Dealing With Office Politics

I once worked for a company that had a leadership team that was intact for many years and we all understood one another’s role until “Black Monday” happened.

I reported to work Monday morning and took a seat at my desk and logged into my computer and saw I had an incorrect password/ username combination. I tried again and no luck. As I angrily spun around to ask what happened I collided with a grinning coworker who confided he had the same problem “Follow me, you won’t believe this”
We went down the hall to our boss’s office and saw it was empty and proceeded further to see him in a cubicle that was the same as his underlings. My heart sank….here was a senior member of the company stranded amongst the common staff and trainees…a powerful message was sent. Then the intercom blared from above with an announcement…”Attention all staff, there will be a mandatory meeting in 5 minutes held in the conference room…repeat..mandatory..that means attendance is required, no excuses will be tolerated”

When we arrived we saw that half the people in attendance were new faces and there was a chill in the air…

We were informed that the previous Friday we bought the assets of 2 companies and now we were all one organization. Next we saw a presentation detailing the new table of organization showing that our former supervisor was demoted so dramatically that he basically had no authority whatsoever and was just a common employee without any special status at all.

Over the course of the next few weeks we saw a troubling pattern emerge…those employees that offered support to the deposed former supervisor seemed to be subjected to mistreatment.

An act as simple as stopping by his desk and asking if he was okay or going out to lunch with him was enough to lose credit for a project or suddenly discover your hours were extended several hours beyond dinnertime.

Eventually people stopped supporting their former boss and tried to work their way through all the new changes…it became “look out for number one” and morale crashed in the process. New alliances formed and people quickly saw the value of embracing the new management team while abandoning friendships that endured for years previously.

Divide and conquer is a frequent management ploy designed to prevent people from forming voting blocs and nowhere was it more apparent than watching tightly knit teams fracture and loyalties evaporate…in an effort to kiss up to the new management people disgusted their former friends and then my company became a dis-functional mess.

Turnover of staff became inevitable and soon the new team became the only team…the original company that absorbed the other 2 organizations was no longer evident and another yet faceless company that didn’t have any identity struggled for market-share.

The moral of the story is that a company that monitors office politics at the expense of the greater good is destined to suffer and the individuals that get trapped by their inability to adjust suffer even more.

Office Politics written by Ken Bownes

Office Politics blog

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