Is Office politics slowing us down?
The sight of my project record from the college years opened up nostalgic memories of how a group of four carefree adults with a common rented desktop, a dial-up modem, and a java book from the library completed a project in a span of three months. During that phase, the project was not our only focus; we attended classes, bid farewells, and prepared for interviews in parallel. Zooming twenty years from there, I got intrigued with the same project and estimated the effort to execute it in a Corporate setup. By any yardstick, it’s a minimum of the 7-month worth of effort with at least 20 associates (BA’s, Developers, Architects, Testers, Program Manager, Test managers, PMO, Quality audit teams, Release Management, Account/Portfolio Manager, to name a few). Remember, unlike the college environment, Corporate has the advantage of high-performing infrastructure (dedicated laptop, high-speed internet), and of course, no worries on semester exams. Yet, what a set of college grads with minimalistic infrastructure & bookish knowledge could accomplish in a casual environment takes double the time and effort in an efficient, organized, structured corporate ecosystem. If you think my estimates are exacerbated, let me quote another irrefutable example. When HP assembled a large team with hundreds of high-profile Project managers for its ambitious personal computer project, seated in a remote corner of the same office performing an insignificant role, was Steve Wozniak. He single-handedly created the first computer (which later became Apple-I) as a pet hobby program. Pages of corporate history are paved with many such testimonials. Yet, when organization recruit and forms the best teams, are we genuinely leveraging their full potential? Aren’t most corporates operating using the least common energy levels of their talent pool? Why so? That’s where Politics crawls in.
How do we spot this trend? The response is simple, wherever more roles & levels are established than what is genuinely required, Politics starts kicking in. In such environments, the aspiration of individuals to take credits for baby steps far exceeds the need for sharing credit for making giant leaps. This urge is so powerful that it invariantly slows down progress and doesn’t hesitate to bring it to a grinding halt. It’s not flowery rhetoric but a fact vindicated by none other than the Head of Software engineering of DoD managing an astronomical $700 Billion with 100,000 engineers. Imagine the head of the largest software division on the planet lamenting that he couldn’t even remotely accomplish his essential goals. That’s the toxic power of Organizational politics.
Let’s pragmatically corroborate this fact, take any moderate to the complex project recently executed in your organization. Map it against timeline from incubation/ideation to execution. I bet my paycheck that significant efforts would have been spent on document-heavy processes such as procurement, vendor management, legal, tiered governance, and other overheads than the core work. This inherent productivity dip is precisely where startups score. Hypothetically even if we port a team entirely from a successful startup to a corporate atmosphere, results won’t change because of this politics. So let’s stop blaming the teams for productivity and hold org culture accountable. When I am not berating the support groups, we often forget that such departments exist to expedite the goals and not to blindly point at rule books and rationalize why an activity can’t be done. To read from a rule book, we don’t require a phalanx of decorated titles & corner offices; don’t you think a 10th grader will be more than sufficient to do this job? Great leaders understand this intuitively; when the legal team strongly advised Steve Jobs to reconsider the name “iPod” as it was already taken, Steve asked them to get it resolved and didn’t heed their suggestion. Such leadership catapulted Apple from the verge of bankruptcy to the world’s most valuable company. In contrast, other CxO’s who remain deeply buried in many unproductive meetings struggle to pace with relevance.
No one is immune to this politics; we are auto-enrolled in it from the time we join an organization. If anyone claims to be neutral, I will either call it a blatant lie or regard it as a newbie cutting the teeth on the corporate contours. Slowly but steadily, this politics builds on us until a point that we get inextricably blended with it. If we think it’s just in the office, think again, politics is everywhere, right from home, friends, and in all our communities. Office politics gets more pronounced because most of our active hours are spent there. Can we avoid it? It’s impossible to be neck-deep in water and avoid becoming wet; similarly, we can’t escape from politics but can become cautious of its presence. Awareness and learning to navigate this political whirlpool help us stay buoyant and prevent us from becoming hopeless and helpless victims. If the tide rises to levels making swimming dangerous…know that your time has come to fasten to the shore and switch over to a safer bay. Happy surfing !!
References :
@Nicolas M. Chaillan’s Resignation post from DoD
iWoz — Autobiography by Steve Wozniak
Steve Jobs — An authorized biography by Walter Issacson