Using office politics to pick a side

by Shadowmaster on 02/12/09 at 1:15 pm

Dur­ing our every day work we deal with con­flicts and pick­ing sides. I’m not going to write about how to pick side in an argu­ment as this isn’t the pur­pose of the arti­cle, the arti­cle deals with pick­ing what is bet­ter for your sur­vival in the office and what will con­tribute to your survival.

As an employee or super­vi­sor you are being asked from time to time to pick a side, but you have to remem­ber that you have to pick a side that it will turn into your benefit.

In order to sim­plify things let’s assume that there are 2 options that are being offered are the same regard­ing the needed man power, knowl­edge, same com­plex­ity, and you can do any of them with out any prob­lem – the only dif­fer­ence between them is the implementation.

Never give an answer on the spot – tell the par­ties that you need some time to think about it. There isn’t really some­thing to think about as you already know that you can do any of the given options, this is more for you to think and under­stand which part can give you more advan­tage at the office (in long or short term).

Now it’s time to use your office pol­i­tics and inform the par­ties what in your mind is the best option. There is also another option but this is for the “friends per­son” as this employee will go with his friend and won’t look fur­ther the line , there­fore most chances he won’t suc­cess and won’t be able to sur­vive the office pol­i­tics, and I’m not going to refer to him in this arti­cle. In order to make things more clearly I’ll pro­vide 2 examples:

1.  A soft­ware com­pany wishes to imple­ment a new fea­ture in their prod­uct and they came to you, their shin­ing ris­ing star in the R&D with 2 options to imple­ment it — the VP R&D has his way and the PM has his way. As a devel­oper you know that the VP R&D can pro­vide you more power at work, pro­mote you, giv­ing you a raise in your salary but on the other side the PM can “help” you if you want to switch your posi­tion and join team in the office, at this point you’ll exam­ine what you want to achieve at work and to where you want to pro­mote your­self and accord­ing to that you can pick your side.
2.  A soft­ware com­pany wishes to imple­ment a new fea­ture in their prod­uct as a cus­tomer request and they came to you, their shin­ing ris­ing star pre-sell engi­neer. At this time you have a “con­flict” between VP R&D and VP SELLS; once again you look at the sides and see where you can get more. At this sit­u­a­tion you have some­one who’s your boss (VP sells) and some­one who isn’t your direct super­vi­sor, once again you have to choose and see what they (can) offer for long and short terms.

Any­one who’s going to pick a side knows deep inside that this is going to influ­ence both the par­tic­i­pate sides and both him , as he is going to work with them , the real ques­tion that you need to ask your­self is “what is there for me?” and that what will help you to survive.

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