by Margaret Heffernan - Thursday, 6th September 2007

It’s the bane of our existence, a major cause of employee grievances and a big reason why companies lose talented employees.

I’ve lost track of the number of job candidates who, asked why they wanted to leave their current positions, cited office politics. It’s worse in small businesses, where everything is taken so personally – but office politics, it seems, is here to stay.

Where would David Brent or Dilbert be without them?

I used to think the problem was simply endemic. Politics could get better or worse but you’d never entirely eradicate it.

But now I’m not so sure. I’ve visited two businesses recently that appeared, on close examination, to be politics-free zones.

This month, I’m going to tell you about WebCT, a software company that puts university course work online. Until she sold it a few months ago, it was run by Carol Vallone who is, at heart, a saleswoman.

She’s also a great leader – positive, cogent, fair-minded and honest. But that’s not enough to eliminate politics. When it comes time to draw up the business plan for the coming year, Carol does something I’ve never seen before – but which I’d like to see more often.

She makes each functional head (head of marketing, engineering, sales, finance) change hats. The head of engineering has to argue the case for the marketing budget; the head of sales has to explain why the new products won’t generate revenue until the second quarter.

Everyone has to see the business plan from the perspective of a department not their own.

What this means is the management team develops, first hand, a profound understanding of the dependencies inherent in every business.

Sales understands why it can’t promise features that won’t be ready for six months. Marketing understands why the ad campaign must start earlier. Finance discovers why the sales cycle takes so long.

Instead of the blame game which absorbs so many companies – and so much time – Carol’s team is vigorously engaged in working for the company as a whole.

And when employees don’t understand why things are the way they are, instead of pitching department against department, their boss can explain how the whole thing works.

This process is self-evidently so smart that I’m amazed I haven’t run into it before. But I can see why not. It requires the individual letting down of significant defences.

Where do most politics spring from? Ignorance. I whinge about marketing and deride their expertise when I don’t really know what their challenges are.

It’s easier to blame than to empathise. Moreover (as I discovered watching one leader trying to implement Carol’s method) letting someone else stand in your shoes requires that you reveal your position eloquently – warts and all.

And so a more honest language starts to emerge in which, instead of posturing, managers must reveal what they feel confident about and what keeps them awake at night.

What Carol’s method also does is take ego out of the debate. Wanting a big budget isn’t about you – because the money you’re arguing for isn’t your own. In fact, arguing well may mean your own department ends up with less.

To excel, you have to strengthen your colleague. It’s a profound lesson in personal dependencies, as well as functional ones.

Did Carol encounter any resistance when she adopted this process? Of course. Many felt it would turn them into amateurs, arguing without their usual expertise.

But they came to value how much they kept learning about each other and the business. They weren’t siloed any more. They preferred abstract thinking to emotional conflict. And it gave the best of them a forum for articulating how much they appreciated their colleagues’ work.

Carol recently sold her business for a very large amount of money. When the deal was announced, her employees made a point of thanking her for the experience they’d had working there. What had they valued most? The culture. It starts at the top.

Tags: office politics, talented employees,