Bad news: politics is unavoidable in the workspace. I’m sorry to break it to you, Virginia: even if you see yourself as non-political, there’s no avoiding it, because politics consumes everything. And Santa Claus doesn’t exist!
This reminds me of myself when I was 18: I hated fashion and people who judge others by fashion. It has taken me far too many decades to realize and admit an ugly truth: choosing to not care about clothing and thus wear whatever clean t-shirt and jeans happen to be lying around—now that is a fashion choice. (The deeper lesson there is: everything is symbolic and perhaps even unconscious, and choosing to not play the game is just one of the options in the game, an option designed to target those who think they are too cool for the school of the game.)
So, it’s useful to break the political relationships in the office into four categories, because each one should be managed in very different ways. (Of course, it’s even better to analyze people on an individual basis so you don’t need patterns—and in fact, I have a tool for that I’d like to recommend to you!)
One of my preferred ways to think about this is to divide everyone in the office into four categories, based on a 2×2 matrix, where the X-axis is how important they are to the mission or perhaps locally or maybe even globally; and the Y-axis is how well you know them. We call this The Familiarity-Importance Matrix.
Let’s go through the four quadrants.
Coming up first, in the top-right quadrant, are those who are both high-importance and whom you know well. Think of your old friend who hires you to work for his fast-growing startup because he trusts you more than anyone else, or the older colleague who is the whisperer into the company, who has worked there for years and knows where the bodies are buried, and over the years working together, you’ve built up a good relationship. We call this quadrant the “VIP Mentor.”
How do you best manage them? You might want to try direct bluntness. That’s appreciated by those who are important AND by anyone who is truly close to you. Indeed, this is the best situation in many ways because you are both able to have the important and hard conversations due to the relationship, and the VIPs tend to be more receptive to hearing the ugly truth than the privates on the front-line. Use your power wisely!
In the second quadrant, we have those whom you know very well, but they’re not that important. The secretary you are friends with, or the guy in the other division who is always funny. In our joking style, we enjoy calling this person the “Meeting Over-sharer” because we’ve found, far too often, those who aren’t that important but feel very comfortable with those around them tend to reveal too much, too often. They just talk a lot.
Hot tip: if you want people to think you’re important, you might want to just shut up and listen. Doubly hot tip: if you don’t want people to realize how important you are, you might want to talk a lot, far too much, so everyone thinks you’re of low importance—and thus they don’t see you coming. Cough, cough.
With those in this quadrant, my go-to strategy is to build bridges with them because they are often the keys to team support and building internal alliances so you can get broad support for your internal initiatives.
The third quadrant is those who are both low-importance, and you don’t know. Those are, basically by definition, the people you ignore, and it’s not worth your energy to try to engage them. If you are to find new people and engage them, might as well make it the important ones!
Unless, of course, you either have too much time on your hands, or you really—REALLY—are committed to building broad-based support among the privates for your vision or your team. That’s when you become a politician, show up, shake hands, wave.
Or they’re just the person in the cubicle where you two politely ignore each other.
The fourth and final quadrant is people who are both high-importance, and you don’t know them well. That’s the mysterious big, important CEO you always hear about, and every once in a while you hear on a Zoom with hundreds of people, or you see in a hallway.
What to do with them? Be careful. Control your words and your emotions most carefully around them. They’re the ones likely to misinterpret what you say or do, if only because you don’t know them well, and you—like all humans—come off to others wildly different than you think you do.
A fun game to play—that could even play to your advantage—is to map people you know into the different positions on the grid, and then observe how your natural behavior around them changes as you move around the quadrants.
And of course, you will deny that’s true, and maybe you really don’t change your behavior based on where they are on the grid, and you do treat everyone like individuals, looking deep into their soul and basing your decisions around them on that. And when you tell me that that’s how you play it, dear reader, I only have one response to you: “Oh, I was wrong: there is indeed a Santa Claus!”
