Anger management

Is the controversy over the supposed “War Against Christmas” relevant to working IT managers? Absolutely.

One reason, discussed in last week’s column, is direct. The December holidays are a focal point for the difficult challenge managers face whenever the religious or cultural differences of a diverse workforce collide in the workplace … which is, and must be, a social environment as well as a place work gets done.

Here’s another reason for you to pay attention. Step outside your personal opinion regarding the issue’s validity. Instead, consider politics as a sport and the effectiveness of the War Against Christmas as a tactic. You’ll find strong similarities to a stratagem popular in office politics — making people angry so they’ll make decisions without thinking.

To be an effective executive you have to be an effective politician. The word has taken on ugly overtones, deserved by some politicians but not all of them. The word itself, though, is (or at least should be) neutral. The perfect politician is someone who can maneuver — manipulate isn’t too strong a word — people with competing interests into following a common direction without ever being manipulated by other politicians.

The first part — manipulating people — isn’t very hard.

Politicians manipulate people by engaging their emotions. The extent to which they succeed is the extent people stop thinking analytically, because when people stop thinking analytically they’ll accept any proposition they want to be true. The more powerful the emotion the more likely their acceptance.

And you’re in the middle. Think of the situation as a large, multi-player chess game. Everyone is both a piece on the board and one of the players. You’re a player when you persuade someone else to move from one square to another. You’re a player when you decide which square you should move to. But if someone manipulates you into making a move that isn’t in your best interest, you’re just another piece on the board.

The most powerful emotion politicians have at their disposal is probably anger, and just about everyone is susceptible. The only challenge is finding each person’s hot button. This is easier in office politics than national politics because in national politics the propagandists have to engage in mass marketing — a hit-or-miss affair. In office politics the politicians understand each of their targets personally.

Here’s how it plays out. You’re the CIO and budget season has rolled around again. You’ve prepared a rational budget: Start with last year’s spending, add budget for new programs, the maintenance increment for newly delivered software and inflation; subtract for programs scheduled to complete, maintenance on software scheduled for decommissioning, and your continuous improvement target.

A corporate politician — one of your peers, who wants more budget but has no logical argument to give in its favor — chooses a hot-button topic for the CEO, CFO or both, and maybe for some of your other peers in the company too:

• It’s all technology for technology’s sake,

• IT projects always cost too much and take too long.

• We keep spending and have nothing tangible to show for it.

• Gartner says PCs cost $13,000 each per year and isn’t that awful.

• Paul Strassmann says there’s no correlation between IT spending and business benefit anyway.

The politician knows who is susceptible and doesn’t try to push a button that isn’t there among any of the others. All it takes is three or four executives grumbling about IT and how its budget always seems to be increasing. You’ll find yourself on the defensive, where it won’t matter how good your math is.

The defense against this kind of backstabbing is preventive: Strong relationships among the company’s executives. People are most vulnerable to those they trust, ideas they’re already predisposed to agree with, and, when it comes to anger, targets they don’t know or already don’t like.

You aren’t immune either. The same politician, or a different one, will try to make you angry too, only at different targets — probably the “bureaucrats in Human Resources” and the “bean counters in Accounting.” If you know and trust the politician, and don’t know or already don’t like Human Resources and Accounting, you’re as vulnerable to this manipulation as anyone else.

So remind yourself constantly: If (1) someone you know and like (2) says something that fits your biases that (3) starts to make you angry at (4) somebody you already don’t like, turn on your adrenal-gland suppressor.

You’re being played.