Enhance your office politics ability

by Shadowmaster on 04/12/09 at 1:22 pm

Writ­ing about office sur­vival and pol­i­tics, made me look­ing for prac­tice guide. after Google it, i found this  nice arti­cle about office politics.Reading it, the author men­tion that office pol­i­tics is prac­tice. Its some­times also called “play­ing the game”.

First, the author  explain that we come to work as “free-agent mode”.The rea­son to come to work his moti­vated by our own ambi­tions and look­ing for a  way to accom­plish it in social envi­ron­ment using pol­i­tics and net­work­ing. we come to work not nec­es­sary for the ben­e­fits of the orga­ni­za­tion but for your’s only.

After it, the author gives an exam­ple of a dilemma:telling the truth to a new job can­di­date or “play the game” AKA lie to him with sugar. In that exam­ple, the worker decide to say the truth which made her boss angry. how awful of him…

the author explain that pol­i­tics is prac­tice, and thus we arrived to our twist in this arti­cle. we will give sev­eral tip how to practice(which the author don’t explain-he just telling his stu­dents to keep notes of their every day life).

So, here are part of tips that will help you prac­tice “office pol­i­tics” as real player. Keep in mind that this are tips which this were used by me and worked most of the times. but they are not the 10 com­mand­ments not writ­ten by stone.

1. the moment you enter the office, say hello to as many peo­ple as you can. don’t go directly to your room,start read­ing email, mak­ing phone calls or what­ever. Go for 15 min­utes and try to say “hello” to as many peo­ple as you can. This will help you gain con­fi­dence, you can talk to sim­ple work­ers and to the high­est man­ager. Smile. Ask every time some­one else to a “morn­ing cof­fee break”.If he is to busy, try another one. This way you can extend your net­work peo­ple. Talk to the jan­i­tor never know if he just heard of a good real estate invest­ment that might  be inter­est­ing.
   It doesn’t mat­ter if you had a fight with your wife ear­lier this morn­ing, or you were stuck in 1 hour traf­fic jam. the “Hello”/“What up” that mat­ters. also, you can read this one.
2. Search for a men­tor.
   
3. Don’t be a swing vote.
4. Don’t be afraid to lie to your boss. we do not encour­age doing it. lie is bad, BUT there are sev­eral sce­nar­ios which this is required for your survival:here is one:

you had a task you needed to accom­plish and you wasted your time doing some­thing else instead. then the dead­line is just a few days and you know you don’t have to time to fin­ish it in rea­son­able 9 work­ing hours.

Go to your Boss and ask for more time in the deliv­ery and start fill him with excuses for it. Any­thing goes:my dog ate my homework(remember high school?), you were sick,you were at cus­tomers out of the office most of the time, you worked on it but its to com­plex to fin­ish in the time frame that was ini­tially setup…\

So, there are few more in the list that can help you mas­ter office pol­i­tics. we will add in the future a few more actions that can be use­ful  in sur­viv­ing the game of office politics.

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