I am Autistic and a paper that I am working on involves a “political mindset” to solve a problem. I am seeing ways to survive office politics but I am not sure ultimately what it is. Please help.
In: 34
Have a business degree, worked in offices for over a decade.
ELI5: You know when you go to a restaurant and you have a waiter. Of course you’ll place an order and get your food. But the waiter also wants a good tip, so the waiter might be nice and extra friendly, tell a joke maybe the tip will be really good. And if you’re friendly with the waiter, if the restaurant is really busy, maybe you will get your food quicker, or maybe a free dessert. There’s the basic service, but then you are “nice” in extra ways to try to get a little bit extra from each other.
Non-ELI5: This is surprisingly difficult to explain. But businesses are made up of people. And being nice to those people can get you additional benefits.
Here’s an easy example.
Making your boss think it was their idea. You buy and use a $10 pen once a month. That’s $120 a year. The pen store has a sale that if you buy 12 pens it’s only $100. You’ll save $20.
If you go to your boss and ask for $100 for pens, your boss might not be okay spending this much right away. But if you say to your boss “we always spend $10 a month on pens, I wonder if there was a way we could save money on pens… do you think if we bought a bunch of pens at once it could save money?” Boss says “yes look in to it and let me know what you find” Now you tell your boss about saving $20 and the boss can take credit for it.
It’s also how you manage other people’s incompetence.
Are you picking up on social cues in emails and in person interactions, do you show an interest in the personal lives of your colleagues, which personal relationships can you leverage to achieve your aims and bypass bureaucracy.
As an autistic person it’s also the general added layer of how you navigate those unwritten rules of office etiquette and culture.
In actuality, offices aren’t pure meritocracies. There are certain departments that get more favorable treatment, there are people who get preferential treatment because of who they’re friends with or who they are related to, and such. For example, a company may favor salesmen who bring in revenue vs. departments like IT or HR that don’t drive revenue. Of if the CEO came out of Marketing, then you might see the marketing team get larger budgets, more visibility with CEO. Politics can also be on the department level, such as who gets promoted and whether it’s tied to performance/merit or who is better friends with the department head or makes them look good.
It’s mostly just a catch all term that describes to what degree personal drama and power grabs affect the work place.
The first thing you have to understand is that people who work together are being forced into very close contact with people they may not get along with or have anything in common with. Other than where they work. Okay, so, you don’t like these people but if you just keep your head down and focus on your job you should be fine. Except, no, you have to rely on these people as well.
Some people are just power hungry. If they get the least bit of authority over anything, even if it’s being in charge of being the community coffee pot, they are completely incapable of not a using that power. Some people are lazy and will do anything to avoid doing their job and will try to dump their work off on other people. Some people are egomaniacs who will never believe they can be wrong about anything. Some people are just cruel and like to watch other people struggle because it makes them feel better about themselves. There are also people who are just, well, crazy. People who have something wrong with them and the mental health system either failed them or they found enough ways to compensate that they are semi functional.
All these people and other extreme personality types will be in an office and you cannot just avoid them as you are all interdependent upon each other. So, when we talk about office politics we are usually talking about how these interactions are playing out and the dangers of picking a side over another.
Unfortunately, there can be very little way of knowing how this will shake out. I have worked in places where cubicle assignments had to take into consideration restraining orders. Or where spouses and the people who they had affairs with all worked in the same area. Sometimes you think the correct move is to just do what the boss says even though you don’t know the boss is on the way out and your loyalty can now be viewed as a problem.
The only real trick to surviving office politics is to be good at your job, don’t be particularly vocal about anything going on in the office that could be interpreted as picking sides, and be careful about thinking of people at work as your friends. Most of them are not. They may be social with you. They may even like you. But they are not your friend and thinking of them as such can be a big problem because your “friend” may suddenly decide to do something really dumb and is counting out your support. Whether or not they get it may not matter if you are a known friend and viewed as potentially supportive. If you are good enough at your job and you are easy to tie to any particular faction you are generally allowed to continue relatively unhindered.
Hi, I’m a political scientist.
There’s a difference between office politics and a political mindset. So office politics are what everyone has described to you, but political mindsets are different, they kind of involve either a partisan view of political parties, or they involve a “one person has to lose if I’m going to win” point of view.
Try asking your supervisor or boss for clarification like this: “I don’t understand the context that the term political mindset is used in for my project. Can you please spell it out?”
It might have nothing to do with office politics! A political mindset isn’t much more than a buzzword, and I understand your confusion. Good luck!
Instead of getting actual work done, people let their egos get in the way of making meaningful progress. Having to deal with and waste HOURS of energy on this nonsense every week is generally considered office politics.
One I don’t see here yet is fitting in. I worked at an insurance/finance job and if you didn’t go drinking with the team you could be looked over for promotions. Stand tall and wear a jacket but no tie that kind of thing immediately says to an exec you’re meeting for the first time that you’re “one of them” and they’ll give you the time of day. Oh and the handshakes ffs the importance old guys put on a handshake is alarming.
Office Politics is personal biases and opinions interfering with the “ideal” operation of a business (rather than purely being based on what choices are best, most efficient, etc).
It can be a manager giving the best roles to their favorite worker, or giving undesirable roles to their least favorite.
It can be an assistant scheduling your meetings at undesirable times.
It can be an equal coworker badmouthing your work to other coworkers.
Office politics is just the shifting and dynamic social relationships which lie on top of what the “org chart” and “process diagrams” say is the structure and process of the office. It’s quite complex, even for somebody who isn’t autistic – people individually bring a lot of strange psycho-social and power dynamic quirks to the office, and when those interact in an environment like an office where peoples’ real monetary and status ambitions clash, the result can be pretty chaotic.
Keep in mind that there are formal and informal power structures at a workplace. Formal power structures are obviously bosses, etc.
Having people higher up on the food chain who like you and/or highly value your work can be a huge benefit — if there is a problem, they may vouch for you; if you have an idea, they can promote it for you; if you have a complaint, they can elevate it to people even higher up in the company for you.
But there are also people who have more power than their formal position would suggest. A good example is executive assistants / secretaries. Or people who have been at the company a really really long time. Getting on their good side can make your life a lot easier.
And some people have a lot of power not because of their actual position in the company, but because a lot of people (or the RIGHT people) like them. How toxic this dynamic is depends on the personalities of people in the office.
Office politics is understanding there these different points of power, and navigating between then.
However, it is also important to play to your strengths. Some companies have way less office politics than others. And in many companies, just doing good work and being pleasant is enough to create and maintain a healthy and profitable work environment for yourself.
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