Politics politics politics
politics! Who among us thinks that
they're great at navigating
office politics or relishes it? Probably
very few. I'm not sure I've met anybody. But if you
want three great strategies and an
amazing resource to help you
navigate corporate politics with ease,
stick with me through the video and I'll
leave you with some great stuff.
Where you can evaluate your own
organizational savvy, basically which is
ability to navigate politics,
and build on
what you already have working for you.
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I'm Christina DelliSanti-Miller of
Full Potential Realized
and I'm a career transition coach. That
means I help mostly women
take their career from point a to point
b. And that could mean
breaking through to the next level,
getting a promotion, taking on managing a team,
expanding your compensation, finding and
landing the role of your dreams -
like that. How to handle office politics?
If you've wondered how to get through
those difficult relationships, possible
saboteurs...
who of us hasn't had one of those
experiences?
I was recently asked this question at a
technology company
career Q&A session/Ask Me Anything
session -  like how do we handle office
politics?
I thought it was a great question and it
required more time than what we had in
that moment, so I wanted to circle back
and record this response and hopefully
it'll be valuable
for more than just the one person who
asked me. I would have loved to have
known this as a young person,
because this was not on my radar screen.
First strategy is to adopt a
growth mindset, and if you haven't read
Carol Dweck's book
about Mindset, it's a game changer. I'll
leave a link in the description. Highly recommend. So I think throughout
my career what I had
around politics was a fixed mindset, not
a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is
I'm not great at that. I don't know how
to do that. I don't have the background. It's just not me. I don't like it. I can't.
Whatever. Right so the growth mindset
would be
if I learn how to do, that I'll be able
to do it. And if I practice it, I'll get
better
at it. So sometimes you think that
you can't do it, and so then you don't
try to learn it and then
you can't do it.
That was me... But if you have a growth
mindset, like anything can be learned,
then you'll pursue the resources and
you'll practice and improve your
capability.
Effectively navigating relationships and
organizations,
which is what the politics is, it can be learned.
Second tip is to think of a role model
who is effective at navigating politics.
and the reason I say this is because
especially as women we often think that
people who are political are unsavory
and we don't hold them as role models.
But I would assert
that there are people who are effective
at navigating and
they still hold true to their values. I
want to share
a model that I learned many years ago
when I was
pulling together an Investment Banking
curriculum for senior women, and they had
the Center for High Performance
Leadership training us,
and they presented this 'model for good
politics'
and it was a four box. Imagine two axis,
four boxes,
so high, low, low, high. Right.
And the one dimension was in alignment
with her values, and the bottom dimension was
navigates the organization
astutely. So let's start in the bottom,
low and low. 
Someone who doesn't navigate astutely
and doesn't align with their own values
is the donkey. (They had animals in each
of the four boxes.)
Also known as the ass. The woman who
aligned
highly with her values and her behaviors
but did not
navigate the organization astutely was
the lamb. The woman who navigated the
organization astutely
and did not align with her values was
the fox.
And the woman who had high
alignment with her values and high
effectiveness in navigating the
organization was the owl.
So the owl is the role model and
somebody
that you can identify - you probably know
some owls. Think about them
as the possibility for being effective
and still being a good person.
In organizational life you know the lamb
gets slaughtered,
the donkey kicks the lamb,
the fox eats the lamb, but the owl soars
above it all.
Third tip is to build great
relationships throughout your
organizational life by creating win-win
solutions. And I have two or three videos
about creating win-win solutions - I'll
point to them in the end
cards. But it's really about figuring out
what solutions
to the challenges you're facing meet
your expectations AND support the
goals of the other party. And when you do
that as a practice and you're always
looking at creating win-win,
you have you're better set up to create
organizational alliances that will help
you move forward. If you create
win-lose situations where your agenda is
advanced but your teammates or your
colleagues
are disrupted or pushed aside,
that's a poor foundation for creating
the relationships that will help you
navigate office politics well. So the
fantastic resource I want to leave you
with
is the Survival secrets of the Savvy.
It's a self-assessment and a book that
goes with it,
and it has like a ladder or a pyramid of
fundamentals, starting with basic ethics
and ending
at the top of the pyramid, which
represents much fewer experiences that
you have to deal with but may happen
sometimes,
is when you have somebody sabotaging you.
So I've had two experiences with
saboteurs.
The first one I worked my way out of
without really knowing what I was doing.
i was lucky better than good. And the
second one really actually had an impact
on me.
And if I had taken it not as an affront,
but as just something that happens in
organizational life and you just need to
pull something
a tool out of your tool kit and deal
with it, I would have dealt with it
differently.
So I feel like this resource, which was
given to me after that experience,
is so valuable. And hopefully you don't
have a lot of these experiences,
but you at least have it on your radar
screen and
you know what to do if it pops up. Check
out these other videos for additional
strategies on taking your career forward.
And if you got value from this video,
please share it with your friends,
like it, give it a comment and subscribe
to the channel if you haven't already
done so.
Thanks. I look forward to seeing you next
time.
