I have talked many times about management and why I believe a manager cannot be truly effective if s/he does not understand the details of what they are managing, but there is another part of management that I think is equally important and rarely discussed honestly: “Politics“.
I grew up in a culture where keeping your seat was almost more important than doing the job itself, and I am not exaggerating when I say that this applied to everyone, from the CEO all the way down to the person responsible for cleaning the office. Your position, your desk, your chair, your title, your paycheck, all of it had to be protected, and there was an expression for this mentality that basically meant exactly that: keep your desk!
The interesting thing is that when keeping your desk becomes the primary objective, everything else becomes secondary.
“If your primary objective is protecting your position rather than delivering the best possible outcome, you will eventually turn your area of responsibility into a political territory.”
Your responsibilities become secondary. The quality of your work becomes secondary. The success of the company becomes secondary. Even your team can become secondary, because the real objective is no longer doing the job well, but making sure nothing happens that could put your position at risk. This is where politics becomes part of management…
You can have a manager responsible for 10k people and you can have another manager responsible for 10 people, or even somebody managing a very small area of a company, and the size of the organization does not really matter if the management philosophy is the same. If your primary objective is protecting your position rather than delivering the best possible outcome, you will eventually turn your area of responsibility into a political territory where every conversation, every decision, every project, and even every technical discussion becomes part of a game of protecting power.
You can talk the talk without actually walking the walk.
You can look extremely proactive in meetings, send impressive emails, use all the right management words, take credit when things go well, find somebody else to blame when things go wrong, and make yourself look extremely busy while producing very little that actually benefits the organization...
That is not management, that is politics.
When the Manager Becomes the Center of the Business
A good manager should make the organization stronger even when nobody is looking at the manager, but a political manager does the opposite.
The organization slowly becomes dependent on the manager’s personal relationships, personal decisions, personal approval, and personal control, because the manager has built a small kingdom instead of building a capable organization.
“The chair is not the job…The title is not the job…The office is not the job…The paycheck is not the job…”
Think about a restaurant where the owner insists that every single decision must go through him, including how much salt goes into the soup, because he believes that if people can operate without him, they might eventually realize that they do not need him.
That restaurant is not becoming stronger; it is simply becoming dependent.
The same thing happens inside companies. A manager who keeps information, controls access, takes ownership of every decision, and makes people feel that their careers depend on staying on the manager’s good side may look powerful, but that is not organizational strength. It is actually a weakness that has been disguised as authority.
And this becomes even more dangerous when the manager is responsible for technology.
Technology Does Not Like Politics
Technology is one of the worst places to introduce this type of management because technology is extremely sensitive to bad decisions, and unlike many political conversations inside an organization, technology eventually has to produce something that either works or does not work.
You can manipulate a meeting…You can manipulate a presentation…You can manipulate a performance review…You can even manipulate some business metrics…
But eventually the system has to run…The application has to work…The network has to carry the traffic…The security controls have to stop the attack…The project has to deliver what it was supposed to deliver…
That is why mixing politics into technology is so destructive. The technical reality does not change because somebody has a stronger political position inside the company.
A server does not care who your boss is…A network packet does not care who approved the project…A security vulnerability does not disappear because somebody does not want it mentioned in a meeting 🙂
Yet I have seen technology initiatives become completely disconnected from their original purpose because somebody’s personal interests became more important than the business objective.
At that point, the project starts serving the manager instead of serving the company.
The ROI Disappears
This is also where return on investment (ROI) gets destroyed.
A technology initiative normally starts with a relatively simple question: what problem are we trying to solve, and what value will this investment create?
But once politics enters the process, the questions change:
Who gets credit? Who controls the budget? Who owns the project? Who reports to whom? Who will look good when it succeeds? Who can use this project to justify another position? Who will get blamed if it fails?
Suddenly the original business problem is somewhere in the background while a completely different game is being played in the foreground.
The company may still spend the money. The project may still be delivered. There may even be a nice presentation at the end showing that everything was a success. But the real business value may have disappeared somewhere in the middle.
It is like building a bridge and then spending most of the construction budget deciding which executive should have his name on the bridge. Eventually you may have a beautiful bridge, but you have forgotten why you were building it in the first place.
Not Every Political Manager Knows He Is Political
There is another problem here that I think is important: Well, not every person who manages this way is consciously trying to manipulate people. Some people have simply learned that this is how management works.
They see their manager doing it. They see other managers doing it. They learn that protecting yourself is more important than taking responsibility, that bad news should be hidden until somebody else discovers it, that disagreement is dangerous, and that being politically safe is more important than being technically correct.
Eventually it becomes normal. That is probably one of the most dangerous parts of organizational politics. You may not even realize that you are doing it.
You may genuinely believe that you are protecting your team, protecting your department, or protecting the company, when in reality you are protecting your position.
There is a very simple test for this:
Ask yourself what would happen if tomorrow you lost your title, but your team and your responsibilities remained exactly the same:
Would you still make the same decisions? Would you still fight for the same projects? Would you still tell your executives the same uncomfortable truths Would you still recommend the same technology? Would you still reject the same bad ideas?
If the answer is no, then perhaps you are managing your position rather than managing the business.
A Manager Is Not the Owner of the Chair
I think a manager needs to understand one simple thing: the chair is not the job…The title is not the job…The office is not the job…The paycheck is not the job…
Those are consequences of having a responsibility, not the purpose of having one.
Your job is to produce an outcome, yes your job is to make your organization better. Your job is to allocate resources intelligently, understand what your people are doing, make decisions based on facts, take responsibility when something goes wrong, and give credit to the people who actually produced the result.
And sometimes, your job is to make a decision that makes you personally look bad because it is the right decision for the company.
That is management!
If you need to manipulate people, hide information, create internal enemies, control every conversation, or play political games just to keep your chair, then perhaps you are not managing the organization anymore.
Perhaps you are managing your own survival and there is a big difference between the two. A company does not need another person protecting a desk. It needs a manager who is willing to get out of the chair, look at the real problem, understand the details, and do the job.