Say the word ‘politics’ to most engineers and see their faces tear up as if they were just bitten in a lemon. We are all conditioned to believe that politics in the workplace is this dirty game that is played by manipulative ladder climbing, while the “real” engineers concentrate on the code.
I always thought in the same way. For years as an engineer I wore my hatred against politics as an honorary sign. I was especially that nonsense. I just wanted to send. Politics was for those other people, those who didn’t need what was technically needed.
Now I think the opposite: Politics is not the problem; is bad politics. And pretending that politics does not exist? That is how bad politics wins.
Politics is exactly how people coordinate in groups. It is the invisible network of relationships, influence and informal power that exists in every organization. You can refuse to participate, but that doesn’t let it disappear. It simply means that decisions are made without you.
Think about the last time that a terrible technical decision was pushed through your company. Perhaps it was adopted too much complicated architecture, or choosing a seller that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that actually worked. I bet that if you dig in what happened, you will notice that this was not because the decision makers were stupid. It is because people with the right information were not in the room. They “did not do politics.”
In the meantime, someone who understood how influence works in that room, making their business, building coalitions, which shows that they had done their homework. And won their idea. Not because it was better, but because they showed up to play while everyone else was ‘too pure’ for politics.
Ideas don’t speak. People do that. And the people who understand how to navigate through organizational dynamics, build relationships and play politically? Their ideas are heard.
When you build strong relationships between teams, you understand what different stakeholders motivate and know how to build consensus, you do politics. When you take the time to explain your technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders in language they understand, that is political. When you take coffee with someone from another team to understand their challenges, that is also political.
Good politics is simply strategic about relationships and influence in the service of good results.
The best technical leaders are incredibly political. They just don’t call it that. They call it “stakeholder management” or “structure of coordination” or “organizational consciousness”. But it’s political, and they are good at it.
The engineers who refuse to get in touch with politics often complain that their companies make bad technical decisions. But they are not willing to do what is needed to influence those decisions. They want a world where only technical merit determines the results. That world does not exist and never has.
This is not about becoming a schedule -backstabber. As I wrote in your strengths, your weaknesses are, the same characteristic can be positive or negative, depending on how you use it. Politics is the same way. You can use political skills to manipulate and promote yourself, or you can use them to implement good ideas and protect your team against bad decisions.
This is how good politics looks in practice:
- Build relationships before you need them. That random coffee with someone from the data team? Six months later they are your biggest advocate for obtaining technical sources for your data pipeline project.
- Insight into the real incentives. Your VP does not care about your beautiful microservices architecture. They care faster for shipping functions. Frame your technical proposals in terms of what they actually care about.
- Manage effectively. Your manager juggles with competitive priorities that you don’t see. Keep them informed of what is important, flag problems early with potential solutions and help them make good decisions. If they trust that you will handle things, they will fight for you if it matters
- Create win-win situations. Instead of fighting for resources, look for ways to help other teams while you get what you need. It doesn’t have to be a Zero-Sum game.
- Be visible. If you do a great job, but nobody knows, did it really happen? Share your victories, present on all hands, write those design documents to which everyone will refer later.
The alternative to good politics is not political. It is a bad political winning as standard. It is the loud person who is wrong to get his way because the calm person who is right will not speak. These are good projects that die because nobody argued for them. They are talented people who leave because they could not navigate through the dynamics of the organization.
Stop pretending to be above politics. You are not. Nobody is. The only question is whether you will be good at it or will continue to lose to people who are already.
#Stop #avoiding #politics