Speaker 1: 0:21

Hello and welcome again to another episode of the Search for Clarity, and this one is a super interesting and super exciting one. We are focusing on the power playbook winning in organizational politics for Professor David Clutterbuck, a great guest to have with us today. So David is a distinguished figure in the field of management, mentoring and coaching. His expertise extends to team coaching, talent management and board performance. He has mentored and does mentoring around the globe today. He holds a PhD from King's College London and is a visiting professor to several universities.

Speaker 1: 1:01

I thought he'd authored 70 books, but he's just corrected me it's up to 80 books he's going to have written. I don't know where you find the time, david, never mind all the articles and the journals that you write as well On various cutting edge management topics. He's the co-founder of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, a co-founder of a charity to support young people with learning or social disabilities using mentoring style approaches. Current interests at the moment include AI and coaching, which I think is a fascinating topic today, and coaching teams of teams. What else does your organization do today, david?

Speaker 2: 1:37

We're launching. We're doing the last experiments on a whole program to create 5 million school-age coaches and mentors over a period.

Speaker 1: 1:47

Wow, that is ambitious. Ambitious, that is really impressive. So, david, um, this whole discussion was sparked by a really great book that I picked up around uh, it's called coaching, mentoring and organizational politics, which you wrote along with um tim bright, um lysa lewis and uh, radhika Kusil, if I pronounced them correctly, and you really did a lot of research and explored this concept of organizational politics and what it means and the applications. It's a highly diverse topic. There's culture involved, there's psychological safety, et safety, etc. How would you define organizational politics?

Speaker 2: 2:27

well politics is based is, at root, the art of achieving things through influence. It's as simple as that, um, but it's the. What makes up politics, positive or negative, is the intent of the individuals exercising the influence. What are you trying to influence for? And if we look back at research around you, what do people really value in a really good leader? It's the fact that they not that they were trying to achieve a personal agenda, but they were trying to achieve something, a wider agenda on behalf of, of, of, of of society or other people, or but, but it's beyond themselves. And when organization politics gets um, gets negative, it's because people are doing things. It's their, it's it's they're doing things for themselves, and um and um they, and so it's it's.

Speaker 2: 3:20

It's a big distinction between this basically psychopathic tendencies. At one end of the spectrum, it's narcissistic, yes, yes, and a lot of the problems with politics with a big P is that people who tend to gravitate into politics are very often the wrong kind of leader, the kind of person that is about for their own narcissistic ends, that wants to manipulate people and make things happen rather than really focusing on achieving great things. Now, of course, there are lots of exceptions to that. But when you think that the majority of American presidents have scored high on the psychopath scale and I'm not going to comment at all on the current situation on the current situation it tells you that organisational politics and the fear that runs and the impact of them that it has on people's lives and their mental wellness is enormous. And so when we looked at writing the book, we were focusing particularly on coaches working with people who are in the midst of organizational politics.

Speaker 1: 4:51

And one thing I found fascinating was you know, even if you're not a coach, it's a highly valuable and informative read. It's very much anyone can pick it up and start applying it. It's not something I would necessarily say, but I mean obviously highly beneficial for a coach, but I think any leader or manager who's willing to become more proficient at dealing with it. There's just a lot of really good content, practical content for them in there as well.

Speaker 2: 5:14

The big challenge is in that kind of environment, how do you maintain authenticity for yourself? Do you actually start to play the game like everybody else and manipulate and and so forth, um, or do you say I don't do that kind of thing? If you do, if you take the latter um approach, you're going to get slaughtered. I mean, there's a book called if you don't do politics, politics will do you, and but written by a lovely lady in south Africa, and it's absolutely true. You cannot afford to ignore politics. On the other hand, if every decision that you make is a political decision, you've lost your humanity. You cannot be yourself. You're constantly putting a mask on and an act on and, worse still, you're forcing other people to do the same. Right, go on.

Speaker 2: 6:13

Well I was going to say, one quote that I really liked from the publication was that politics is like a knife it can be used to chop vegetables that can feed an entire village, or it could be used to stab someone in the back, which I thought was a really clear contrast between applications of uh of what politics actually means to people in an organization well, there's a lovely old quote that said that the um, the politicians at westminster were so confused they were all running around stabbing each other in the front, and I think it's a challenge for us to be able to steer through things and really exert influence in a way that allows you to be yourself and allows you to think of other people and not lose your humanity.

Speaker 2: 7:06

And not lose your humanity, and I think one of the things that's one of the big issues is that there have been a couple of studies, research studies that look at the way that people develop in the way they think about problems and dilemmas that get put in front of them. The higher up the corporate tree they get, or the power tree that people get, the more that people lose their touch with their humanity.

Speaker 1: 7:34

I saw that research as well. Yes and yeah, I've read that.

Speaker 2: 7:39

And that's pretty dangerous because and part of it's related to you. What do you see all around you If all you see is figures?

Speaker 2: 7:46

Figures yeah, I remember that people like a bunch of figures. You know, essentially, people that uh, that, uh, that you know that, die because they're stuck in ambulances outside the hospital. You know it's just a number, um, but you're there with that person when you see this happening. That's not a a number, that's a human being, absolutely, yeah, a constant reconnection with what it means to be a truly authentic human being in the midst of complexity. And what makes it more difficult is, the more complex things become, the more difficult it is to counter negative politics. And what we see in politics with a big P at the moment and it's being reflected in corporate or organizational politics to a significant extent is that when you've got complex situations which are simplistic, answers don't work, you tend to get people producing simplistic answers because that's what somebody can understand, sure, yeah, but then you get opposing simplistic answers because they don't actually see the system that people are in. They just see a particular perspective, and so what that does is to create polarization, and we see this in politics, particularly in the United States.

Speaker 2: 9:16

We see this at the moment. You've got people there's no middle anymore, there's no moderate middle. You're pushed to one side or the other of the spectrum Right, and that means that you have no room for real politics, the negotiation, the understanding of each other's perspective. It just doesn't happen. They become, and so the negative outcome of politicization is that we get these polarities, the people on one side or the other and they might in other contexts be very reasonable, but they automatically assume that somebody who doesn't see things the way they see things must somehow be wrong, evil, have malintent and all the rest of it. And those attitudes just get deeper and deeper the stronger the polarization becomes. So we have some real conflicts at the moment, in large part because people don't understand the complexity of the system that they're in.

Speaker 2: 10:18

Right yeah, that, uh, political naivety, is what it's referred to in the the publication yeah, um, and and when people do begin to understand the some of the complexities, then do they have the power to do anything about it? Yeah, yeah, there's a whole study of a topic called called cleodynamics, which is about the rise and fall of civilizations, um, and it's quite fascinating because very few societies um exist for more than 200 years or 300 years before they collapse, right, and they have to be completely remade. And there are a number of factors that happen here, but they tend to be gradual and not noticed. People don't understand what's happening around them because it's the system, right. And two things that they point to in particular in one of the studies I've recently been reading says that there's a process of immiseration, more and more people struggling to survive. And when you think, one of the quotes from that was that the earning power of people in the United States in the 1960s was nearly twice that of people currently, yeah, the bottom of the chain, whereas the earning power, the fortunes of the people at the top, the sort of 1% at the top, have gone up by. I don't know, I think it was something like 1,500%. Wow, yeah, the divide is growing. For sure, the divide is growing.

Speaker 2: 11:58

The second thing that they identify is the production of what they call elites, but what we mean is basically educated people who should be having, should be because of their education whether they're doctors or, for example, they should be. They feel entitled to be earning a lot more, be much more comfortable and secure, but they find themselves being pushed down the chain as well, and when that happens, revolutions occur in that, in, in, in those educated, um, or this is what they call the elite in the middle. So the political, the bigger political situation that we see around us is often a reflection or reflective inside the corporations. So when you get the chief executive earning millions and millions and the person at the bottom struggling to pay their rent, you've now created a dynamic which ultimately can't succeed or can't continue forever. It's got to at some point. So there's the kind of things.

Speaker 2: 12:59

There's a context in which politics is taking place, but in terms of using politics effectively within an organization, one has to define what is the good that we're trying to create, and so how do the decisions that we're making today actually help or push forward that agenda, or do they actually undermine that agenda? And that's a question that's often that's frequently not asked. There's a whole set of studies around the good ancestor, and the fundamental question there is to ask people, very senior people in organizations, how do you want your grandchildren's children to regard you? Will they regard you as somebody who created a better world for us to live in, or somebody who screwed the world up for us? And they said, yeah, these. So this is also practical politics at this level looking at, looking at the systems, trying to understand what's going on. These are skills which are, I believe, absolutely essential for the future leader absolutely I mean some of the.

Speaker 1: 14:15

If I was in my attempt to try and define and understand politics, I was looking at some of the typical political challenges that people might be facing will be accustomed to when in an organization, and I think the publication does a great job in looking at this from different angles, so there's different perspectives, which really gives you a nice rounded, practical view of it, and I think the ones that stood out were things like information flow being a key one, sharing of information or withholding it, not allowing access to information, being selective with what information you're sharing, power dynamics, how decisions are made made, unable to speak openly, our relationships are leveraged, conflicting agendas and then lack of fair treatment being some of the most common types of political challenges.

Speaker 1: 14:59

One would expect to see and, to your point, the heart of it is the negative or the, the self that's what's, the lack of a better word the self-intent of the individuals. So if you look at each one of those, they can be both positive if being used constructively, if being used for the alignment of the organization's values. But if you're trying to drive your own values in any one of those categories, you see the mask of the negative aspects of it sort of resulting in an organization.

Speaker 2: 15:28

And it's amazing how you can. One thing that I like to do is to go is in a large organization. I I'll go up and down the lift in the lift um a few times, or I'll sit in the staff pistol and I'll just casually listen to conversations. What I'm listening for is are those conversations, the conversations that people have, the genuine conversations of how people are having the same thing they feel they should have, right?

Speaker 1: 15:58

And you know that tells you a lot, I can imagine. Yeah, what are some of the most common misconceptions you think are out there about politics outside of the broad, obvious one around it being just a negative thing? What are some of the other misconceptions you think exist out there?

Speaker 2: 16:12

Well, there's a lot of people who are quite diffident about networking, for example, and there have been a couple of studies or more that suggest that women are, on average, feel less comfortable about networking, networking, even though they're better at it. This absurdity here, absolutely yeah, um and so, um, but recognizing that that actually, um, networks really really are not only just useful for you, but having really strong networks is useful for the organization, for society and so forth. That's how we get things done. Me too happened because networks were established um and so so. So creating really positive networks is, I think, one of the key again, a key skill of surviving an organization. But it's not a. It's partly about who you know and then partly about who knows you.

Speaker 1: 17:13

Key to great networks is what you give the network, not you, what you take from it, and here again, positive and negative so you spoke about political, uh, currency, uh, or capital, if I will and you think of it like a bank account, again referencing from the, the book where you know it's it's. You're either feeding money in to, so giving into the network, or taking out from the the book where you know it's it's. You're either feeding money in to, so giving into the network, or taking out from the network, but you can't just be constantly taking or you'll have a negative balance in terms of your political capital. So that's a really great way to um to put it.

Speaker 2: 17:43

Thanks to you and and if you and if you want to get traction for an idea in an organization, the bigger the network you have have, or the better constructed the network you have, the more likely you are to get traction. And so people are used to receiving little tidbits of information from you, for example, so you might be interested in this or that. Sure, when you pass something on to them which makes them aware of something going on that they think that you, you would like their support from you, don't actually have to ask them for support. You can, you, you can actually ask them. You know, just wondering what you thought about this, and you can start to create traction, um, so a groundswell to of other people, without having to do very much. So it's the more that you focus on being helpful to other people and actually caring about the whole network, the more effective you can be.

Speaker 2: 18:46

And interestingly and there's quite a lot of research that said, when people want to change jobs, for example, it's not the people in your immediate circles that you might be as frequently connect with. That matters. It's not the people that you most frequently interact with. That matters, it's the people who are much further out you might not interact with only once every three or four months or once a year or so. With only once every three or four months or once a year or so, because they have a good connection with you. They're the people who are going to tell you about things. I know somebody who would do that. Sure, exactly right. And so politics is very much about conversations and it's about moving, or effective politics is about dialogue, whereas ineffective politics is about rhetoric and polemic. Right.

Speaker 1: 19:37

So for leaders, I thought what was great about the publication as well, looking at one of those other angles of identifying politics because I think that's the tricky bit for leaders is sometimes to really being able to build up the or improve on their naivety, um around politics, some of the trigger words it listed out, a bunch of uh trigger words, if you will, to illustrate if you have a very negative, you know political behaviors, things like, um, trouble explaining decisions, or talk of playing the game, where people's behaviors completely defy logic. Or you know people having a perceived lack of influence for argument's sakes. What, what are the types of common triggers? Do you see in those elevator sessions that you have that you can help people point?

Speaker 2: 20:26

to. Well, I'm particularly looking out for fear. Fear right, Cause that's the one that's right, Because that's the primary emotion that drives a lot of negative political behavior.

Speaker 1: 20:43

And that fear could be. I mean that's could be purely, I mean it's obviously psychological, but what I mean is it could be just based on you feeling inadequate and your behavior based on the feeling of inadequacy or threatened by you know someone else doing a better idea than you for argument's sake.

Speaker 2: 21:02

So it's a very cultural thing, isn't it within an organization? Yeah, loss of face, in particular loss of position? Yeah, sure, or authority.

Speaker 2: 21:14

Or standing yeah, and in some work we did with the conference board about 18 months ago, one of the things that came out, we've got an epidemic, in the Western world at least, of people with imposter syndrome. Yeah, that's a good one, absolutely. Is is where you, where you feel you feel that you're going to get you, don't feel adequate, you don't feel really in control of all the things and therefore you, you do everything you can not to to to dampen things down. So you either try and control everything which you can't Sure, but everything which you can't um sure but, or or you, you find some sort of tactics to, to play politics, to push, shift the blame for anything might go wrong onto somebody else. Sure, and an imposter syndrome is is really damaging, uh, because it you basically means you stifle all the talent below you as a leader, and what it means is that you try and try and control, but you actually achieve less and less Right and a core skill, therefore, of a really effective leader from current research suggests that vulnerability is is key, being able to to.

Speaker 2: 22:35

Does it look, I made this mistake, or these are things that I made, or I don't know what to do now. I'm really being comfortable with it. Yeah, um, one of the things that I do um with with leaders, which is quite fascinating actually um, I, I might be a leader. And then I'll say to him do you have the courage for us to have one of these coaching sessions in front of your team? Well, no, yep. And then we say okay. So if that went well? We say okay, so do you have the courage to be coached by a member of your team while I just sit in and make sure things are going well? So you're creating that whole sense of psychological safety in the team, right? That is very insightful. Yeah, and some of the other research that we're doing.

Speaker 2: 23:29

We do a lot of work in team dynamics. We have, to the best of my knowledge, the only instrument that measures teams from a complex, adaptive, systemic perspective. So everything affects everything else, right, and one of the things we measure there is psychological safety, right, and one of the things we measure there is psychological safety. And time and time again, what we see is the team leader and a couple of other people feel score very highly or they think. They think, yes, this team has got great psychological safety.

Speaker 2: 24:02

You get other people in the team who say no, it hasn't, yeah, um, yeah. And when you're asking people how many times did something need to be said, but but you didn't feel that you had permission to. You heard yeah. And when you start to see these differences in perception, that's when, if you open it up and talk about it and help people feel that they do have psychological safety, then the politics are going to disappear. I mean, the negative politics are mostly gone, sure to disappear. You want to get rid of negative politics entirely. Of course it's human, it's human right, yeah, but you can replace them. You can have a lot more positive politics going on that make the negative ones less important.

Speaker 1: 24:46

So if I summarise where we're at David essentially. So if I summarize where we're at David essentially, even a replacement for the word politics is influence and impact, you know, to remove the stigma behind. And again, drawing that from the publication itself, you know, removes the stigma behind the word with the term politics because it's usually associated with very negative connotations. So it's about positive influence and impact, negative connotation. So it's about positive influence and impact. And it really to get positive influence and impact and positive politics.

Speaker 1: 25:16

It's about leaders or individuals being authentic. It's about them having a very strong emotional intelligence, very strong self-awareness, being comfortable with being vulnerable for argument's sakes, because they know their values, they know who they are, they're comfortable with who they are, they've done that reflection, they know themselves well. And it's around when doing any task or anything you're trying to achieve within an organization. It's about you driving your own values, your personal values, but it's also about driving the organization's values and your own values making you authentic, but those values being aligned with the organization's values in terms of it being best for the organization, not for your own sort of intent. And that when I try to, when I listen to what you're saying, when I try to bring it all together is, I think, the boiling point or at the heart of what positive politics or influence and impact would would be. Would that be a fair, a fair summary of the study?

Speaker 2: 26:21

Yeah, I mean the, the idea that it has to be adversarial. It just it's not gonna it, it, it, it. It's an assumption that causes so many problems, sure, and what happens is, as soon as you've become adversarial, you begin to doubt the other person's motives. You assume Absolutely, absolutely Good point. Yeah, and that's why dialogue is so important.

Speaker 2: 26:49

A lot of the work we're doing now is looking at the going beyond the individual to the team, looking at the politics within the team and the influence, the EPI, exertion of positive influence within the team. But now, then, we're also looking at the API between teams in the same structure. So you can have a lot of teams, each of which is high functioning, but the structure as a whole is not Right, getting each other's way. Absolutely sure, and guess what? The clue to creating this, this positive environment is, is dialogue and creating new channels for people to talk to and understand each other right what would you say would be the key skills to develop, uh, political acumen and or, you know, and resiliency to, to the negative politics if you will.

Speaker 2: 27:53

Well, the first one is to actually understand your own values. It's amazing how few people can actually articulate what their fundamental values are. I agree, yeah, and so spending some time reflecting on that, perhaps having a coach to help you think them through, being very clear about what's important to you. There's a story Many years ago I was doing some research into high-performing companies and I went to visit Clark's the shoe people Reus, right yeah, and I was absolutely astonished at the contrast between their sales rooms and their boardroom, because the sales rooms, just money had been spent very, very extensively and the boardroom, well, it was warm carpet, there was a little bit of plaster falling off the walls, there was stuffing coming out of the chairs, and the chairman said to me I said, just have to remember.

Speaker 2: 28:52

Chief Executive said to me you have to remember the company question Does it sell shoes? He said we can spend money on staff welfare, we can spend money on equipment, on all sorts of things. He said, but nobody's ever come up with a good reason for spending any money on the boardroom. And that was great and that, that notion of the critical question, you know, will this make me respect myself more or less politics based, uh, or authenticity, insightful, yeah, and so finding the questions that work for you in, in, in being true to your values, um, making those values, and the next thing is to make values. Making those values and the next thing is to make those values, articulate those to other people. This is the thinking behind what I'm trying to achieve here, so linking what you do with the values that you exercise. Now, you may not always be able to convince other people, but that's not the point. It's about them understanding that you have positive motivation for what you're doing. Right, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 29:57

Right, so we're going to uh, we'll pull a pause at that point, david. Uh, this could be the end of our first uh section of our, of our podcast. There's so much we got from the session. Um, so it's all about you know we got political. Uh, well's all about you know we got political. Uh, well, politics, political, politics, but politics, um, and what we've learned today is it's really about influence and impact and positive influence. Impact.

Speaker 1: 30:20

That's the intent and we, we use that wonderful quote around. A knife could be used for, you know, a village to feed a village with the chopping vegetables, or it could be used to stab people in the back, and it's all around people just being authentic and, you know, aligning their values with the organization's values and in driving things forward and being open, and also, very importantly, being comfortable with being vulnerable. And this has all been fantastic. So we'll look forward to seeing you on our next episode, david, thank you very much and, for everyone listening on the podcast, stay tuned. We'll advertise and market the next one and look forward to seeing you on the next episode. I hope you all in search, excuse me. I hope you all enjoy your search for clarity. We'll see you next time.