Successfully navigating the C-suite work world can at times feel like a labyrinth with so many roads to travel and directions to take, especially the higher up one goes in their careers.
Hbr.org (Harvard Business Review) reported that office politics is one of those facets of work-life that can be challenging for Black, minority and women C-suite executives and leaders.
According to the website, women and racial minorities know the political environment, but they “may not gain the advantages white men do by engaging in it.”
A primary cause behind this is that for women and minorities, participating in political behaviors leads them to operate in actions that are “not their own.”
For example, women connect political behaviors with “traditionally masculine attributes” like aggressiveness and competitiveness, which could bring up negative gender and racial stereotypes for both groups,” according to the website.
Participating in some form of office politics to get ahead is par for the course, per Business News Daily. Positive office politics can help teams, but negative politics can cause employees to become “disengaged.”
Leaders also must identify the underlying causes of negative office politics to boost effective team morale.
About 55 percent of employees say they are connected to office politics in some way, with many participating to advance their careers.
Gossiping and spreading rumors is the top popular form of office politics. According to a survey by Accountemps, 46 percent of employees polled said it is the behavior they see most frequently. This includes gaining favor by flattering the boss, taking credit for someone else’s work and sabotaging co-workers’ projects, plus other things employees see firsthand.
SASHE, LLC executive coach Jocelyn Giangrande told The Michigan Chronicle that office politics and network-building together is a savvy mix of soft skills that can lend itself to opportunities on and off the job.
Giangrande said that she has seen people hired over lunch without a formal interview and before a job was even posted or advised.
“Those informal networks happen — I see that beyond the HR (human resource) conversation,” Giangrande said, adding that a lot of the clients she coaches have varying questions about succeeding in the office.
“It’s really about how do they succeed in the culture that they are in,” she said, adding that it is about understanding office politics essentially. “Everybody has to navigate through understanding politics, how to communicate effectively where they earn the respect and really being confident in their environment.”
Giangrande added that learning how to self-promote their contributions and “get their voice heard” is also key to working on bettering one’s office politics even as one goes up the corporate ladder.
“When you advance in an organization it is really about relationships and how do you build those relationships,” she said, adding that when people get to a senior-level “you start to feel” the need for even greater office politics.
“Up to that point your technical skills experience, education propelled you, but when you get to that level it’s about really simply being confident,” she said. “Now all of a sudden they feel this void keeping them from either being confident or keeping them from people respecting their opinion or getting their voice heard or even they feel like there is a barrier moving forward and being further developed.”
Giangrande said that this stretching into new territory the higher up you go can be fixed by leaders finding additional resources to get the job done while believing in themselves.
“You have to have trust and feel [people] won’t see you as a deficit,” she said, adding that these soft skills are critical to learning. “I see most of the clients I work with … have the experience and qualifications, it’s just those other softer things that are important.”
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