Ask a random group of employees in your organization to name their least favorite thing about work life and chances are that the dreaded "P" word, or "politics", will be the answer.  Ask the same question to a group of IT employees and the chance that politics will be the answer probably goes up quite a bit.  So we shun it as an "evil" thing and thus miss out on what could be a useful tool for us.  This is a mistake.  Politics (the word and the function) has an undeservedly bad reputation. 

I keep a number of dictionaries in my office and consult them regularly.  While they often have slightly different spins on a word, a composite definition I've come up with for the word ‘politics' is simply "The art of influencing people".  So what better inter-personal or group skill could an IT person develop, especially since many of us seem to feel we are "second-class (organizational) citizens that nobody listens to"?

Any time you get two or three people together you have politics so we all "play politics" whether we know it or not.  Deciding what movie to see with your friends Saturday night?  One or more of you may be playing politics quite actively.  Deciding between a burger or a pizza before the show?  Unless there's an instant consensus some influencing (e.g., "politics") will be involved; very often the one who speaks first or most convincingly will carry the day.  Are we being evil in doing that?  I don't think so, but we are playing politics.  Those political components exist with pretty much any decisions between people at work or in your personal life, at least for decisions that aren't made unilaterally or "top down".  But even those types of decisions are often influenced by the input of others.  We hear about how the better bosses gather input before deciding, hear in the news about "powers behind the throne" or we see those same things in our daily lives.  All of that is politics, i.e., influencing.

There's a good side and a bad side to politics, of course.  It all depends on how it's played and the motives behind playing it.  Unfortunately, most of us focus on the bad side and thus dismiss too easily what could be a very powerful and useful tool.  I see that tendency as the biggest problem with the concept of politics.  Politics is not intrinsically a bad word and neither is it intrinsically a bad practice.  It can be (and is) just as easily used for good.  Like most things, it's all in how we choose to use it.  Many of us, because of the bad connotations we've come to accept about politics choose not to use it at all. Or we think we do.  That's sad. 

If we want to increase our ability to influence our organizations, therefore, one place to start is to get over our conventional wisdoms about politics and start developing better political skills.

Paul Williams has recently retired after 40+ years in IT, although in truth much of that time was spent in EDP, MIS and IS before he became an IT'er.  Most of his career has been in IT management, where he enjoyed several stints as a CIO for different insurance companies on the West Coast.  While at the same time doing some "real work" in IT, for the last five years Paul has specialized in developing and facilitating leadership  programs both for his division and for the company at large.  He doesn't think of himself as a technical person but rather as a business person with some technical skills. 

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