Office Politics

The campaigns, the candidates, the debates. We don’t know whether to get our hopes up or to hunker down.  Both the national and state politics are scary.  But it’s the political scene each of us enters on Monday morning that will keep most of us tossing and turning tonight.

Office politics. Those are the hardest politics we face—and now they are made even harder by budget cuts and union battles.

A young friend recently said to me, “I don’t want to work where there are politics.” I understood her distress, but I said to her, “Then go home and make pot holders.”  There is no work without politics because there is no work without people.   Any time we organize ourselves into a business, a women’s club, a church group or a scout troop there will be politics.

The trend toward making the workplace feel like home doesn’t help. By loosening the home and work boundary we get to have—at work—all the goodies that belong at home: sibling rivalry, parental intrusion, and fights about money, cleaning and table manners.  Maybe if work were less like home we’d go home to get the things we’re supposed to get there: love, companionship and intimacy.

So it’s inevitable that we have office politics. 

  Every day each of us carries our emotional baggage to work in an invisible tote bag and then we pick from it throughout the day. But this is not necessarily a bad thing.  Working with other human beings is a creative process—and a messy one. Maybe the best we can do is to try not to draw blood and to say we’re sorry when we do.  But like the sign says in the casino, “You must be present to win”, we need the politics in our workplaces and in our communities to work out who we are and how we get better.

I’m an optimist. I see the messiness of human beings as a good thing.  You might roll your eyes and call me a “Pollyanna”, but that fictional girl is not a bad role model. The Dali Lama has little on the 11-year-old girl that Eleanor Porter created in 1912.  Pollyanna is the story of a girl who went through many painful events with very difficult people and was able to remain optimistic and make changes for the good.

Pollyanna lived in poverty, was orphaned, treated poorly and had illness and grief in her life. It’s not that she didn’t feel pain rather she chose to see the world as a good place despite the suffering. While most of us adults know how to toughen up in order to survive Pollyanna’s talent was in dealing with all of the difficulties while keeping her heart open.

It can feel safer to stay with the negative but pessimism is lazy. You can always be somewhat right.  To stay optimistic takes courage.  You have to keep believing that things will work out even if it’s not the way you hoped they would.  

Now in our nation, our state and our workplaces we get to make that choice. We can moan and groan, or choose optimism. That may just be the smartest political strategy of all. 

Office Holiday Party

We are entering the time of year that makes seasoned managers cringe and human resource directors want to leave town. Despite fine words to the contrary, there is little Peace on Earth at the office around this time because we are getting ready for the office Christmas, oops, I mean “holiday” party.

Yes, we’ve learned to choke on the word Christmas and insist that the December party where we dress in sparkles, bring wrapped gifts, and drink eggnog standing next to an evergreen tree is just a winter event. But language games are the least of it when management has to plan the annual—“no one will be happy no matter what we do”--office holiday party.

This time of year career gurus give us the regular reminders: you must attend, you should not drink, don’t dress like a stripper and do make small talk with many people. The warnings should certainly be heeded. The annual holiday party is ground zero for what is known in Human Resources as the CLM, or Career Limiting Move. CLM’s include Xeroxing body parts, getting tanked with co-workers and making jokes about the boss to his/her spouse. But love them --or leave them early-- the office holiday party is a ritual of the workplace.

The list of issues is long: Do we go out on the town or stay in the building? Is the event during work or after hours? Will there be dancing? Music? And biggest bugaboo: booze or no booze? The tension produced along the way inevitably ends up in an annual review or with someone not forgiving someone else for months.

Divisiveness is in the details. One of the words tossed around liberally in the weeks leading up to the party is “they” as in they don’t have kids, they don’t like to drink, they drink too much, or they don’t have to pay a baby-sitter. Preferences also break down by personality type: Extroverts love the parties; Introverts want to die.

Some offices give money to charity instead but then end up bringing in a deli tray on December 22nd because it doesn’t feel right not to do something. I think it hits us that if we don’t have some kind of party, then we’re admitting that this is work and not really our family or our best friends. It’s one of the passive deceptions we engage in to smooth life along.

So what’s at the heart of this holiday ritual? Well, for starters we have strong cultural memories and it’s dark this time of year and we are longing for light. Workplaces have their own kind of darkness so it’s human to want to brighten that up too.

But there’s more. The office party is really a throwback. Yes, that sushi with sparkles affair in the boardroom is a remnant from the Ebenezer Scrooge days. It’s a flashback to the days when Big Daddy Corporation rewarded its Childlike Workers with the decent meal and glass of bubbly that they could not provide for themselves. The company party was also a time to reset any drifting notions of who owned the means of production.

I remember that kind of event. At the box factory where my Dad worked the assembly line was shut down once a year: the Saturday before Christmas. Hot dogs were served from the corrugator and Santa arrived on a forklift. There were no Bring Your Kids to Work days back then, so the Christmas Party was how you saw where Dad went every day. It was understood that that place and those people held the key to our survival.

Today, in our workplaces, we play out that past. And despite all the tension it takes to get there, we’ll toast our teams this week with hopes for prosperity and peace at work.