It’s a jungle out there: a back-stabbing, buck-passing, bitching, ass-kissing jungle.
A whopping 98% of people have noticed an increase in skullduggery around the water cooler, according to a recent report, with office politicking reaching epidemic proportions since the downturn.
And it’s not just queen bees and bastards being drawn into political machinations. We’re all at it, apparently, with the vast majority of workers saying it’s something they always have to keep in mind. Largely considered the informal (brown-nosing the boss), as opposed to the formal (calling a meeting), way of getting things done, office politics are rated by 80% of workers as destructive, and no wonder: when you’re so busy fluffing your boss’s ego to feather your own nest, who has time to do their job properly?
The uncertainty, engendered by rocketing redundancies, is making us all edgy, and with good reason. “When there’s an increase in competition, people are more likely to stab colleagues in the back,” says the business psychologist Jane Clarke, a director at Nicholson McBride, the consultancy responsible for the survey. “Now people are fearful for their jobs, and it’s, ‘How can I make sure the axe will fall on them and not on me?’ People are admitting to behaviour they’re not proud of, but they see others doing it. They believe that playing by the rules won’t get them far in this climate.”
Take the office-politician test
The essayist Alain de Botton, author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, believes our ability to play “the game” decides who rises to the top of any organisation. “Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, in order to get ahead, workers must acquire a range of skills disconnected from their original job descriptions, skills for which ordinary life does not usually prepare them and that may indeed
run counter to the codes of much of ordinary, moral behaviour,” he says.
Politicking can range from the innocent – publicising your own successes, or sending lots of e-mails to cover your back, for example – through to the downright Machiavellian, such as passing off others’ work as your own, blaming colleagues for your mistakes or lobbying for people to be sacked.
Sarah, a PR executive at a corporate consultancy, recalls how her boss, sensing trouble ahead, asked her to take on an extra project “as a favour”, then, when the client pulled out at the last minute, as her boss fully expected, Sarah took the bullet.
She kept her job. Others haven’t been so lucky. Clarke recently witnessed Lucas, a senior marketing director and former SAS officer, reduced to tears at the hands of his own scheming team, who, without his knowledge, had arranged for their CEO and HR manager to be at a meeting to discuss some particularly difficult team issues. Lucas was shocked to see his bosses there. “Any negative feedback, of which there was plenty, could be used against him,” says Clarke. “At first, he was really angry, then he burst into tears.” Pre-recession, says Clarke, the team would probably have pulled together, no matter how unpopular the boss. “People can cope with difficult times when they’re getting the results. Now, people feel they’re working harder and harder with nothing to show for it, and there’s far more risk of being fired, so they feel they have to cover their backs. People are experiencing a definite loss of control and sense of helplessness. There’s very little upside, especially for the victims.”
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