Blog

Written by author and consultant, David Bancroft-Turner BA (Hons)

You may recall from the previous blog that I had promised a new client an influencing skills workshop, which was to include a session on the subject of ‘Workplace politics’.

After the trip south on the train where my business partner has accused me of lying (remember the ‘intention’ response? – more later) I set about finding out what materials were out there and what we could usefully buy (or borrow) to include into the workshop. In a nutshell, there was very little. Most, if not all materials that appeared were related to Politics with a BIG P – the politics within a Country/Party/Council but very little on the topic of politics in the workplace – politics with a small ‘p’.

I found this very strange.

My own experiences of working in 2 very large, multinational financial institutions, was that the workplace politics were rife, active and mostly destructive. We did find however, what turned out to be a very useful model linking political behaviour to 4 distinct and different ‘Animal Types’, designed by Baddeley and James. A standard 2 x 2 box model, with the axis related to ‘political awareness’ and ‘Intention’ creating the Fox, Owl, Donkey, Sheep model – 4 very different ‘types’ of political animal that you may encounter in the workplace.

Having got permission from the authors to use the model, we set about making it a lot more user friendly and ‘more corporate and recognisable’. We changed the ‘Awareness’ Dimension to ‘Skill’ and the ‘Intention’ to ‘Goal Alignment’. Our new model looked a lot more familiar for our intended audience.

What happened next……We presented the model as - ‘Here are 4 very different political animals, here are a few of the behaviours you may see from them’ and mapped those behaviours onto the 4 box grid.

Well, it all got very crazy……...

"That’s my manger that is" - "That’s the CEO, the bl**dy Fox" - "that Sheep was me 5 years ago, but not now" - "I want to be an Owl – how do I do it?" were just a few of the responses.

We had planned for a 30 minutes light discussion and it turned out to be a very intensive 2 hour session which raised many more questions than it answered.

We came away from the first workshop absolutely stunned. The delegates wanted more:

1.    Information on how to more accurately identify the 4 ‘Animals’

2.    Skill and behavioural ideas on how to manage each of the 4 animals

3.    Understanding as to what type of political animal they might be

4.    Tools and processes to use in the workplace

5.    An Assessment/Questionnaire that could accurately predict a person’s animal type.

So, we went to work. We designed, from scratch:

• A self-assessment that allowed delegates to obtain self-awareness of their own political type
• A questionnaire on ‘How political’ their workplace is
• Behaviours that you were likely to see from each of the 4 types
• How to identify each of the 4 animals
• Behaviours that can be deployed to ‘protect’ oneself from the negative behaviours of others
• A questionnaire on how they, as individuals, perceive the topic of workplace politics
• Practice on core skills to improve political capabilities, and most importantly
• How to turn, what is a negative for most people, into a positive.

We really did hit the jackpot. The assessments worked really well, Feedback from fellow delegates on the accuracy of the results correlated well, and the 4 box model provided a framework for the mapping of the key stakeholders which then highlighted what and who, they were dealing with followed by the behaviours and the skills which needed to be to deployed for them and their teams to be more effective.

We had turned what was a very interesting intellectual exercise into a really pragmatic and useful part of the workshop. The delegates loved it!

As we designed more and more material it was clear we were moving away from ‘Influence’ and into a new and distinct skill area that was badly needed by the delegates working in a very political organisation. (Remember the behaviour of the Board member – we later found out that another Board member was not supportive of what we were doing and said "I’m not convinced we want our people knowing all this stuff. They will be able to spot what we are really doing.") Nevertheless, we carried on, and we designed so much training material that we turned the session in the workshop into a stand alone 1 day event, focussing purely on ‘Workplace politics’.

But how would we sell it? How would the market react? Who would buy it? It was all very new – how would we market it?

In the next blog I’ll cover how we went about selling what turned out to be one of the most successful workshops we have ever run.