
Mustang stallions fighting. With tooth and hoof, stallions use these fights — most often — to settle differences of opinion about reproductive rights. The mares usually accept the result of these conflicts, though they do occasionally object. The social system of the wild horse functions to optimize the fitness of the next generation, because in Nature, there's little room for anything less than the best. Organizations can learn much from Nature's systems. Photo courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
The mythology about best practices is that they universally improve every organization. The truth is more likely that organizations are so idiosyncratic that any practice born elsewhere probably needs tailoring before it can be imported. My old shoes are very comfortable for me, but they probably aren't for you.
Worst practices are different — they're almost universally disastrous. We know this because, sadly, nearly everyone tries them. Here's a short list of some worst practices.
- Provide only outdated equipment. Even better: make people share outdated equipment.
- For security, lock all portable computers to desks
- Never, ever train anybody
- Use training as a reward. Provide it only to those who need it least.
- To increase productivity, increase pressure
- Let acrimony persist until it's truly injurious
- Leave in place people who are clearly incapable of doing much of anything
- Assign blame
- Spend time defending yourself in case someone, someday decides to assign blame
- Take credit for work done by subordinates or colleagues
- Give credit to one person for what was a team effort, ignoring everyone else's contributions
- Kill the messenger: punish people who deliver bad news
- Kill the nonmessenger: after you get bad news, punish those who knew about it but didn't tell you because you have a reputation for killing the messenger
- Force consensus by shaming or punishing those few souls foolish enough to disagree with the "correct" position
- Force consensus without allowing time for sufficient discussion
- Make decisions autocratically even when there's time for consensus
- Have favorite subordinates who can do no wrong
- The worst thing about
worst practices isn't their
consequences; it's that we
keep using them despite
their consequencesHave troubled subordinates who can do no right, even when they do right - As team owner, publicly castigate team members
- Publicly overrule a subordinate manager, citing information obtained from one of his or her subordinates
- "Sit in" on a subordinate's meeting unannounced
- Make the problem excessively complicated by raising herds of ancillary minor issues
- Angrily say things that hurt people, damaging the group's ability to collaborate
- Add new people to the team. Even better: do it in a way that raises questions about the abilities of incumbents
- "Temporarily" transfer some team member(s) to another effort
- Conduct "emergency" project reviews regularly
- Increase the budget without warning
- Decrease the budget
- Circulate rumors that maybe we'll be cutting the budget
- Tighten project scope to maintain schedule
- Use (faked) schedule urgency as a way of managing spending
- Remove or relax some requirements
- After work is well underway, add new requirements or tighten existing requirements
- Reassign some work from one team member to another
- Assign the same work to two people (or teams) without their knowing it
- Assign to one person work already completed by another
- Assign work to two people, together, without designating either one as lead
Count how many of these you've seen. Even scarier: count how many you've done. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
When Others Curry Favor
- When peers curry favor with the boss, many of us feel contempt, an urge for revenge, anger, or worse.
Trying to stop those who curry favor probably isn't an effective strategy. What is?
Things We Believe That Maybe Aren't So True
- Maxims and rules make life simpler by eliminating decisions. And they have a price: they sometimes foreclose
options that would have worked better than anything else. Here are some things we believe in maybe a
little too much.
Power Affect
- Expressing one's organizational power to others is essential to maintaining it. Expressing power one
does not yet have is just as useful in attaining it.
Fractures in Virtual Teams
- Virtual teams — teams not co-located — do sometimes encounter difficulties maintaining unity
of direction, or even unity of purpose. When they fracture, they do so in particular ways. Bone fractures
provide a metaphor useful for guiding interventions.
Yet More Ways to Waste a Meeting
- Experts have discovered that people have been complaining about meetings since the Bronze Age (3300-1200
BCE). Just kidding. But I'm probably right. As an aid to future archaeologists I offer this compilation
of methods people use today to eliminate any possibility that a meeting might produce results worth
the time spent.
See also Workplace Politics for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming September 3: Contributions in Team Meetings: Advocating
- An agenda in the form of an ordered list of topics might not provide an appropriate framework for a given meeting. For example, if A depends on B, and B depends on A, we must find a way to discuss A and B together in some orderly fashion. Here are some alternatives to linear, ordered agendas. Available here and by RSS on September 3.
And on September 10: Contributions in Team Meetings: Scoping
- Some meetings focus on solving specific problems. We call them "working sessions." More often, we delegate problem solving to task teams, while meetings wrestle with the difficult task of identifying or "scoping" problems rather than solving them. Scoping discussions can be perilous. Available here and by RSS on September 10.
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Beware any resource that speaks of "winning" at workplace politics or "defeating" it. You can benefit or not, but there is no score-keeping, and it isn't a game.
- Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of additional resources
- Some public libraries offer collections. Here's an example from Saskatoon.
- Check my own links collection
- LinkedIn's Office Politics discussion group