Not Just Office Politics As Usual

The interpersonal dynamics within a workplace can make or break the culture in any business. Office politics, essentially, are the differences between people at work; differences in opinions and conflicts of interest. Workplace dynamics can be positive and create camaraderie, but they also can be productivity poison.

NY Report managing editor Daria Meoli had a roundtable discussion with three very different professional service firm owners and addressed how each one deals with office politics in his own organization. Justin Foa is president of Foa & Son Corporation, an international insurance brokers firm that has been in the Foa family since 1861. Foa has 75 employees and $18 million in revenue. Kevin Rees is president of The LanguageWorks, Inc., a company that provides foreign language translation, editing, proofreading and cultural analysis. LanguageWorks was founded in 1993 and has 50 employees and sales of $10 million. David Moore is chairman and founder of 24/7 Real Media, Inc., a global internet marketing company that he started in 1997. 24/7 has 400 employees and does approximately $200 million in revenue. Moore sold the business last year to WPP, an international corporation with 100,000 employees.

How have office politics affected your businesses?

Kevin Reese: To me, I think of the term “office politics,” as sort of the informal and formal network of relationships. There are examples where office politics have been extremely helpful to team building in our company and friendships that go on. And there’s been some that have been very negative. We’ve had to really dive into it and see what we could do to put a stop to it or confront it. I would say the biggest problem that we’ve had was when I had a senior management group for many years who didn’t like each other very much, and I let that stand. I knew that people didn’t appreciate each other’s roles, didn’t want to work together, weren’t totally clear what everybody was doing, and I let it stand. I ended up having to change the senior management. I didn’t force people to work together, and I now have a standing policy that I’ve chosen all my senior team for reasons that are well founded and that I expect people to get along and work together.

Justin Foa: I think that rooting out negative office politics is critical to keeping a healthy corporate culture. We had a very bad corporate politics problem, which was creating negative morale in one of our offices. The manager of that office was buying into it and creating two camps. When you have that polarization happening in a company, it’s very damaging. What I had to do was move a very talented executive into a different role and get a new manager that came in and basically said, “Look, I’m not buying into any of this. We’re here to do the job. Here are the parameters of your job.” We actually issued a memo and outlawed gossip. Now, I know it sounds ridiculous, but people were relieved and happy about it. We said, “You cannot talk behind someone’s back about them. If you have an issue with them, you bring it to their manager.”

David Moore: You set the tone as the CEO, but in spite of my best intentions, we did have office politics. When you have a management team of 10 people who are running their own profit and loss statements, there tends to be a very competitive atmosphere. In competitive atmospheres, people go to great lengths to win, and sometimes they do it in a way that is not ethical, perhaps misleading colleagues or by presenting facts about someone in a misleading way and distorting something he may have said. I’ve had employees come to me and say they’ve tried to work with another employee, but that co-worker didn’t give them the time of day. So I’d talk to that person and he would say, “The coworker came in and wanted to see me right then and there, and I wasn’t available.” In those cases, get them both in the same office and structure the meetings for them. And you can watch the dynamics that are going on just through that type of activity.

But I think, to Justin’s point, we stress a team environment. Everybody is “on the team,” and everyone has to play their role appropriately. And if you have somebody that’s disrupting the team, they either have to get in line or they have to leave. I find that office politics create an incredible amount of dysfunction and non-productivity, and to the extent that you can, create an environment where it’s kept to a minimum and you’ll definitely have a better performing company overall.

KR: What’s often at the root of the problem are unclear policies and procedures. Sometimes there are gray areas regarding workflow and responsibilities, and that can actually cause conflict. With high-charged, aggressive professionals, sometimes boundaries are not as clearly defined as they need to be. So often these politics actually
reveal areas where there’s room for organizational improvement.

JF: I’ve got to agree 100 percent with that and add that I think the key to the entire process is confronting the issue early before animosity builds up between those people to the point where you can’t remedy it.