Good and bad politics

If you have worked in a corporate environments you will likely have come across (or used) the term "politics", as I have. More often than not, I've heard this term being used with a negative connotation, e.g.: "Oh, there are too many politics here"; "If you want to make career, you need to be good at politics"; "It doesn't matter how good you are, the only thing that matters is who you know", and so on.

The reality is that not all politics are bad. There are good and bad politics.

Good Politics

I'll try to define good politics as the intellectual activity and resulting actions of one or more individuals with the goal of creating synergy between stakeholders with different interests so that the resulting activities:

• Align with the company culture and values
• Align with the company overall strategy
• Create a productive environment where people can fulfil their aspirations and deliver business value

Good politics are not only positive in a work environment, but necessary to create high-performing teams and organisations and ultimately happy employees. This is especially true the larger the organisation is. The ability to identify Win-Win situations, apply emotional intelligence and empathy when engaging with others and create synergy between stakeholders with different interests is paramount in creating high-performing environments. The sum of all the parts is far greater than the sum of the individual parts.

To be a great leader, therefore, one must excel at good politics and such skills, like leadership, can be learnt, one doesn't necessarily have to be born with them.

Bad politics

I'll try to define bad politics as the intellectual activity and resulting actions of one or more individuals that presents the following characteristics:

• It's not transparent, i.e. the individuals involved do not want others to know what they are sup to and the outcomes of their actions, at least until they have achieved what they want.
• It is performed with lack of honesty (conforming our words to reality) and lack of integrity (conforming reality to our words).
• It explicitly goes against the company culture, values and strategy.
• It produces zero-sum situations, where for each winner there is (at least) a loser.
• It produces a nepotistic and hierarchical environment, based on power, fear, title, threats, punishments, connivance and injustice.
• It produces a culture of fear and confusion where people don't know right from wrong anymore.

I'll also add that bad politics are the veil that people lacking talent and skills hide behind, in order to keep getting their salaries and/or maintain their position. It goes without saying that bad politics are very harmful for businesses. They create a culture of fear, nepotism, connivance, lack of trust, ultimately damaging the business because a) People will leave sooner rather than later; b) People who promote bad politics and are occupy leadership positions will promote a traditional "Management 1.0" environment, surrounding themselves of "Yes men" and people who tend to see it like them (the confirmation bias syndrome).

To summarise, not all politics are bad. Organisations who want to create high performing working environments and teams must promote, encourage and train their people in good politics and must have a bad politics zero tolerance policy.