Politics and Egg Toss
How to play politics proactively
Politics in the office or the social environment is a game of power. You can say that you don’t engage in politics, but that is like saying you won’t play egg toss. If I want to play egg toss, you have to play egg toss. Otherwise you will be covered with broken eggs.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there are no politics in my company or any of the social organizations that I’m involved in. Never has been, never will be. This is all purely hypothetical for your benefit. Let’s have some fun with it, ok?
It doesn’t matter whether it is a big company, a small company, a school, a social club or a tribe. There will always be power dynamics. Sometimes the smaller the organization the more personal and nasty the politics get. I think this may be because the players in smaller organizations are unskilled in politics and default to less subtle attack strategies.
The best choice is to avoid politics. The best way to avoid them in my experience is to assume an air of abundance and maybe even indifference. Politics manifest where there is a culture of scarcity. When the overwhelming sentiment in the organization is that there isn’t enough to go around humans will start to compete. They will compete for power, resources and recognition. Politics is the mechanism that they will use to get theirs by taking yours.
Even if you have to operate in an organization that has a culture of scarcity, you can rise above it by assuming an attitude of abundance. When your peers begin to gossip, which, by the way is the Esperanto of scarcity, refuse to commiserate, take the high road and assume an attitude of abundance. It will make you bulletproof.
But, unfortunately it is a game of egg toss. Even if you are bulletproof you can be maneuvered into bad political situations by those who are playing the game. They will see your attitude of abundance as a competitive threat.
The way you can be cornered is by allowing someone else to define a moment of truth for you. When you are caught unawares by that meeting or conference call, when your boss calls you on the carpet for some task that is not in your sweet spot, those are the bad types of moments of truth. These were potentially engineered for you by someone else through politics and influence.
Why would someone do this? Because by setting you up to struggle in response to these moments of truth they are reducing your power. They are draining your resources and misdirecting your efforts into a reactive mode. You become less of a threat. You are under control. It is like they are felling trees to block your road and impede your progress.
What can you do about it? Obviously you can try to figure out where the next tree is going to fall so you can get a jump on the next negative moment of truth. In this way you can influence and control but you are still reacting.
The best way to play egg toss is to be the one tossing the eggs.
The best thing for you and the organization is for you to be in a position to leverage your strengths for maximum impact. You need to create your own moments of truth. You need to consistently put yourself in high value situations that play to your strengths.
What exactly am I talking about? I’m talking about proactively doing things that you are good at. Don’t wait to be told. You should know what your strengths are. These are things you do well. Are you a strategic thinker? Are you a good communicator? Are you a powerful analytic? Know your strengths and then find ways to create your own moments of truth.
The trick is that most of the high-value things that you can do in the organization are not going to be urgent. They may be outside your direct responsibility and above your pay grade. You’re going to have to step out of your day-to-day tasks to find these moments of truth. If they were part of your day-to-day tasks you would already be doing them. They’d be expected, and by being expected they would lose their value as a moment of truth.
An example would be if you were a good communicator, you might consider writing a white paper or designing a presentation to address one of the key challenges of your market or your organization. This will put you in the spotlight and define you as an expert and a proactive thinker.
List your strengths and start to come up with things that you can do to create positive moments of truths in your job, in your life. Engineer the agenda so that you are the one stepping in to catch the ball before they even know it is dropped. Create a constant flow of these events out into the future and align them with your life goals.
That’s how you break out of the political traps. You use your strengths to proactively change the future agenda to create positive moments of truth, for you.
Going back to the politics topic, I don’t consider this to be negative behavior. Your intent is not to make other people look bad. Your intent is not to take power from others. Your intent is to maximize your own impact on the organization by leveraging your own strengths in a positive proactive manner.
You could use this knowledge to create negative moments of truths for others, but I know you, you’re a good person and you wouldn’t do that.
If you abdicate the agenda to others you will be on the receiving end of a game of egg toss that you can’t win. If you take charge of it you won’t be there when the egg gets tossed.