For most of us, dealing with organizational politics is a necessary evil. Project Managers are often the first to criticise colleagues who are “too political”, spending excessive attention to their profile in the organisation rather than to the needs of their team. Sometimes it can seem a bit self-serving or predatory and certainly unprofessional, particularly to those of us from a technical background.
Yet, if you want to be more realistic, nothing gets changed without some power to make changes and influence people’s decisions, and that is essentially what organisational politics is about. We project managers can be a bit naïve about the importance of power in getting results.
We ourselves may be relatively powerless, but as implementers of change, as leaders of teams, it’s important that we can manage upwards to use the power of our superiors to get stakeholders on board and supporting our activities.
Let’s try and make sense of where organisational politics can arise in projects, and how we may best deal with it to the benefit of our project.
What is organisational politics?
Since there are so many ambiguities about the phrase organisational politics (many of which are quite negative, I quite like this particular definition, taken from an excellent book called “Power and Politics in Project Management”, by Jeff Pinto: “The exercise or use of power to obtain one’s preferred outcomes within the organisation”.
This definition takes it all away from the area of moral judgments or ethics, and focusses on the outcome, our job of delivering the project’s outcome.
Naturally, the project outcomes themselves are often overlaid with the priorities of powerful stakeholders who have initiated the project in the first case, and these priorities may have a profound impact on the way our project is conducted or aligned.
Let’s look at 4 of these factors that may exert significant influence on project outcomes or at the least, on the power dynamics we project managers deal with.
As we will discover, having a good relationship with your sponsor, including regular contact and communication, can help overcome the power disparity between you and your boss, and sure you have a more positive experience of managing organisational politics.
1. Complex Stakeholder Dynamics – more than one project “owner”
This factor often first appears in the business case, project proposal or in other initiation documents: it occurs in situations where multiple senior executives or external partners are jointly funding or co-sponsoring a project, or where an outside organisation is partnering with us.
Complex project ownership or funding responsibilities obviously lead immediately to issues of power and politics, and we may find ourselves frequently sandwiched between two powerful stakeholders, both of whom see themselves as being the critical one in deciding outcomes and directions.
Who is more important? Who benefits?
This can demand a delicate balance for the project manager to navigate the complicated interpersonal dynamics while ensuring the project remains aligned with broader organisational needs and objectives.
2. Impact of an influential stakeholder – one-off project requirements
In other situations we may become concerned when there are specific one-off requirements that are being incorporated in the work due to the influence of one high priority stakeholder.
The issue here may be a very basic question: is this particular influential stakeholder important to the organization as a whole or to the community that we are servicing, or is it just due to the influence that person has over our sponsor?
Some cases, this question can even raise issues of propriety and business ethics!
We must be very careful, obviously, in making judgments like that without actual evidence, and even more so in suggesting it to colleagues.
But it could be a good practice that when you see work being proposed that only caters to the needs of a specific stakeholder, you seek clarification with your sponsor (without making it a major issue) about why those specific needs are being incorporated in the work. There are often good reasons, internal funding requirements for example, to give priority to that stakeholder.
3. Reciprocal Benefit Agreements
In some situations, projects will require collaborative activities that extend beyond our immediate organization. These may be formalised fire contracts memorandums of understanding, or may be less structured.
The real problem is that project managers are significantly down the food chain, and are not always informed of such arrangements unless they are fundamental to a contract or other written agreement.
This situation can be quite a straightforward matter if there is a formal joint venture structure, as this will (or should) involve contractual goals and agreed responsibilities. However, it can also occur where a key part of the work is to achieve mutual benefits between two different organisations that is not clearly documented – eg, “we get this and they get that”, less formal agreements that have little or no documentation.
The reciprocal arrangement can be between our organisation and a supplier, our business unit and another business unit or department within the organization, or it can be a more complex transaction, such as an agreement to share or split activities in a region or a market segment.
Since I’m not a lawyer, I will assume that these arrangements don’t conflict with any local legislation governing competition or price-fixing!
There are two issues here: is there an agreement that you should be aware of, perhaps one more transactional than a full joint venture? Or is this an ad hoc arrangement between two stakeholders, whose status is not documented.
In many cases, these situations may be clearly understood by the organisation, even if this is not communicated to you as the project manager.
But it can create a complex problem for a project manager when we feel that some stakeholder groups aren’t really being catered for as adequately as others. For example, we may discover this in the course of reviewing the project work, we find that while some are getting the results they desired, others are not, or our steering group starts prioritising some deliverables or business benefits ahead of others, and not necessarily those highlighted in the original timeline.
Interestingly enough, some books on program management often recommend that deliverables be prioritised by the size of their business benefit, ensuring that projects retain strong support from key executives who control those business outcomes. That approach is of course totally different to the priorities usually expected of the average project manager!
As in the previous scenario, dealing with this situation this may demand greater knowledge of the power dynamics with in our organisation, and require us to work closely with our sponsor to understand the complexities of these benefit agreements.
Once again, a simple low key discussion with your project sponsor can ensure that you remain in the loop, and understand the organisation’s immediate priorities.
4. Comparative Benefit Alignment
In my writings and presentations on business case development, I have always recommended that any discussion of project outcomes and deliverables should be traced back to the key stakeholders expecting those outcomes. The “owner” of a project requirement is the best person to tell us how the achievement of that requirement is to be measured. It’s important that we have a clear and achievable KPI (key performance indicator) to show that a deliverable has been accomplished.
What are the outcomes being sought by each stakeholder?
What requirements do they own?
And also, given their power and influence over our project, what are they going to regard as key performance indicators of successful completion?
What expectations have been set by previous documents and promises in business cases, proposals and in requirements gathering
So when I refer to comparative benefits, what degree of improvement is adequate to regard project or that specific deliverable as adequate? What had they been led to believe from the business case for the marketing plan?
It’s no benefit to the organisation if we, the project manager, are too naïve in our approach to planning. We need to ensure that we can directly deal with our stakeholders and learn of such priorities early enough to ensure a timely delivery.
Taken together, these four factors can obviously lead to problems in our relationships with our sponsor and other stakeholders.
PMs need a real power base to succeed
There are clearly many ways in which problems can arise, so we project managers must ensure we get some degree of power and authority to influence stakeholders, to modify their attitudes or perhaps shape the way they perceive the work and the desired outcomes.
We get power by acquiring power bases within the organisation, either directly through our own influence or by formally ensuring we get a clear delegation of power from our superiors.
Note again, the term I’ve used previously, managing upwards.
It’s important that we understand that we may not be able to deal with these things directly. We may have to work through our sponsor to achieve our results.
In my next article, I will discuss several ways in which we can achieve some power and influence within the organisation based on either good delegation from senior management or by building up our own credibility to good communication consistently across many projects.