You know you are trapped in a politically charged and possibly toxic work environment when...:
- your so-called "trusted" colleague "backbites" and spreads a false rumor about you with others, and you had no idea about it till someone asks you about it casually in the hallway. The false rumor could be harmless or sensational or malicious, of course.
- your cross-functional peers or internal "collaborators" stall and use various delay tactics in providing you the required information or resources for your work on hand, in spite of repeated requests and reminders by phone, email and/or escalations. Examples of stalling may look like: "Not now, am busy"/ "I am not available"/ "Ask someone else"...or simply...radio silence!
- you are the last one in your team or work-group to get to know about an important development in the organization or management decision, and that too by accident with partial or incomplete information......all this when the development or decision directly impacts your work objectives.
- your reporting senior team member (whom you have "inherited" when you joined the organization as the manager very recently) has a "tacit" equation with your boss, such that you are unable to get work done efficiently and effectively; for example: if you ask for data to prepare a report, s/he would have emailed the same to your boss first, claimed credit and then condescendingly forwarded the stuff to you after repeated reminders, that too in incomplete installments.
- in a town-hall, group meeting or one-to-one interaction, when you ask a direct pointed question about a burning organizational issue to a senior leader, s/he lies blatantly, or mutters camouflaged half-truths or simply ignores the question.
- your manager has unequivocally (but verbally) approved your budget proposal for your department, but when you approach the finance function for release of the funds for initiating execution, they resist saying "we don't have any approval or information on this". And when you go back to your boss to cross-check, s/he dismisses you nonchalantly with an "already informed finance long back" retort.
- your reporting team member bypasses you on every single work-related issue, taking instructions only from your boss. And your boss encourages such behavior as it makes him/her feel superior and important. That's the flip side of the "skip-level" culture, isn't it?
- your peer colleague drops very high-level names in the organization, positioning an unconfirmed speculation as a decisive mandate from them to get you to do what he/she personally wants, especially when you believe differently or have no prior information, direction or instructions on the issue.
- in a group or team meeting, the boss ignores specific individuals who have contributed significantly to the work/project being discussed and instead acknowledges members who are peripherally or not involved in the project. One of those specific individuals could be you.
- the senior management or those responsible allocate resources and/or budget (promised to your function) to some other area without any explanation, even after you have made a strong business case for your project proposal that was approved as a "go" (in-principle). The only response you get, after a lot of follow-ups: "change in priority due to dynamic business circumstances", of which you have no idea or anticipation.
- some of your peer colleagues or one or more of your reporting team members experience and slyly demonstrate "schadenfreude" when you get pulled up severely in a meeting by your boss or by a senior management representative, especially after you have toiled hard to put together a presentation with facts, supporting data and conclusions for the meeting.
- your manager leads you to believe a perspective on an organizational or cross-functional issue, while painting a contrary perspective with your peer colleague, leading to a conflict that could turn dysfunctional. However, your boss keeps absolutely silent or vanishes from the scene when the conflict erupts and snowballs into a major issue.
- you are led to believe by your manager and other senior leaders that you will get handsomely rewarded and/or promoted in the upcoming performance management cycle conclusion, but when the D-day arrives, your name is conspicuously missing in the promotion or rewards announcement. Adding insult to the injury is that your direct peer (who is junior in work-experience and less qualified than you) grabs the coveted promotion and/or the reward that places him/her one level above your pay-grade.
- your manager presenting your successful work as his/hers in a group meeting - perhaps a very common phenomenon - and claiming credit as well as the associated reward/recognition in appropriate forums, while mentioning you in passing (or not at all). as an insignificant "supporting" element in the project.
- your manager or a senior leader declaring a course of action as a decision in a group meeting, and doing exactly the opposite during the execution phase. Needless to say, the manager or senior leader is unavailable or inaccessible post the execution of the action, whereby you are left wondering, shell-shocked, suffering the "deer-in-the headlights" syndrome:: "w-t-f just happened??"
For the uninitiated and the naive, welcome to the "pulse-pounding", "spine-chilling" and "edge-of-the-seat thrilling" games people play in corporate politics!
Note:?The above article/post, with its contents reflect the personal views of the author, expressed purely in his personal capacity and is not related to any specific existing organization, institution, group or individual. Any such perceived resemblance or derived linkage or relationship as such is purely coincidental and unintended.
