How to Drive Meaningful Change - Improve your mindset
Because politics is about relationships, and relationships involve a connection between you and someone else, the very first place you should start at is yourself.
Everyone can benefit from understanding and knowing how to build influence, implement change, and shape the organization and culture.
Much of it relies on learning and understanding the soft skill of navigating organizational politics.
This article is part of my series How to Drive Meaningful Change.
Improve your mindset
It starts with improving your mindset
Because politics is about relationships, and relationships involve a connection between you and someone else, the very first place you should start at is yourself.
How you view the world, the interactions, and the opportunities colors your decision-making - for good or for ill. Your mindset needs to be aligned to achieve maximal benefit for the organization.
View politics as a positive
Office politics is basically just a fancy term for “human relationships and interaction.”
When many people think “politics”, they think of some slimy politician that takes bribes and enriches themselves at the expense of others. They might even envision lizard people wearing human skin suits slithering about as they pursue world domination.
This perspective may be accurate in some cases, but it’s just not necessarily true within the context of companies and organizations. Organizations that say they don’t have politics still have politics.
The only organization that doesn’t truly doesn’t have any politics is an organization with a single person.
Office politics is basically just a fancy term for “human relationships and interaction”.
Whenever people interact, they form judgements, share insights, and ultimately make decisions. They may agree, they may disagree, there might be conflict. Over a period of time, trust or distrust builds, alignment or misalignment is created. Given enough time, an interpersonal relationship forms.
If you view politics as just “human interaction”, it’s a lot less intimidating. It’s not something to be avoided, and is instead something that can be learned to the benefit of all.
More importantly - it’s not a negative thing. What people think of politics, they’re conflating unhealthy politics like gossiping or larger corporate “dog-eat-dog” behaviors. That’s also politics, sure, but only a subset. Politics can also be extremely healthy and valuable.
View interactions as an opportunity to help
Some people sometimes naturally shy away from meetings and having to talk to people. They’d rather focus on their work, headphones on and heads-down. While this might be useful for getting the day-to-day work done, it makes it harder to truly impact the upstream that heavily influences what the day-to-day work entails.
Instead - view conversations as opportunities. Every conversation you have is an opportunity to help the other person. It’s an opportunity to learn about the problems they are encountering within the organization. It’s an opportunity to swap ideas and discuss how to improve and strengthen the company. It’s an opportunity to raise awareness, to provide support, or even empathize.
Whether it’s a comment on a ticket, or a slack message - think about how you are helping the other person with your interaction. If you’re not - is there a way?
If still no - then why are you having that conversation? Talking in and of itself doesn’t create value. Are you actually wasting the person’s time? Is the most helpful thing you can do to not have that conversation?
View getting credit as meaningless
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.
— Lao Tzu, philosopher
You can get a lot done if you don’t care who gets the credit.
If you truly want to drive change, it often means letting others take credit for your hard work — and being OK with it. It may mean nobody even knows you were involved!
This is a tough pull to swallow for most people, and it’s the one that gets in the way of their efforts to actually have an outsized impact. People naturally want to get credit. People naturally want to be rewarded for their efforts. There is a sense of inherent unfairness that bubbles up as a reaction when others get credit for work you’ve done.
Push down that reaction. Let it pass. Your goal is to make the change, not to get credit for it.
If you care too much about your own success, you start to make zero-sum decisions. You’ll shoot down ideas that are great just because you won’t get credit. You’ll start “protecting your turf” when great concepts in your area come from those outside your area. It very quickly devolves into an “us vs. them” mentality - damaging to organizations and the cause of many silos. You’ll start positioning yourself as the “go-to”, which harms your organization’s bench.
All the “big company” corporate behaviors start to come in:
Siloing
Resource and knowledge hoarding
Non-collaboration
Job security
Self-aggrandizing
The list goes on.
You’ll hurt your own cause trying to ensure your name is attached to every win. People see this - your reports, your peers, your superiors.
If you’re trying to drive organizational change, it’s not about the credit — it’s about making positive impact. Don’t think about the credit. Focus on the outcome.
I once worked with a Product Manager that took credit for all of my ideas and successes. Sometimes it was implicit, like not mentioning my participation or contributions. Other times, it was explicit - framing himself as if he was the key contributor and decider. He didn’t do this just to me - he regularly took credit for his team’s ideas, as well.
I didn’t care because I was focused on the long-term: making our organization successful. Later on, that Product Manager got promoted and moved to another team, and we stopped interacting.
He floundered in his new role. He was unable to build the trust of his team because his reputation preceded him, and without having access to someone else who could actually do the job, he was unable to have an impact proportional to the higher expectations of his new role. He was later fired, having been peter-principled beyond his competency.
As for me - none of that mattered. I got the product to where I envisioned it should go.
View resistance as inevitable
There’s no. way around it - people will strongly object to an idea you propose at some point. You’ll face a lot of resistance, or you may not get your way.
Master the emotional reaction to opposition
There’s often a feeling of defeat when people shut down your idea or object to it happens. Perhaps you feel an anger that rises, like "how dare they disagree with me”. These sentiments can quickly lead to a a “you vs. them” combative mindset which can devolve into uselessness.
It is your responsibility to control your reaction and tamp it down. You must avoid getting defensive, combative, or reactionary. Your mindset on receiving resistance should be one of openness and comfort.
In fact - you should expect opposition and want it to occur. This is an opportunity to learn more and strengthen your idea. “Swiss cheesing” is a technique where you ask people to poke holes into your idea so that you can address weaknesses and make it stronger.
Dig deep into objections to learn from them
People’s objections to your idea are a gift. If there’s an objection to your idea, you’ve learned something that’s beneficial.
Dig deeper. Ask questions. Understand the “why”:
Why the opposition?
Are there other factors not being considered?
Are there other prioritizations occurring that you should be aware of?
Are there different tradeoffs at play?
Is there some unexpected conclusion that was arrived at?
Is there clarity or lack of clarity?
Remember - it’s rarely, if ever, a personal attack against you or your character, and thus it is important to not take it personally. Even if the resistance is personal, it’s important to consider it as if it wasn’t personal.
Viewed from that perspective, objections are constructive in nature.
I once proposed an idea to the executive team that would improve percetion from users in our organization, but had the risk of greatly harming the company’s bottom line by reducing processing volume. I knew the risk existed, and knew the objection would be there, but proposed it anyways for discussion.
The initial reaction was strongly negative: absolutely not - it would kill our company.
The discussion could have easily stopped there. We could have moved on to a different topic. I could’ve tried to save my reputation somehow, argued, and tried to look smarter. Instead, we acknowledged the flaws involved, and then dug deeper into the idea.
What risks were involved? What controls could we implement to mitigate the risks? What elements of the idea could be removed, supplemented, delayed, accelerated, reinforced?What would need to change or be implemented first for the idea to be effective? What small experiments could be done to validate some of these concerns?
From that discussion rose a much stronger, much improved idea that incorporated elements of the original idea, layered with expertise from others. This wouldn’t have been possible without the initial, less ideal idea being proposed and honestly discussed.
Always look forward
Always keep your mindset and conversations constructive and forward-looking.
If you do face a setback, realize it is not necessarily permanent. A “no” or “not yet” is an opportunity to figure out the “why” behind the “no”. Once you know the “why” you can work to resolve the reason for the opposition. It may even be a perfectly legitimate reason that you should factor in.
Every problem you encounter is an opportunity to solve it. It might truly be that your approach or idea is fundamentally flawed — that’s OK: it’s an important learning!