I was in Hong Kong last week, and had coffee last week with a friend of mine whom I had not seen in over a year. As we caught up, I mentioned a person we both knew from his former employer (I’ll call him Bill). Bill had recently called me to ask about business opportunities.
“Do you know what happened to him?” my friend asked me.
“No, I replied, I just figured they let him go,” as the economic crisis is impacting everyone.
My friend continued. “He came to work one day, they tapped him on the shoulder and told him to pack up and leave, right then and there. He didn’t see it coming, but everyone in the office else did. He wasn’t bringing in enough revenue, and was working until 10pm every night. No one else ever stayed that late, and it became a running joke in the office.”
My friend then turned to me. “Don’t you think at this point of his life, (Bill is around 50) he would have known better or at least seen it coming?”
Sadly, there are plenty of people like Bill, with poor political instincts. They think if they work late or harder, they’ll get acknowledged, and everything will somehow be all right. But it seldom is like that in the workplace, and Bill was not organisationally savvy. He did not hear what was being said about him (or didn’t care to know), nor did he spend time building his internal relationships and strategy, instead thinking he just needed to work harder. And he did, but in solitude.
I’m not sure what would have saved Bill. He was not bringing in enough business, and that was essentially how he was assessed. But we all know people that are still standing when the dust settles are not always the rainmakers. Why is that? Do they simply know how to kiss the boss’s behind? Not necessarily. One can be highly ethical and also organisationally smart.
Politics, after all, is not a pejorative; rather it is how to lobby and influence, formally and informally.
If I was to give Bill some pointers on what to look out for next time, here would be four initial thoughts:
1) Do not trust others to “do the right thing” for you at the office. Never assume that “my work speaks for itself” and that you’ll succeed at work. There is no Santa Claus either.
2) When you are struck down or diminished in a public meeting and shrug it off, convincing yourself the other person did not really mean it – think again. And if they approach you afterwards and tell you they did not really mean it, think again even more. Put your antennae up and don’t be quick to agree. As Ronald Reagan once said about Russia, “Trust, but verify.”
3) Never never assume your boss knows how hard you are working. Your boss has hundreds of other things that require attention, and simply cannot know what you are doing, or how hard you’re working. You have to learn how to deftly trumpet your successes without sounding like “me me me”. A boss wants to know what you are doing, and will help, but you must know how to present the situation and the potential solution to engage their help.
4) Know how to use collaborative language with everyone in the office. When someone says, “No, that can’t work, we tried that years ago,” it only results in resistance and anger from the recipient. Use invitational language to get others to collaborate, as an outside consultant would by using phrases such as, “Help me understand this better”, “I’d appreciate your input to help getting this completed,” and “Based on my experience, here is what I have heard”. Get the negative and cynical words out of your vocabulary – in person and in email, and if it that doesn’t come naturally, it will over time.
Bill may be an embittered person and look for another company that will treat him better without ever knowing what others said about him. But until he gets better political antennae (never too late to do so), he is doomed to repeat his patterns, over and over again.
