If you want to avoid politics entirely, you'll need to live on your own in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately your nearest neighbors are likely to be militiamen or budding Unabombers, so you'll have other problems to deal with.

Politics at its worst can be terrifically ugly. But at its benign best, politics is a social lubricant, allowing people to work together with minimal interpersonal friction. If you can understand the politics whizzing around you, you'll be able to get the resources you need to do your job well. And you can defend yourself and your team in the event of a political disaster.

Influence Is More Important Than Titles
In the traditional hierarchical company, power is carefully measured out from the smoke-filled boardroom downwards. People know their roles and how they should perform ... at least in theory. Politics is how the officially less powerful or the powerless can obtain power. A classic example is The Boss's Secretary. She's probably not even on the org chart, but get on the wrong side of her and your career is toast.

Power is the ability to make things happen, and politics is the art of obtaining power, says Watts S. Humphrey in Managing Technical People (Addison-Wesley). If you don't have power of your own, you need to find someone who does and influence him or her to make your things happen. Do that often enough and that power rubs off on you.

Influence is key—it often carries more real power than the official kind. Nelson Mandela overthrew the odious apartheid regime from his prison cell. Ghandi changed the fate of 500 million people, taking India out of the British Empire without military backing or political office. And you thought it was difficult obtaining funding for a new network printer.

Fast forward to the age of constant change, re-engineering, downsizing, and management fads. The old you-know-your-place style of work went out the window, taking with it the formal allocation of power. Most procedures and buddy networks were also torn up in the process. What replaced them are flexible structures where people are empowered to make things happen according to the dynamic needs of the customer.

Yeah, right.

The reality is that rigid structure riddled with political strife gave way to uncertainty and doubt. The politics remained. Working in a structural vacuum compounds the political action as it leaves much more scope for sharp operators to work the system. Lack of official power doesn't mean that there are no power bases—it's just that they're hidden in the mists. As are the territorial boundaries.

If you're new to an organization or are changing jobs within the same one, you need to learn where they lie or you are in for trouble. Unfortunately, the more politically charged the environment the more difficult it will be to find the limits until you blunder into them—and the consequences of error are higher too.

This all comes about because, at the root of it all, most people are just trying to get their jobs done and help make money for their companies. If one person can't get things done on his own, he needs to get the help of others. If help isn't directly available from more senior management, he'll turn to his peers to look for support. These people are likely to form a clique who will work together to gain influence to make things happen. By clubbing together, they are increasing their leverage with the powers that be.

Cliques are the basic element of any political system. You can see them forming in functional areas and geographical locations. Any dispersed organization is likely to develop cliques at an alarming rate, united by a strong dislike of headquarters. You have to work hard to make sure that these power factions are all working for the common good. Not an easy task if distances between centers is great.

Now, cliques are not fundamentally bad. A sensible org chart will reflect cliques as a management structure. Informal affinity usually indicates common goals and needs, so it would be sensible to recognize that. But unfortunately, ego generally prevents organizations from defining themselves in a realistic way.

Many semi-enlightened executives understand that they must flatten hierarchies and delegate responsibility, but they can't actually bring themselves to let go. This leads to two structures: the theoretical documented one, and the real one. You can spot such a structure when one or more people are systematically included in high-level discussions when their place in the org chart would not normally warrant it. This is where you might need to annotate that chart with influence lines ... and make sure you respect them.

	The Real Org Chart Click here

Self-Promotion: Office Oolitics' Dark Underbelly
Some politics can be constructive, such as getting your buddy over in the Far East division to lend you his spare router when your network is down. Most people probably don't even think of that as office politics, tending to focus on the destructive kind. There's always someone willing to put a bad word in for you come project review time, hoping to co-opt your resources for his own team.

A friend of mine recently commented that empowerment only exists at his company so that blame can be allocated if something goes wrong. Any time he actually uses some ingenuity or even thinks for himself he is told off. His was a fake allocation of power, designed only to provide senior management with a scapegoat. That is destructive politics at play.

If like me, you find yourself lacking the skills or inclination to make sure everyone knows about the latest blunder committed by your rival for that promotion, help is at hand. You can buy books that claim to teach you how to play dirty, but that is about as responsible as selling handguns in supermarkets: someone is going to get hurt. Personally, I'd rather not indulge in negative machinations. That way I sleep nights.

Instead, I'd suggest that you examine your motivations for any political actions you take. Are your objectives aligned with those of the company? And if not, why not? Of course you're allowed to promote your project or department at a higher level; that's only appropriate. But you're not there to promote yourself.

I once worked for a serial project builder. As soon as the going got tough he'd be up and off, climbing on the faces of those he'd hired to ensure himself a good place at the next level up. By ignoring what was happening in his own project and systematically managing upward, he was able to forge his own career path at the expense of his employees. You can only go on like that for so long until you find yourself friendless apart from the other slimebags doing the same thing.

You must constantly monitor your own actions, as well as those of others, to check for integrity. Many companies pay lip service to integrity, but do little to promote it. There is no excuse for that. I insist on zero tolerance for dishonesty in my teams and I'd recommend you do the same. Bullying must not be tolerated either—if for no other reason than the huge number of workdays lost through stress-related illnesses. If you recognize a bully in your people—or indeed anywhere in your organization—you must help them fix their behavior or fire them. Talk to your manager (unless he or she is the bully, of course) or human resources if you can rely on them to act.

A Menagerie of Political Animals
Which of these beasts do you find in your environment? Read sidebar...

The CC List and Other Draconian Solutions
Assuming the problem isn't you, and given that all workplaces have some politics, you're going to have to learn to cope. The first step is to recognize that politics exist and that you can contribute positively. As engineers, we can work around known problems, and this technique works with politics too. One company I know has a marketing manager in the head office who always does immediately what anyone in the head office wants, and systematically ignores anything from the other offices. This arrangement works well for her because everyone in her building thinks she's great and won't hear a bad thing about her. The solution turned out to be CCing her manager or a senior executive on any requests. Unpleasant but effective.

The key tool in coping with politics is good communication. You can usually tell how politically adept someone is by the number of "power CCs" she uses on her mail. Each CC is chosen for maximum impact on the names on the To line, not to keep the CCs informed!

Of course, e-mail can work against you as much as it can work for you. A remarkable number of otherwise kindhearted people have been done in by pushing the Send button on a message with comments they wouldn't dare say to the recipient in person. If you find yourself inclined to send a nastygram to someone, go ahead and write it. But for your own sake press Delete, not Send—especially if you have a carefully crafted CC list. It's just as cathartic an experience but without the unpleasant aftereffects.

On the other hand, receiving nastygrams can be deeply shocking. They are often irrational, spur of the moment efforts, lashing out angrily at something or someone. Or they may have been marinated in bile for some time. In both cases, they contain language that the author would never dare use to your face. I try to ignore these outbursts, rationalizing (often unsuccessfully) that they are irrational. I have a friend who does the reverse—she keeps them and looks over them and takes strength from the stupidity of the senders. If you are unfortunate enough to be the subject of a sustained campaign of such attacks, it's vital that you keep them as documentary evidence should you have to make formal complaints.

Open, genuine communication is just as important as managing e-mail. Furtive meetings behind closed doors, or long sessions and equally long faces in the boardroom, will breed fear. Expect your paper supplies to disappear as your colleagues print resumes. Nature abhors a void and will fill silence with rumor unless you fill it with fact first. Remember too that communication is supposed to be two-directional—you must listen carefully to what people tell you and what the rumor mill is saying.

People talk to each other, especially in cliques. Too many people still believe in divide and conquer as a management technique, thinking every member of clique will be putty in their hands if they tell them each a different story. Wrong. That team will, surprise surprise, compare notes and discover the duplicity. Much better to keep everyone informed equally from the beginning.