How to use office politics to become a real manager

by chess master on 31/12/09 at 2:39 am

Office Pol­i­tics requires unique of out of the box think­ing. Sur­vive in the office pol­i­tics, requires from the employee spe­cial behav­ior. The office sur­vivor makes strat­egy for the long run, using tac­tics in short term,

You work at the office a few years, famil­iar with your sur­round­ings, know­ing the pit­falls and how to attack cer­tain things-this is the back­ground for this article.

You just got a call from one of the major part­ners in the com­pany. The rela­tion­ship with that per­son speci­ficity is quite well. He asked you to join him in his room for a dis­cus­sion over major project. There is some­thing fishy with his request, but you go-its not that you have any other choice.

Enter­ing his room, you see also that your direct super­vi­sor is there. They both explain to you the rea­son for the meeting-the com­pany just got a chance to win a, major con­tract if we all suc­ceed in deliv­er­ing a sta­ble release of some mod­ule which was never developed-only talked about. And guess who got the plea­sure in devel­op­ing it from scratch?

You ask for the tome sched­ule and for your “sur­pris­ing” they tell you some­thing about a …WEEK. Perfect

So, you are leased for the next week or even two and if needed three from all you respon­si­bil­i­ties just to focus on those deliveries.

Before you start even think­ing on this project– you need to make sure they under­stand that mean­ing of UN attend­ing you cur­rent clients-explain them in DETAILS all the bad things that can hap­pen if you won’t attend the cus­tomers for the time frame.

You need to do it for their approval. Indeed its just for­mal­ity, but then again you need it to be said-office pol­i­tics right?

 

Then you can start dis­cussing the project. You may be required to attend some meet­ings at the begin­ning which will occurs late that day-call your wife and tell her you are going to be late –not for this day only. for the next three weeks, bet­ter to set­tle this now than open a fight later on.

 

Now, after you got the impres­sion of what need to be done, you stand before two choices:

 

1.      You can start work­ing on the project like hell. Assum­ing you know what need to be done and it mostly hard tech­ni­cal stuff. For the next two weeks, you will get late to home. Not a bright future.

2.      Act as an office sur­vivor will. Here are the actions that need to be followed:

·        Every morn­ing send an email what you going to do this day. Send it to every­body involved so they will know about it. Don’t hide things.

·        Call the part­ner on the phone every morn­ing or so. It’s impor­tant. This is his client. He draws a coupon on this sale-which you won’t see much from It.-but sav­ing your job is coupon also-Ha Ha.

·        For the first week work on it 2–3 hours. No more than this. The next hours use for your own good-other client or pri­vate stuff.

·        At the mid­dle of each day, call again the part­ner and tell him its much work than we all antic­i­pated, and this “blah blah….”.he won’t get angry because you are the tech­ni­cal mas­ter. Telling his is required because you want him to take in con­sid­er­a­tion two things: one is to option to have more days and the other is doing less. Both are good for you. You need to pro­pa­ganda this every day. Do it nice and this will work. This is impor­tant step. The rea­son for is that you want every­body to know that although you have your exper­tise, they cant throw at you a lot of work, in short notice with lit­tle time frame. They don’t care if you work 12 hours a day, but you do. You have other things in mind, so telling this is very com­pli­cated project will give you more point s for your expert also.

·        At the end of each day, write a sec­ond mail to same peo­ple, telling them what was done. Of coupe it will be less than the morn­ing mail stuff.

 

After doing it for week, you will get the feel­ing if it work­ing or not. If you got more days, keep doing it until the last week.

 

The last week is cru­cial: even­tu­ally you need to deliver no mat­ter what, you just wasted a lot of time doing your own stuff, but now you need to repay. So, lets office pol­i­tics the last week. Need­less to say you need to con­tinue the same actions. There are few add-ons to them:

 

1.      The first impor­tant thing is telling your fam­ily that the next week they will see you less, explain them it’s tem­po­rally, and it’s an impor­tant client.

2.      Start work­ing on the project full day, this is money time so you don’t want to blow it.

3.      Tell the part­ner there are still a lot of work and that this is the time for rein­force­ment. You don’t get credit doing it alone and in short time. In the long run this fact will go unno­ticed, you get only for deliv­er­ing on time and it’s impor­tant to the man­ager more than you.

4.      Repeat telling him you need extra hands –more work­ers are needed. Even­tu­ally he will start work­ing on it, and like magic you will see extra hands work­ing on it.

5.      Don’t start man­ag­ing them, let your super­vi­sor do it, be a silence man­ager but telling them how to do stuff instead of what. In the long run this will turn other side around, and at one point they will start ask­ing you what and not how. This is the point you become a real manager-not by title only but by actions. This is the office pol­i­tics way of the survivor.

6.      The next fact is impor­tant, the extra hands feel just like you, so, you need to act dif­fer­ently form your man­ager. explain them that is tem­po­rally, tell them you are not their boss, let them feel more com­pat­i­ble with this new sta­tus, in the mean while you needs to give them stuff to do,. Stuff you had to do your self and now they are doing it. Thank them every day telling them they are doing won­der­ful job for the project. You may tell the big boss (the com­pany part­ner) about them also– nice act but not that important.

If a spe­cific per­son doing you hard time-first try to per­suade him not to do so, talk to him and try to under­stand why-what moti­vated him. Try get­ting a mutual understating.

If the talk didn’t give good results and he keeps on the bad atti­tude, this is the time to give him office sur­vivor pol­i­tics les­son: go directly to your boss and tell him that guy is bad for the project. Make sure your boss under­stand that if he won’t backup you, the project won’t be deliv­ered on time.

If your boss wont backup your com­pletely are act as no dif­fer­ent, sug­gest to replace that per­son, bet­ter to no have it, then to ruin your name because of unnec­es­sary fights.

Releas­ing the guy involves to acts:

1.      Telling him he was doing good job (not excel­lent) but due to some facts not related to him, the boss decided to remove hi from this project. This will give him some think­ing about his future in the company.

2.      Make a loud announce­ment. Tell every­body about the sit­u­a­tion and that this the boss decide to release him. make sure to drop a few sen­tences about his bad behavior-do it with a smiles but repeat it, so that every­body that hears you under­stand that work­ing with you required dis­ci­pline and its not safe to con­front you.

 

Start push­ing the peo­ple with every day before the deliv­ery. go around the office telling every­body includ­ing the COO, CTO and oth­ers about this project, at the end you want every­body to remem­ber who orches­trate this; You and not your boss.

Give the rein­force­ment work­ers good exam­ple and stay late at work this week, explain  them that either you all need to work hard in the 9 work­ing hours or stay­ing late if you didn’t fin­ish the job.

Stay­ing late also involves also loud announce­ments .you want every­body to see and hear about the ded­i­ca­tion the job required for all of you.

Reach­ing the dead line deliv­ery day, you will become more occu­pied with it. Keep on with the office pol­i­tics acts described above. On the D-Day, the last 3 days will be hard work– but bet­ter to work hard only 3 days while the other 27 you rested a bit.

The Deliv­ery should be fol­lowed with some mails, describ­ing how hard you all worked some thanks let­ters to all the par­tic­i­pants. Remem­ber to thank and men­tion every one in the mails, at least once. Don’t take all the credit for you.

In the next days, make some buzz about the projects, talk to other mem­bers in the office, and make sure the extra work­ers you silently man­aged are happy. Maybe they have more ideas. Keep with the office pol­i­tics acts like a true office survivor.

 

If this method suc­ceeded, try to do it for 3,4 more projects, at the end of these your name will be raised when some­one need the job done. Col­lec­tive suc­cess sto­ries will be good for next year salary raise.

 

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