There is no language for politics! (The Office Matters Journey Lessons Part 1)
When James and I took up The Office Matters excitedly as a new journey to turn our culture design experience online, we didn’t know what we were in for.
It felt right.
We have helped our clients changed their company cultures radically through conversations, interviews and emotional support and subsequently creating customised culture mechanisms for them to work with. (That’s what we do throughout our consultancies.)
We thought to ourselves — politics is a huge thing in the office and we have solved it before, let’s take on solving it for the world! It was a great vision.
What a naïve thought. Hah!
But… Everything that I have achieved so far has been based on my own chosen naivety and sheer insistence on digging my way there. And thankfully, The Office Matters experience wasn’t dissimilar to the other experiences.
But to explain why this was a real journey, let’s talk about the first lesson that we learnt the hard way.
Lesson 1: There is NO language for office politics
Yes, there is no clear, precise language that is created around office politics or politics in general for that matter. When I say that I mean it in the way that most people can relate to.
It is unlike the field of marketing where there are so many already-established terms like “opt-in”, “lead generation”, etc that once you use it people who are barely exposed can Google and understand it. It is unlike the travel industry where the photos of travel and experiences can be translated effectively.
As part of the research, we interviewed our members, some people who were looking for help and friends about their understanding of some key words we understood were important in understanding politics. The words were things like “authority”, “responsibility”, “power”, “accountability” and a lot of other fancy words.
The discovery? That no one knew what the heck these words meant in the same sentence together. Authority had so many definitions depending on the context and in social science theories that it seems mightily unusable on a day-to-day level. Then you add in responsibility, power and accountability and the conversation goes into merry-go-rounds.
One of my favourite quotes is Sun Tzu’s “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles,” and it, to me, illustrates the need to have a language around office politics — it allows you to know your enemy and yourself.
The real war isn’t against other people in the work place, but to get good people to be recognised and be the leaders at the workplace so that everyone wins.
So, what do we do when there’s no language around office politics? James and I took studies from multiple areas of social sciences, business studies and everyday language to start the journey of creating an understandable, actionable language around office politics to help people star their journey solve their own issues with office politics.
How did we do this? That takes us to Part 2!
