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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.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

In high school one of my poorer bits of judgment was an attempt to win the admiration of an exceptionally attractive young lady. My strategy was to tell her a very funny joke. The joke I chose was, had the vocabulary existed back then, politically incorrect and then some — its punchline was a pun on a derogatory name for an ethnic group.

Her ethnic group.

After my head stopped ringing — her response was instantaneous and surprisingly muscular for someone that slender — my chances of her going out with me, never very high, dropped to numbers smaller than mathematicians had yet invented.

It was a painful lesson. Literally.

The phrase “politically correct” is overused these days but what it means, exactly, isn’t clear. It might mean “a ridiculous attempt to euphemize plain facts,” but it often seems more like “I want to tell Polish jokes in public without peeving the Poles.”

Faced with a phrase that means little, the best course of action is to not use it. So I don’t.

Which brings us to the question, raised last week, of how to handle an employee who belongs to the Jehovah’s Witnesses — and who, as a consequence, doesn’t celebrate birthdays — if your staff habitually celebrates all birthdays as they come around on the calendar.

Unsurprisingly, I received a flood of responses (many are chronicled as comments on Advice Line if you’re interested in the details). Many were from Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of whom expressed their appreciation for my raising the issue. When invited, it appears, the average Jehovah’s Witness politely explains the situation, wishes everyone well, and offers to answer the phone during the party.

I also heard from a few folks asserting that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult, should be treated as such, and that perhaps as a manager you should encourage them to seek your help to escape.

Before continuing: Neither KJR nor Advice Line are forums for discussing what is a religion, what is a cult, or for that matter what the difference is between the two. If the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult, that hasn’t been obvious to me in my dealings with any — that’s as far as I’ll take the subject.

To continue: Your role as a manager isn’t to discuss what is a religion, what is a cult, the difference between the two, or your opinion that one or some religions are superior to others. As a manager (at least in a publicly held corporation), you are secular. Here’s why:

Publicly held U.S. corporations are, by definition, secular entities. Their ownership is diffuse and largely anonymous; any religious affiliation of the owners is unknown and almost certainly not uniform. Beyond that, the laws currently governing the chartering of a publicly held corporation limit them to a single goal: Increasing value to shareholders.

When you act as a manager for a publicly held corporation, you are its agent. That confers an obligation to be secular when in that role. Any other course of action goes beyond your scope of authority and responsibility. Worse, it creates an environment in which some religious groups have an expectation of preferred treatment and others have the expectation of the opposite.

It’s a very clear principle, which collides with a very messy reality: The people who work for you are diverse and human. In order to work together effectively they can’t be automata — they have to get to know and trust each other as human beings. Inevitably that means finding out who was born when, where their ancestors came from, family history, how many children they have, whether they like dogs or cats, and all the other bits of information that you, in your official capacity as manager, aren’t supposed to know or take into account as you assess who is performing how well and what to do about it.

Don’t let the impossible balance you’re supposed to maintain paralyze you. You can get through most of these challenges by following one of the simplest and most basic rules of courtesy: Be interested in them but don’t ask them to be interested in you. That Schwartz is Moslem, Achmed is Presbyterian, Andersen is Jewish and Chelsea used to be Sheldon isn’t your business. If they tell you anyway, because you’re a good listener and they like to schmooze, it will help you facilitate the sometimes-awkward group dynamics that can result when even the best-intentioned people make assumptions about each other.

And the group dynamics definitely are your business.

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