performance

Politics, then, is simply the process through which the inevitable differences in self-interest and organizational agendas are played out. It occurs naturally in organizations, whether managers choose to engage with it or not. Where such differences are ignored or dealt with in wholly self-serving and manipulative ways, negative political game-playing comes to the fore. However, when approached from a politically aware, ethical and organizationally enhancing standpoint, these same dynamics offer a source of energy and vitality, enabling competing demands to be handled constructively and organisationally beneficial results to be achieved (see also Political Savvy by DeLuca).

Acting politically then provides one of the primary means through which leaders can build active coalitions of support for beneficial changes, and transform ordinary performance into extra-ordinary performance.

Comments

[Justin Kerr]

According to Bernard Crick (who once wrote a book called 'In Defence of Politics'), Macchiavelli was the first to ever say that political division is a source of strength, not weakness. Macchiavelli was writing about the source of the strength of the Roman Republic: "...if tumults led to the creation of the tribunes, tumults deserve the highest praise" because the "Republic was made more perfect" by the creation of the tribunes. This is in Book one Chapters 3 and 4 of The Discourses (which is more interesting than The Prince).