7 Surefire Ways to Dominate Office Politics

How do you nav­ig­ate office polit­ics efficiently?

You might hate office polit­ics — and that is under­stand­able. Still, you could turn man­aging office polit­ics into a valu­able com­mu­nic­a­tion skill. 

Here we go:

7 Ways To Dominate Office Politics

When promp­ted, most people would say that they hate office polit­ics. They would describe it as a waste of everyone’s time. There’s mer­it to this argu­ment, but this per­spect­ive will also likely hold you back.

I would sug­gest con­sid­er­ing your work­place con­tex­tu­ally: Politics hap­pens when people with dif­fer­ent agen­das use power and influ­ence to get their way. 

Your work­place is no exception.

Here are sev­en strategies for nav­ig­at­ing office politics:

1. Practice Douchebag Slalom

“But I just want to focus on doing the best job I can instead of spend­ing half my time deal­ing with incom­pet­ent douchebags.”

That’s fair — to a degree. 

First, you’d have to con­sider the pos­sib­il­ity that those “incom­pet­ent douchebags” are frus­trated about spend­ing their time deal­ing with you. After all, few douchebags are aware of being douchebags.

Second, douchebags have a habit of bick­er­ing with each oth­er. It’s part of their rep­er­toire. Plus, they can’t stand oth­er douchebags, either.

Third, douchebags are every­where.

Word to the wise: Being truly com­pet­ent at your job includes know­ing how to sla­lom incom­pet­ent douchebags — and still get the job done.

2. Emulate a Type A Personality

Unlike douchebags, Type A per­son­al­it­ies rarely fight each other. 

Type A per­son­al­it­ies don’t whine, they don’t com­plain, and they don’t engage in unne­ces­sary argu­ments. In so many words: They’re adults.

You should be an adult, too.

If two adults dis­agree, they out­line their argu­ments and listen care­fully to each oth­er with the intent to understand. 

Then, if an adult receives a bet­ter counter-argu­ment, they will change their minds without adding status or prestige into the mix.

By recog­niz­ing Type A per­son­al­it­ies in the work­place, you can study and mim­ic their traits. They steer clear of douchebags, and they nev­er engage with them on an emo­tion­al level. 

3. “Wow” Your Colleagues

There are many ways to nav­ig­ate a social envir­on­ment. Some try to make friends. Some try to suck up to the right people. Some people try their utmost to be agree­able to every­one. Others engage in dark­er tac­tics, like stra­tegic bul­ly­ing, abuse of power, and clique formation. 

However, a potent strategy for nav­ig­at­ing an office is con­tinu­ously impress­ing people.

The art of impress­ing someone is situ­ation­al and has two components:

The second part is the crit­ic­al key:

You don’t want to come across as the wise-ass kid sit­ting in front of the classroom with your hand stuck in the air; noth­ing about such a deliv­ery is unex­pec­ted — nor is it welcome.

4. Pick Fights After Your Pay Grade

If you’re not in charge of intern­al com­mu­nic­a­tion, don’t make it your busi­ness to set every­one straight. The same applies to cor­por­ate cul­ture, lead­er­ship decisions, product/​market fit, sup­ply chain logist­ics, etc. 

Make sure to get your job done (which includes nego­ti­at­ing any obstacles in your path) instead of try­ing to do (or second-guess) someone else’s.

If you’re bet­ter at a spe­cif­ic job than the per­son tasked with actu­ally doing it, either apply for that job or keep your head down.

5. Say, “The Job is Now Done”

I’ve worked as a lead­er in dif­fer­ent set­tings, and it can be pretty tax­ing to have people come up to you all day with prob­lems. It’s part of the job, of course, but I can’t stress how awe­some it is to have a cowork­er come up to you and say, “The job is now done.”

A cowork­er might come to you on rare but bliss­ful occa­sions and say, “The job is done. Next, I’m tack­ling this oth­er thing. I’ll keep you posted.” 

Oh, the happiness!

“The job is done” might be the most beau­ti­ful phrase in the busi­ness. And the kick­er is that any­one who makes a habit of deliv­er­ing this par­tic­u­lar news will rarely have a prob­lem with office polit­ics. ¹If the job is indeed done, of course. The only caveat is that you must deliv­er this news face-to-face and one-to-one. That’s just the way this works..

6. Work the Floor Daily

No mat­ter how much work’s on your plate, you should always leave your desk and work the floor at least once daily. 

There will always be cowork­ers avail­able for a friendly exchange of words. While it might not be all that import­ant to some of us, invest­ing a few minutes in mak­ing oth­ers feel bet­ter can’t be con­sidered a waste of time. 

Let go of your ego and your endeav­ours for a few minutes and take an interest in oth­er people. 

Now, some will jump at the oppor­tun­ity to take advant­age of your attent­ive­ness by try­ing to use you as a sound­ing board for com­plaints and criticism. 

If you habitu­ally steer such con­ver­sa­tions back to a pos­it­ive focus, you will quickly take the wind out of most bit­ter people.

7. Use Dog Psychology 

Dogs have a tend­ency not to pro­cess neg­at­ive feed­back very well. In enfor­cing change, your chances might be bet­ter if you play the long game using only a) praise and b) absence of praise.

By prais­ing your cowork­ers often, your col­leagues will start to expect pos­it­ive feed­back from you. You should there­fore be gen­er­ous with praise. 

The trick here, of course, is to hold back on that praise for any beha­viours you don’t con­done. The absence of praise in this con­text will likely have a more sig­ni­fic­ant effect than verbal dir­ect neg­at­ive feed­back. ²My prin­ciple is that I only deliv­er dir­ect neg­at­ive feed­back to someone pro­fes­sion­ally if I’m expli­citly paid to do just that.