All Posts in Office Politics

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

One of my dopier career moves was showing up the marketing director at a former employer. I thought I was demonstrating how useful I could be in her organization. She saw me as a potential rival. Blam! I got backstabbed up the yin yang, and if you’ve ever had your yin yang backstabbed you know it hurts like the Dickens.

If only I’d had a copy of Wess Roberts’ new book It Takes More Than a Carrot and a Stick I’d have known better. Right there on page 88, talking about Colleague Slayers it says, “They normally attack only those colleagues who have offended them or present a competitive threat to them in the battle for power and prestige that occurs in virtually all workplaces.”

Carrot and Stick isn’t just about how to handle backstabbers. It’s a veritable field guide to annoying co-workers, only more useful.

The average field guide helps you identify critters, but doesn’t generally give you advice about what to do once you’ve found them. Look up seagulls in your average bird book, for example, and it won’t tell you to move immediately if you find yourself directly below a hovering flock.

Carrot and Stick, on the other hand, tells you exactly how to handle each of the 15 major types of office irritant. Whether your problem is an Imperious Jerk, Empty Suit, Android or Perpetual Victim, Roberts helps you cope. He gives you specific advice tailored to your work relationship, so you know what to do whether you report to the Slougher (yet another species) he reports to you, or you’re peers.

This book isn’t for everyone. I know a guy, for example, who makes his living managing his own investments. He’s actually good enough to earn a satisfactory income this way. He operates out of his home, trades on-line, and has no boss, no co-workers, no staff … not even suppliers in any meaningful sense. He wouldn’t get much benefit out of this book. Neither would your average hermit, I suppose.

If you, like my investor friend, work alone in splendid isolation, don’t bother with It Takes More Than a Carrot and a Stick. Instead, buy Bob Lewis’s IS Survival Guide (hey, I need the royalties just as much as Wess does, and book-plugging does begin at home!).

But if you work in an office and have several nominees for the cubicle farthest from you, Carrot and Stick is just the ticket.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Change is good, we’re told. Resistance to change is natural, but we all need to get past it we’re told.

We’re told a lot of dopey things, aren’t we? It’s worth remembering that in World War II we considered the various European resistance fighters to be the good guys and the agents of change to be the bad guys. Sometimes resistance to change is a good thing. It all depends on the nature of the change, and what side you’re on.

We’re continuing our discussion of how to facilitate organizational change. So far we’ve talked about the importance of communication, involvement, and making sure that to the extent possible the change is personally beneficial to those it affects — concepts that aren’t especially profound, but are ignored with astonishing frequency.

To continue the discussion, here are two more not-very-profound ideas that will help you ensure successful change: Don’t skimp on training, and define suitable measures of success.

Some tips on training:

  • Include a trainer on your design team. This helps you design for trainability, and also makes sure the trainer’s understanding of the subject is more than superficial.
  • Train just-in-time. Skills acquired in the classroom have an amazingly short half-life if they aren’t put to practical use.
  • When you put implement any change, turn the entire project team into floorwalkers, so that when an employee has a question it gets answered immediately.

Some tips on measures:

  • Don’t start with measures. Also don’t start with the desire to track the performance of individual employees. Instead start with business goals. Then express each key goal in the form of an equation. This keeps your focus on improving business functions, which is where it should be.
  • Fine-tune each measure so employees can’t manipulate it. The world of business is filled with measures that can improve while the business actually deteriorates.
  • Automate the data collection needed for each measure. For the most part, employees are too busy doing the work to spend time logging data as a separate activity, and managers are better off spending their time tracking results than computing them.

One last thought: Don’t waste your time and money on a “change readiness assessment.” Some change management gurus like to start an engagement by discovering the level of change resistance in an organization. So here’s my question: What difference does it make? What are you going to do, cancel the change if change resistance is high?

I didn’t think so.

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