While I spent years working with software business solutions clients and vendors during my career, I sold and implemented software that implies change management. In fact, many of our clients have deployed ERP software to implement corporate governance. I couldn’t help but notice that hidden power inside organizations takes decisions, comes up or kills initiatives, converts urgency to normal and normal to speed, and moves to directions I did not think organizations would take. That hidden power is workplace politics. Politics in the workplace happen when power, authority, gossip, and relationships are behind making decisions aligned with personal interests rather than organizational goals and agendas.
It may sound mean to novice people, but one of the fundamental sales skills in any B2B industry is to master discovering the political powers of your potential clients, so you use the right weapons with the right people at the right time.
I have seen organizations spend millions of dollars on decisions taken by impressions of those who are authorized enough to bypass decision-making criteria and other millions of dollars to recover from those old decisions. Twenty percent of my clients have failed to implement an HR system three times more in the last five years. About 35 percent of my clients have been unable to implement an HR system that fits their requirements once, at least in the previous two years. You may debate that those failures are not entirely caused by political and change management reasons; politics pressure the organizations’ desire to scale or make objectives.
It is easy to avoid politics if running a startup with around 25 employees. Things get worse when you scale up or run 50+ employees. The bigger the organization is, the harder it is to control and avoid politics. Yet, I have seen organizations of 15 employees with politics that could divide them apart, and I have noticed organizations of 5,000+ employees with almost no grouping or politics.
During Steve Jobs’s interview at the D8 conference in 2010, Steve referred to having no committees as one of Apple’s successes. “Do you know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero.” Jobs said, “We have no committees. We are organised like a startup. We are the biggest startup on the planet. We all meet for three hours once a week and we talk about everything we’re doing, the all business. And there is tremendous teamwork at the top of the company which filters down the teamwork through out of the company.“
It’s not only determined by how big a company is in terms of the number of employees but also how old employees are serving the company. The more old employees the organization has, the harder it is to avoid politics.
Those corporate “antibodies” may unintentionally destroy initiatives with the potential to lead to the future. The old wake up every morning determined to kill the new.
