Politics is a heavy word, laden with many meanings and many feelings. For many of us, “office politics” is a negative term. Something we don’t want to get involved in. Something we should stay away from, a game for folks who are self-serving, the folks who might throw others under the bus if they can advance their own cause by doing so. Yikes! Pretty nasty stuff.
The American political scientist and communications theorist, Harold Lasswell, developed a pioneering communication model: "Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect.”
The model gives us a process for thinking about how people work in organizations to collaborate, influence, persuade, negotiate, and develop programs, processes, and tools for the benefit of the enterprise, teams, and individuals – in short, achieving positive business results and adding value. This is office politics done well.
Politics exists in every organization. There’s no getting away from it. Politics in and of itself is not a bad thing. Political behavior, however, can be good or bad, ethical or unethical. That’s the critical distinction I am putting forward.
Niven Postma, a highly respected leadership and organizational culture consultant, wrote an insightful article on politics that you can find in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “You Can’t Sit Out Politics.” A good read: check it out: https://hbr.org/2021/07/you-cant-sit-out-office-politics
Her book: If You Don't Do Politics, Politics Will Do You...: A guide to navigating office politics effectively and ethically. (And yes, it is possible.)
Those two titles sum it up. Politics are a fixture of working life: No organization on earth is free of politics at some scale. Thus, political skills are essential to your career. To grow your career, to keep your career sustainable and successful, you have to learn them – just like you have to learn and earn your technical skills. You’ll get better with practice and with mentors to guide you. Importantly, you can do internal politics well for the good of all – and yourself – and you can do this ethically. Authentically.
Most importantly, political skills are not just skills for others in other business roles, the salesperson, the marketing executive, or C-suite leaders, they are absolutely critical for professionals in every discipline within digital trust at every career stage.
Todd Fitzgerald, CISO, podcaster (CISO Stories), and author, writes in his book CISO Leadership: Essential Principles for Success: “Organizational ability is knowing who to influence and when and how to get things done through formal and informal channels … Security is about solving complex problems and the only way that’s going to happen is by bringing people together.”
It really is about trust. Your roles are grounded in trust, and that’s the place from which you start, the foundational principle. Chirag Joshi, CISO and CEO, writes in his best-selling book 7 Rules to Become Exceptional at Cybersecurity, “It is awfully hard to trust people you don’t know. To gain that trust, it is important to be visible, engaging and actively help people.” Building trust is not at odds with political skill or ethical political behavior. They work hand-in-hand.
That’s the overview. What I am going to focus on here are: 1) The political skills to work on early in your career; 2) Skills to develop later in your career; 3) Negative political behaviors to avoid because they are career limiting at best and career killers at worst.
To get insights that are a fit for professionals in audit and digital trust, I spoke with two heads of audit, a senior director of IT risk, a Big 4 IT audit partner, a CISO, two IT audit directors, a top financial services regulator, and a technology executive in the AI space with a major tech company. Each of these individuals is a thought leader, mentor, and innovator, with deep experience in a wide mix of industries. They had a lot to say!
Core skills for early-career professionals
That first job, whether in industry, consulting, or government, has a learning curve like scaling Mt. Everest. The major focus is developing technical skills related to the work. That’s where a new job feels a bit like school. Learn the material, do the assignment. But there’s more to it. HOW the work actually gets done is where developing an understanding of the political environment and developing political skill is key. To be a top performer, the early-career professional has to tackle BOTH of these new skill sets simultaneously.
Consulting is a crucible for newcomers. With a constant focus on project metrics and client satisfaction, early-career professionals need to quickly understand how to work effectively with their teams and their managers. That is, political skills must be learned quickly with the goals of building trust and a reputation for good work and team play.
The Big 4 IT audit partner I spoke with provided a telling story. He had hired a young man to join one of his large financial services clients, a high visibility start to the associate’s career. Early on, the new associate demonstrated a suite of traits that impressed his managers: He was always on time. He had done his research. He was curious to learn and asked questions. He was true to his word. He had empathy. His motivator was helping people solve problems, not advancing his career.
At the end of the engagement, the client told the Big 4 management team that they were so impressed by how the new associate comported himself, that they might even say he was the most valuable member of the team! Client satisfied; consulting firm looking good.
All the behaviors that the young associate brought to his work were positive for others. He himself benefited from the trust that he earned, the positive reputation accrued, and the managers who wanted to work with him, mentor him, and help him build his career – BECAUSE, he was helping them build their careers. In the words of the partner, the associate was “making deposits in his reputational capital account.” It’s no surprise that once the associate had two years of experience, his managers pushed for his fast-track promotion.
The other senior leaders I spoke with also identified these behaviors as being the foundation for building trust and your positive political foundation as an early-career professional. There was strong agreement on that front.
Let’s recap those skills:
- Be where you are supposed to be, and on time.
- Be prepared to show up fully committed to the job.
- Do your research.
- Be curious. Ask questions. Realize that in this early stage, there are no silly questions.
- Be a sponge. Learn all you can about the business and its people.
- Ask how you can help.
- Make service your motivator.
- Demonstrate genuine empathy.
- Integrity. Keeping your word. Upholding the ethics of your profession.
Empathy came up time and again as a critical skill for early-career professionals. When I spoke with Jim Enstrom1 , the Chief Audit Executive of Cboe Global Markets, Inc., he noted that he views empathy “as a life skill” and that he talks about empathy frequently when he coaches his team.
Jim went on to say that “Change doesn’t happen by the flip of a switch. It comes through continued collaboration.” When an early-career auditor voices frustration about a client, “Why aren’t they accepting my audit findings as written?,” Jim says he reminds them that, “People have lots of competing priorities. We need to understand the work we do through the lens of our customer. This is part of being a politically astute auditor.”
The same applies to all digital trust disciplines. There are myriad of customers and stakeholders. Learning to see from their perspective allows for more collaboration, trust building, and win-win solutions.
Reading the room
From Day One on the job, start observing what people do, listening to what they say – and what they don’t say; watching the timing of people’s inputs to meetings; getting a sense of how people communicate on Slack, and what they say in emails. When do people talk outside of formal meetings? What are those informal settings where information is shared? Essentially, you are being an anthropologist within this new culture that you have joined. Your mission is to understand how people work together – directly and indirectly – to get stuff done.
These observations will help you develop another critical skill: Situational awareness. The ability to “read the room.” In your early days, this is one of your primary tasks. Developing this skill will benefit your team and projects. It will also help you lay the foundation for a successful career within your organization.
Putting your skills to work
At some point – and that could be any time really – you are going to need to enlist a colleague’s aid: push a team member to meet a project deadline; get information from someone sitting in another function; negotiate a point with an internal client; or any number of other things that require input, support, and actions from others. When done in the service of the enterprise, team, or client, these are positive political actions that help you get your job done.
These smaller settings are your laboratory for experimenting and working on your skill at what many leaders call “moving” others – that is, getting people on your side, getting them to do things you’d like them to do. As one IT audit director commented, “There’s no magic fairy dust.” You have to practice.
Mentors, however, are magic!
Practicing your skills in a vacuum, however, can be slow going and could lead to making mistakes. You’ll sharpen your skills faster and avoid pitfalls by finding mentors. At the very beginning, one of your first mentors and guides may be your onboarding buddy. Avail yourself of their insights and knowledge. You’ll find your feet much faster.
Later, you can look for mentors who can help you attune to the political ecosystem and processes. They’ll be able to offer feedback on your experiments in using positive political skills. They can help you interpret what’s going on in meetings, and the dynamics in play behind the scene. Very importantly, they can help you filter out the noise so you can focus on what’s most important in the political situations you encounter.
For more on choosing mentors, see this article from the Career Corner Archive: https://www.isaca.org/resources/news-and-trends/newsletters/atisaca/2022/volume-41/mentor-magic-how-to-make-mentorship-work-for-your-career
The ISACA Mentorship program is another tremendous resource you can leverage: https://mentorship.isaca.org/
What political skills should you build as you advance in your career?
As you gain experience, you’ll need to deepen and refine the political skills you’ve already learned. And, you’ll be adding skills that you’ll need to develop as a strategic leader, whether you manage people, projects or programs.
Reading the room and getting one’s arms around the ever-changing dynamics of the enterprise were constant themes with the leaders with whom I spoke.
Here are the other top political skills for experienced professionals that were identified by our panel of experts:
- “You have to learn what is really important to your company. Which priorities and metrics are do or die.”
- “Be genuinely interested in what you do. That passion helps you promote your projects to people that you want to get to know better because they may be allies or can lend their support in some way.”
- “Leading by example.”
- “Keeping a pulse on what’s going on so you can help your senior leadership understand what is going on with the organization and avoid pitfalls.”
- “Conflict resolution.”
- “Thinking in options to be able to arrive at a win-win solutions when negotiating.”
- “Understanding how political capital evolves as you move up the chain. It is often more about resources you can offer to others – valuable connections, information, equipping them with things so they can help their people; enabling others to be politically savvy.”
- “Seeing how you can help the enterprise gain political wins within their broader community or industry ecosystem.”
- “Being proactive in solving problems that makes your name known outside your group or functional area.”
- “Some of what is important for you to know about the current politics of the organization is not being said in public places. It’s about trust: You have to get into that secret place to hear certain things.”
- “Work on developing good relationships with those who you want to emulate. Seek out the strong leaders who don’t rule by fear or by pitting people against each other.”
- “You have to assess the political climate and be willing to stand your ground and pay the price. At the higher levels of leadership, you can’t really separate the two – work and what you believe.”
Lastly, this longer piece of advice offered by Jim Enstrom, CAE at Cboe: “How I’ve thought about relationships throughout my career has been largely the same and they generally fall into three buckets: The first are the Detractors – these are the people in your circle who you may not get along with or see eye-to-eye on certain things. They may go behind your back. The second are the Neutrals – these are the ones when you go to a meeting they nod their head, and then talk about the weather. They are the bulk of your relationships. And the third are the Advocates – these are relationship allies who will call you for advice and support you even when you are not around.
“The ratio of where your relationships should be should change over time. If you strive to be a senior leader, you really need to have more allies who trust you. That should be a measure of your success as an audit professional.”
Negative political behaviors that are career limiting, possibly even career crushing!
The case has been made for developing your political skills and deploying them in a positive, ethical way that doesn’t harm others or the enterprise. Going back to the opening of this article, you can’t sit out politics. There are many ways to use political skills positively, aligning your political behavior with your values.
Of course, there are a lot of political behaviors that people engage in that are awful. They damage trust, often hurt others, may impede positive progress on projects, encumber an enterprise with negativity, and ultimately, they aren’t even beneficial (especially longer term) for those who use them. Fortunately, most organizations tend to weed out those bad actors eventually. In the end, those using unsavory political tactics will see their careers limited or derailed by their negative politicking.
My panel of experts offered a solid list of 10 negative political behaviors that you’ll want to stay well clear of!
- Hoarding information
- Taking credit for the work of others/not sharing credit
- Bad-mouthing others
- Stonewalling in order to protect one’s interests
- Tying your wagon to someone who doesn’t represent your values with an eye toward a short-term political win
- Starting or promoting rumors
- Proliferating different versions of events
- Aligning too closely with a particular internal clique or regime
- Being unwilling to take ownership for helping others
- Not connecting people who would benefit from the connection and sharing information
It’s hard to read that list and not cringe!
Resources for you
A couple of book titles that were shared during my conversations with my panel of leaders that I want to pass along to you are the following: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey), and 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (John C. Maxwell). Both books were recommended as highly valuable further reading for anyone looking to develop their ethical political and leadership skills.
It’s a big topic!
The more I dug into this topic, the more research and interviews I did, I really saw how much more there was to share. So, the next Career Corner will cover how to learn the political style of an organization, and how to adjust your headset and adapt your political skills when you change jobs and join a new organization. See you in December!
1 The comments included herein are made by Jim Enstrom in his personal capacity; the views and opinions expressed herein are his and do not reflect the views and opinions of Cboe Global Markets, Inc. and its subsidiaries.