5 Steps to Build Your Political Skills as an IT Director

I posted an article about the need for IT Directors to be politically savvy. One of my connections asked me the following question: "What do I do to develop my political skills in my organization?" So I quickly search the literature on building political skills in an organization. Here is what I found

Based on the literature, here are five steps that IT Directors can take to develop their political awareness:

Place people on your radar – identify the key stakeholders who are affected by the change and also the degree to which the change will affect them. You must take this task personally and not delegate it to a subordinate. The people affected usually make their feelings known in several informal settings. So IT directors must plug into channels for getting information from the rumor mill and inuendos. You must also get to know the key stakeholders at a personal level, not necessarily as a friend but good enough to predict their behavior and reaction.

Know who has the power – in every organization, there are people with positional power, influential power, no power, and both positional and influential power. The most powerful are those who have both positional and influential power, followed by those with influential power. In as much as you need the people with positional power to formally approve your projects, the people with influence can derail your project if they are not adequately managed. Beyond the influential people, some have hidden clout, and it is imperative to know them and keep them close. Once the people in the powerbase are identified, you must proceed to have a certain degree of relationship with their assistants.  They may not have any power, but they have access that you may need to leverage to bring the influential people up to date when required.

Keep your enemies close – IT Directors fall into the na?ve trap of believing information and relationship based on logic and rational thinking. In a political environment, rationality is determined by the “What is in it for me” (WIIIFM) syndrome. So the IT Director must do a stakeholder analysis to identify those who stand to win or stand to lose at the end of the project. The degree of win or degree of loss is a critical determinant of the potential level of resistance coming from a given stakeholder.

Map out strategies – after you place people on the radar, determine those with or without power, and their alignments based on WIIFM; the IT Director must develop strategies to promote shared interests, build alliances to change the resistance levels, and contain those who are challenging to convert. One of the plans is to be creative at finding ways to interact with the stakeholders in informal settings.

Traditionally, these IT guys are busy fixing problems, writing code, designing the next best thing, but fail to build meaningful relationships outside of the formal settings. Correct me if I am wrong, most IT guys see chitchatting as a complete waste of time and are always in a hurry to return to their problem-solving mode. At a minimum, IT Directors must build trust with the stakeholders by paying attention to people around them, communicating with them in non-tech language, and learning how to listen to people around them.

Having said all of that, the IT Director must stay the course of the project by continually evaluating the interest and objective of the senior leadership. A change in leadership implies that the new leader may change the course of the project. IT Director must, therefore, seek the support of new leaders to continue where a project when a change at the top occurs.