Read The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library) Online
Authors: Jo Owen
happiness is the greatest revenge
Conflict is not just inevitable inside organizations: it is good, within reason. Every department, function, and geography has a different window on reality. They see things differently and have different priorities. In theory, they should all pull together behind the grand corporate vision. Meanwhile, back on planet earth, these different perspectives and priorities lead to competition for those things which count for most, to most managers: budget, bonuses, promotions, and support of top management.
The competing priorities of different groups have to be sorted out. There is always more demand for budget, bonus, and promotion than there is available supply. Internal competition is a healthy way of finding out where best to allocate scarce resources. Less healthily, it also leads to politicking, back stabbing, and ego clashes between power barons.
If you accept that conflict is inevitable, then the big question is when to fight and when to fold. If you never fight, you become a doormat for more assertive managers to get their own way. At some point, you have to stand up.
Sun Tsu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, did not know much about modern management. But he was an expert on warfare. And his first piece of advice is simple: don’t fight, unless all three of the following conditions are met:
• There is a prize worth fighting for.
• You know you will win.
• There is no other way of achieving your goal.
Most corporate battles miss at least one of these conditions. Sometimes they miss all three. To misquote another great warfare strategist, Clausewitz, most corporate battles are simply office politics by another means.
So let’s see how Sun Tsu can be applied in the office. His three conditions imply you should stand your ground when:
1. There is a prize worth fighting for.
This means budgets are battlegrounds. Fight hard to get an easy budget at the start of the year, or struggle for the next 12 months to achieve an impossible target: your choice. Other critical, must-win battles are assignments and getting the right team: you do not want to work with the boss from hell or the team from hell. And when you start a new job, negotiate your terms hard before you start: the moment you sign you have lost all your negotiating power.
2. You know you will win.
This is not just about marshaling all the reason and facts to support your case. Managers use facts like drunks use lamp posts: for
support, not illumination. So you need more than facts: you need political support. Make sure you have a powerful sponsor on your side; make sure you have squared off all the technocrats who can get in the way (finance, accounting, health and safety, HR, etc.) and quietly do a deal to silence potential rivals.
3. There is no other way of achieving your goal.
There are two problems with fighting. The first is that you might lose. The second is that you might win, and then earn yourself an enemy for life. In the corporate world you need allies and supporters, not enemies who will happily sabotage when the opportunity next arises. The best ways of winning without fighting are:
a.
Pre-empt the competition. Get your position accepted before any alternative emerges by lining up support before the formal debate begins.
b.
Keep any disagreements in private, so that it is easy for rivals to change their minds without losing face.
c.
Publicize any partial agreements loudly: create a bandwagon effect and watch people fall in behind you.
d.
Find a win–win: don’t just beat the competition. Find some common ground, or some way in which to make them look good. They need to be able to tell a story which makes them look smart, so help them.
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How to influence decisions
133
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The art of the good meeting
135
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Getting your way in meetings
136
Look across your organization and see who succeeds and who does not. You can probably find plenty of smart people, some of whom may have MBAs. They have high IQs. You can also find plenty of people with high EQ (Emotional Quotient) who are very good with people and are generally liked. Meanwhile, people who are not so smart and not so nice mysteriously seem to rise to the top. So IQ and EQ are not enough. To succeed, you need something more. You need PQ: Political Quotient. PQ is the art of making things happen through people you do not control; it is about making your limited, formal power stretch so that you have informal power right across the organization. If you can do this, you will set yourself apart from all your colleagues.
PQ is not taught at business school: it is about those hard to define “know-how” skills. And it is also seen as slightly grubby and careerist. This is unfortunate. PQ is the vital skill for the modern organization, where power is diffused, control is ambiguous, and getting things done means doing deals, knowing who to talk to, building trust and alliances, and having a web of influence in the right places. This is the chapter where we start to fill in the holes left by the traditional MBA.
PQ is not taught at business school
If you want to make anything happen, you need your network of influence across your organization. Increasingly, you will need a network of influence which reaches beyond your organization, as more and more work is outsourced.
The size of your network is not important: collecting business cards is about as useful as collecting beer coasters. Beer coasters tend to be better designed. What counts is:
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Network quality
:
do you know the right people?
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Network depth
:
will people actually return your phone call and react positively to you?
As the old saying goes, you are known by the friends you keep. So choose your allies well. This is a harsh truth in many organizations. Winners congregate with winners to form a little magic circle which infuriates everyone else. Put another
way, if you want to swim with sharks, be a shark not shark bait. Finding the right network is not a random process of being nice to people with big titles. You need a network that works for you. Your network will be filled with seven sorts of creature:
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Sponsor.
This should be someone at least two levels above you in the organization who can look out for your interests, see when good and bad opportunities are arising and can clear political blockages for you. In return, sponsors find it useful to have informal eyes and ears telling them what is really going on; they often need a spare pair of hands for some discretionary work and they like having their egos polished by bright young things who appear to value their brilliance, humanity, insight, and all-round business genius.
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Your boss.
This is the most important person in your network. If you do not like or trust your boss, your boss does not have a problem: you do. You may be taught how to manage a team; learning how to manage your boss is even more important. The essential insight is that whereas your team works on your terms, you have to figure out how to work on your boss’s terms without destroying your life and your soul.
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Technicians.
Corporate life is full of staff functions that we love to hate. These are the people who control us (finance, accounting, HR) and who cannot say “yes” but they can say “no” to any idea we have. Warfare with such groups is tempting but unproductive. Take time to understand the needs of these professionals, respect their need to do their job and work with them, not against them.
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Your team.
Do not assume that the team you inherit is the team you need. Move fast and hard to put in place the A team. After three months, if your team causes any problems, then they are your problem: you have accepted the team so you have to live with their results.
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Gatekeepers.
These are the door openers. Some are obvious, such as secretaries and PAs. Treat them like the professionals they are: do not ignore or condescend to them. It is amazing how often they can find a slot in a full schedule if they want to help you. There are some evil gatekeepers: these are executives who tell you that they can help you get a meeting with the CEO or other big shot. In return, they will ask you to make one small adjustment to your plan to make it acceptable to the CEO; then they will ask for another and another and another. They will take control and never give you access. Take care.
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Influencers.
This is the gossip network which will do two things for you: it will be your early warning system about opportunities and challenges. It can also help you seed ideas and messages with other key players. So you
have to work out who has the ear of the big bosses: it might be people in apparently harmless staff functions who are trusted because they are in harmless positions.
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Allies, colleagues, and competitors.
These are the people who you need to strike deals with on a day-to-day basis to get things done. Remember Lord Palmerston’s dictum at the height of the British Empire: “We have no permanent friends or permanent enemies, we only have permanent interests.” Understand your allies’ interests and you can build a coalition.
It really does not matter how many contacts you have on LinkedIn or how many friends you have on Facebook. What counts is whether you have a network that works: will people answer your call and act on your behalf? Or are you struggling to get them to reply to your brilliant and vitally important emails?
The simplest way of gauging and building the strength of your network is to focus on how much people trust you. You can think of trust as having three elements:
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Values alignment.
Can you show you have similar values to the person you want to influence? This can be personal interests and values. But it has to be professional priorities as well: show that you understand their professional needs and that you can work with them, not against them. At its most basic, respect the other person.
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Credibility.
Always deliver on what you say, however trivial it may be. Even something as small as sending a promised weblink shows that you do what you say.
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Risk.
Trust is both analogue and digital. When you are building trust, it is analogue: you build trust slowly as you build credibility. But when you break trust, you find trust becomes digital: once trust is broken, it is very hard to rebuild. So you cannot expect to be trusted on big things immediately: you have to earn the right to be trusted. And once you have won that hard earned right, do not blow it away.
If you have a network of allies who trust and respect you, you have the basic platform for making things happen in the very ambiguous world of the flat organization.
For managers, decision making is an art, not a science. It is a deeply political process based on partial and imperfect information. We will ignore minor decisions (do I call on customer A or B first?) and focus on the more substantive decisions (do we invest in the new IT project, enter the new market, change our pricing structure?). In practice, effective managers apply five screens to the big decisions they make:
1. Who wants which option?
Business is not a democracy. And if it is, you will find the CEO has 1,000 votes and everyone else has zero votes. Decision making is as much political as it is rational, so work out who wants what. You will not be fired for being part of the consensus, even if the consensus is wrong. Being wrong alone is a very lonely place indeed. Equally, if you have a close decision to make and your team wants option A, not option B, then go with option A: make them take responsibility. It is far better to have a team committed to making a decision they like, than to spend your whole time convincing a reluctant team that your decision is better than the one they wanted.
2. What are the benefits of this project?
Benefits normally come in three flavors:
a.
Financial and quantifiable benefits. This has the virtue of appearing to be rigorous and independent. In practice, most financial benefits cases are only as good as the assumptions which lie behind them, and managers will make the assumptions which suit their case. So the case is rigged one way or the other, and the key test is not “do the numbers look good?” but “are the numbers credible and can I persuade colleagues to support them?”
b.
Non-financial but quantifiable benefits. These are things like: reduced time to market, fewer defects, less staff turnover. These tend to be weak selling points, until they have been converted into tangible financial benefits: fewer defects means less rework, scrappage, and warranty claims which all have a financial cost.
c.
Non-financial and non-quantifiable benefits such as “improving staff morale,” “enhancing the reputation of the firm.” These feel-good benefits have close to zero credibility with the CEO, unless the CEO personally has dreamed up a project with these goals, in which case they become all-important.
With all three flavors of benefit, the question is not “how good do they look to me?” but “how attractive and credible are they to the boss, CEO and other decision makers?”
3. What are the costs and risks of this project?
The costs of any project include the three flavors of benefits: