“Office Politics” is a common expression that is used and generally has negative connotations. 
    Jennifer didn't get promoted because Frank is the boss’s favorite. 
    Sally the new boss ignored Jennifer's idea in favor of John’s because Sally had worked with John previously. 
    Jennifer stayed loyal to her boss but when she quit no one realized Jennifer knew how to manage the team and should have been picked as the new boss. 
Do these situations sound like ones that you might put in the ‘Politics at Work’ category?

How about we re-frame the term ‘Politics at Work’ and use ‘Using your Organizational Savvy to Achieve your Goals’?

Sometimes I wish there were no grey areas. I wish there were perfectly aligned cascading objectives from management, the competitors of a product or service were static, and everyone was committed to the organization for the duration of a release cycle, and everyone delivered everything they said they would on time. Truth is most things are influx and we have to learn to adapt as they change.

Building your organizational savvy muscle will help provide some protection from churn. You may read this article and think there’s nothing related to being a woman in it, as this is advice for everyone. That’s true, except the three areas it hits on are: Networking, Self-promotion, and Negotiation – all areas women often find challenging. This article should help you realize the necessity of developing those areas in order to be better at using Organizational Savvy and not be afraid of politics at work. 

Here are three steps to help increase your Organizational Savvy

1. Keep tabs on the environment around you
Think of information as two types: formal information and informal information. Together they help you understand the organizational environment. Formal information is information provided on intranet sites about missions, visions, objectives, it is information provided in address books giving insights on relationships and organizational structure. It is the formal email organizational announcements sent division and company-wide. It can also be found in company press releases.

Then there’s informal information – the challenge of informal information is it’s not a fact, but access to informal information can help in several ways. It can help forecast possible directions of where a division or company may head, it can provide background information on a new leader and preference of work style, it can keep increase your awareness of possible partners or allies for the direction you want to move in.

Where do you find informal information? Try your network – and it isn't just talking with people who are already in your network but adding to your network – your network is dynamic and needs to be adapting as the environment changes.

So first keep in touch with people who seem relevant to the environment that may be able to provide additional perspectives. Second – build your network based on organizational change – if new players are moving into the organization be prepared to talk to them and learn about them, their objectives, how they work. Too often if we were previously in a comfortable situation making these new connections feels like hard-work or even disloyal but it’s all about having information about the environment you are working in. 

2. Make it easy for your campaign message to circulate without you
Have you heard of lobbyists? Again, often a term that feels negative when considered in politics but a lobbyist is someone who tries to influence or persuade a member of government to enact legislation that would benefit their group. The same process is used unofficially in the workplace – in order to influence change or support of an idea you need to have a message that is easy to communicate and understand, and can be appropriately modified to suit the audience you’re appealing to. These types of conversations may be formal and deliberate (presentation of an idea) but many are informal where an idea is raised casually and tested to measure its appeal. Feedback can help with refining the idea before moving to the formal presentation, or can be used for better informal conversations to help build support for the idea.

3. Be open to negotiating win-win situations
Naturally we focus on what we want and strategize how to get it which usually includes a logical argument of the value of what we’re asking for. However, many workshops and seminars on successful negotiations emphasize the need to understand what matters to the person you’re trying to negotiate with. The more you understand what matters to your partner and what outcome they are trying to achieve the better your position to negotiate is. The questions you need to be considering are, ‘To achieve my goal what can I offer my partner to help him/her get closer to his/her goal?’ and ‘What would I consider a reasonable outcome if a compromise is required?’
 
Now let’s consider the situations mentioned in the opening of this article. These are hypothetical but based on true situations. Some may say the outcomes were because of politics at work, but I want you to realize that we do have more ability to influence outcomes if we really step up our organizational savvy and learn to make the insights from our savvy actionable.

Jennifer didn't get promoted because Frank is the boss’s favorite.
Frank may have been aware of the organization environment and a change that was going to happen; perhaps he wasn't afraid to tell his boss and some influential people nearby an idea he had to help the team, perhaps he was able to negotiate the position by knowing what mattered to his boss.

Sally the new boss ignored Jennifer’s idea in favor of John’s because Sally had worked with John previously.
Sally was busy settling into her new job, she already knew John’s reputation and what he was thinking. Jennifer waited to be asked for a meeting with her new boss, and presented a formal plan that didn't map to how Sally was thinking about the organization generally operated.

Jennifer stayed loyal to her boss but when she quit no one realized Jennifer knew how to manage the team and should have been picked as the new boss.
Jennifer didn't renew her network as change was heading her way. She may have failed to tell the new management team that she wanted to become the boss, expecting them to come to her. No one told them she had the skills for the job. She didn't ask for the position or an opportunity for her to demonstrate her skills.

For each of these situations I have seen Jennifer miss out on opportunities because she didn't proactively get involved in responding to the changing environment, hoping someone would notice her skills or ask her opinion, or give her what she was asking for because it made sense to her. But I have also seen Jennifer take action and get results - it took courage to step up but she was able to get what she wanted through engaging. 

 


 

If I had to rate the various skills I have what would I consider the most important excluding domain knowledge. I think one skill that would come close to the top is being character acting. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I have sat in my office awaiting a tough meeting thinking how would Meryl do this. Now truth is I don’t know if it ever made a difference in how others saw me, but it did make a difference in how I entered various work situations, from giving presentations to interviewing to dealing with difficult negotiations. So yes, Meryl is my go to role-model for when I’m figuring out how to get through a tough situation. I thought it was my little game to help me prepare and get through the situations but I’m now delighted to know there may be a scientific justification to my behavior. According to Amy Cuddy, spending 2 minutes holding a power pose can make a big difference on an outcome such as a job interview as it increases the right type of hormones for the situation (testosterone) and decreases the wrong one (cortisol). She had this hunch when she experienced public speaking fear. She has since completed research on the topic and the results actually support the ‘fake it till you make it’ saying. She is the lady who now has research rights to ‘ it’s not fake it till you make it, it’s fake it till you become it’. 

So today when you’re not busy I suggest you play the game below and aim for a 'She Can Oscar' nomination. 

Often we get so busy with the details of doing a fantastic job on a particular work assignment we forget to step back and see the business landscape. It’s so much easier to work diligently on what we’ve been assigned where we feel comfortable with structure, boundaries, known deliverables, and agreed upon approach to get the work done. However leaders and influential decision-makers around us are constantly putting together the business picture of today and the future. They operate in both places simultaneously. To take your area of expertise (you do have one, that’s why you were hired) and blend it with a business understanding can increase your value significantly but only when you share your views. 

I think we should all understand something about the future strategy of the business we’re in but I’ve also had the experience of wanting to figure it out but overwhelmed by how much I could know, and not ever knowing enough to be able to talk knowledgably on the topic. What I realized as I worked in different businesses however was I didn’t need to know everything on the business strategy but enough to use a test and learn approach to trying out  what I did know. You can increase your value to the company by taking a few steps to provide your perspective on the landscape – don’t consider it a project but just part of daily habits. 

You don’t need an MBA to have a position on the business strategy nor the competition, but what you do need is to have is curiosity to stay informed, and courage to test your positions. The second step is vital
because without testing your positions with others no action can be taken with them and no one will ever give you credit for knowing things.  

Here are a few steps that you should consider in shaping the landscape.

Do you have the confidence to assert a position on the business strategy with key influential in your world? 
Women will sit on their business opinions because they lack confidence in having all the information before creating a formal perspective. Business moves fast. You should always have a position on where the business is going even if you’re the new kid on the project. If you’re part of a big company don’t just stay focused on your area make sure you you’re glancing at related areas – big companies have lots of information sources, pick one or two and make sure you glance at them daily. External web sources are also useful and often provide summaries weekly on companies. 

If you learn something that is interesting but you don’t know what it means then ask others for their thoughts on it, or if they know more. Once you start piecing together a perspective, you don’t have to make a big deal positioning your ideas with others but you should practice verbalizing them with people you work with. Something like: 
“From what I’ve heard so far sounds like if we keep doing X, Y could happen because of A and B. What do you think of that?”
 Listen to what others say in response. You can adjust your position as you go. That’s what everyone is doing – test, learn, adjust, test, learn adjust. As you get more confident in the position you can try it with more
influential people.  

Are you confident enough to assert a position on the direction of the competition? 
It’s quite amazing how often we don’t take the time to understand the competition to our business because it’s someone else’s job. It’s pretty easy these days to pay attention get intelligence on the competition by using alerts or news updates. Take the time to be interested in the companies. Be someone who can inform your colleagues on what competitors are up to, and again try your understanding of the competition with your co-workers or boss. 

Do you have confidence for a spontaneous voice?
I bet in meetings today you may be sitting on your point of view as you want just a bit more information to solidify your view, or you know someone will say what you’re thinking soon. Sound familiar? Even without the preparation you should blurt it out – as you have as much insight and knowledge as majority of people in the room may be more (just guessing, but I think it’s true). However if you’ve been practicing speaking about a business strategy and understand the competition you’re going to be in a better position to go ahead and blurt out your idea. 

It takes confidence and courage to make statements about business strategy, and the way to build those is to practice, and practice and practice. You can do it, and believe me, to do it well you don’t need an MBA.

Boy, are we in trouble with diversity and hearing different perspectives. While we look at the statistics of female representation in meetings in different locations and decision making venues we know things look fairly gloomy, but once you dig into the behaviors driven by the statistics the negative impact of lack of diversity multiples. 

In part 1 of this piece I talked about the basic challenges that can lead to women holding back or being overlooked in meetings and discussions. However it’s not simply a matter of women conquering their fears to overcome participation, once they do this you’ll have more voices in the room, but if you think you’re about to benefit from diverse thinking, especially a female point of view, then think again as that doesn’t necessarily follow once they have their voice. Let me explain.  

Women really want to be an equal player in the workplace. They value equality and believe that hard work should be rewarded and recognized. If only we can be perceived as ‘one of the guys’ we can be heard and achieve equality right? Wrong. Achieving ‘one of the guys’ status does not provide any benefits related to gaining insight from feminine intuition. How so? 

What percentage of a group needs to be female before a female perspective is raised on issues? Higher than 40%. While businesses are trying to get excited about increases in the number of females in the workplace they are still falling woefully short of the critical number to have a women’s perspective heard. 

In a research study, they knew from a survey that on a certain topic women held different views than men, so in a follow up study they used a meeting forum to experiment with how many women in the room were required before the point of view expressed in the survey results became a view expressed in the 
meeting. It wasn’t until 60-80% women were in the meeting that the view showed up. 

I came across that research shortly after I had been interviewing people in software development. My motivation was to examine how unintended gender bias shows up in the decision making process of software development. I interviewed men and women from different disciplines and at different  levels of seniority on the topic. The only job discipline group that didn’t admit to using personal opinions at work was research type disciplines, where it was felt that representation of unbiased data was what provided them with credibility to do their job well. However most other disciplines interviewed did say that they did bring personal opinion to discussions and decision making. They would bring personal needs to bump up feature requests, decide on what to build based on what engineering challenges they wanted to take on or skill they wanted to develop. There was one type of opinion that women said they never or extremely rarely used - it was an opinion that would identify them as a woman. The women interviewed said they are very cautious in ever raising a point of view that explicitly supports a female perspective. The justifications for this behavior included not wanting to seem different from the others and being seen as a woman, why put forward an idea when it’s not going to have critical mass support for making it on the feature list (no one wants to suggest ideas that are going to be rejected), and also one woman realized it never dawned on her to have a woman’s point of view as she’s worked so long as a ‘guy’ that she only tackled problems with critical evaluation perspective and not from her personal female experience. While I don’t think in real world situations it will take 60-80% female representation before a female perspective is heard, let’s just say it is far above the 20% that is present in many business today. 

Women account for 51% of the population and are often touted as influencing 80% of the purchasing decisions. I think it’s worth making sure a female insight isn’t accidentally overlooked or ignored. 

Let’s start with some advice to increase the amount of heard female participation in the meetings:

1. Ask questions of individuals rather than leaving it for those with the loudest voices to hold air time. And don’t just launch in the first time you try it with, “Rebecca, what do you think?”, make sure there’s a warm up question or two so Rebecca can have a mental prep time. 

2. Watch for signals that Rebecca wants to contribute she will be giving cues of wanting to participate but the floor will not provide the opening. 

3. Ask questions to insure you’re getting a well-rounded perspective on your customer from a business perspective. “Although we know product X is for men and women, is there anything in particular we need to consider for women, given this team is mostly men designing it?”

4. Let everyone know that even though decisions are being made in the room if people have ideas to share after the meeting send mail or catch ‘me’ later. Better to get the feedback a little late than not at all. In the next  meeting thank people individually for their follow ups so they feel recognized.

5. And women who are more senior in the room – it’s your job too to enable other women as well. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with their contribution, but women can also not enable other women in the same way as men operate. 

I wish I could wave a magic wand and make every woman’s voice be heard at equal volume to a man’s and that the ears listening (both male and female) heard the content with a balanced perspective and without applying a gender filter. Unfortunately I can’t do this. What I can do though is provide insight on why women experience challenges in being heard, and what we can do to increase the amplitude of our voices. I can also provide insight to the listeners on the filters they unknownly apply and the impact it can have on their businesses.

First – what’s up with us not having the courage to speak up and tell people our point of view? We don’t imagine the challenges we experience, they exist, but rather than give into to the challenges we have control over how we put our best-self forward and use our personal power and presence to move the dial in being heard more often. 
 
Imagine if at the end of the day you knew you had always contributed what you thought valuable to the business and it was heard? I wonder what percent we hold back on non-communication each day – 10%? perhaps more. It’s too much whatever it is.  
 
Do these fears resonate with you when you're in a mostly male group at work? 
- Fear of being wrong or making a mistake         
- Fear of not quite having all the facts for an opinion 
- Fear of idea being rejected
- Fear of being ignored when speaking
- Fear of thinking you’re only one who doesn’t understand something
- Fear of not following polite rules of conversational engagement and waiting for opportunity to contribute 
- Fear of being identified as a woman and not ‘one of the guys’

We so want to be certain before we speak that we can be preparing our statements in our heads before saying them – but look at the check list of fears that we have to conquer before our input is received by the group.
 
So what can we do? There is not a single answer to get us heard but there are lots of strategies we can use, especially once we start to identify what is holding us back. Here are some of my thoughts on strategies to overcome some of the fears.

First we need to get use to the idea that our idea may be rejected, hijacked by someone else, or we may be ignored, this obviously isn’t the outcome we want but simply starting to voice our perspective is a starting point. Those things can’t happened to us until we voiced something in the meeting.
Action: Don’t leave any meetings this week with your inside voice wishing it had been heard. Blurt it out and be proud of saying it out loud even if you’re ignored, idea rejected or hijacked – we’ve all got to start somewhere.

If the idea is rejected for some reason, we mustn't take it personally, its business. Lots of ideas are put forth and shot down until something resonates in the meeting. I’m not going to say that the ideas accepted are the right ones from a diversity inclusion perspective but the notion of ideas generated and lots shot-down is a skill we need to learn to experience and is not is not a response to us personally but a business response. 
Action: Experience idea rejection as part of the business process and not personal rejection. In fact
raise the number of ideas you get rejected – it’s got to go up to get more ideas to land successfully.
 
Sometimes we get hung up on having all the facts before offering an opinion so we need to develop some phrases ahead of time that can help us couch our opinion so we're comfortable. Seriously, people in meetings are always full of making ‘factual’ statements on little information, one hopes when the rubber hits the road on the idea that due diligence is done but in many meetings getting ideas out for the debate is the critical thing to do. 
Action: Consider offering statements like, “I have a hunch x and y will lead to outcome x”or “My gut says x and y will lead to outcome x” or “From what I know at this point, I think x and y will lead to x”

It happens all the time, a woman speaks in a meeting, there is a moment of silence, and then the conversation moves on like she never existed. We need to be prepared for it– I’ve it happens more commonly when I’m offering an idea that is from a different perspective (not necessarily a gender based view) or alternative solution that the room hasn’t yet considered. What I’ve found works is in that split second when I think, ‘Ah crap, I’m getting the silent ignore’ is to quickly add “What do you think of the idea – Josh?” that then put’s at least one person on the spot to answer and acknowledge the contribution. 
Action: Be prepared for the silence after you speak, and put someone on the spot to respond to what you’ve said.

Now the challenge is how to find the opening to speak in a rapid debate? This can be a nightmare – like being a foreigner from a rural area trying to figure out how to hail a cab in New York City. It can seem like there is an  opportunity coming as you listen to the conversation but just as it slows to when it’s appropriate to interject someone swoops in and takes the conversation over and marches it forward not realizing it was your turn. To use another analogy, I have found even in fast two people conversations at work that it feels like I’m running a relay where the first person runs alongside the second runner so they have speed before the baton is handed over. Exhausting yes, but the other first speaker will hand over the conversation if they see that you’re up to speed and are ready to contribute. Now once you have the baton you have some control of the pace. 
People don’t like to be seen as being rude, so while offering up an idea in a cacophony of noise hoping someone will respond, I have found attaching someone’s name to my request my offering is harder to ignore. 
Action: Use names to get a direct response and make someone accountable for responding to you.“John, I have an idea… John?” 

I have been many meetings where something is being discussed I don’t understand and waited until the meeting is over before finding out what it was. However later in my career I learned it was okay to ask for clarity on terms, definitions, etc. I like to tell myself I'm in the room because of the expertise I have, not because I know the same as everyone else. And I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in when I've asked for someone to clarify what they mean by a particular term, to find out that either others didn't understand or others had been using a different definition of the word.
Action: “Can you clarify what you mean by X?” or “I’m not familiar with X, are there others here who
aren’t familiar? Or I can follow up later on it” 
 
Okay – so now you have some action items for the week. Please speak up and share your ideas, thoughts and insights - without speaking out in meetings you are not going to be heard – it’s vital for you and your career and it’s vital for the business you work for.

What I haven’t covered today is the Fear of being seen as a woman, as something that holds us back in speaking up with a female  perspective. Businesses need to increase their awareness of realizing this is happening because leveraging diversity of opinion is how products and services will develop their competitive advantage in the future. Watch for a future post specifically on how to encourage businesses to listen to valuable diverse opinions of women, and how we need to increase our confidence of the value this perspective offers to the business and to fulfilling what we know we can contribute.