Blog

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

In this third blog I'm going to cover some of the interesting findings from the delivery of the one day workshop and also some fascinating insights into the marketing once we had what we thought was a market ready product.

Workshop Findings:

I'm going to restrict myself to covering off the top 2 findings because in reality there were many!

Number 1…

many delegates were very concerned about the fact but they couldn't really define what political behaviour actually is so we set about providing some clarity by giving them the following 4 possible definitions to throw some light on how ‘political behaviour’ could be seen

a)    Covert rather than the overt way of doing things

This didn't go down very well as the interpretation here was that covert sounded quite manipulative, almost negative. Underhand and sneaky were words that were frequently used. It was not a definition that was liked

b)    Results achieved through the informal as well as the formal channels

This turned out to be much better and also well liked. Delegates started to understand that not everything gets done in an organisation through the formal channels but rather many informal interactions that happen as a result of e.g. being in the same building, a post meeting meeting or indeed bumping into somebody in one of the office elevators. If you think about it there are actually many opportunities to talk informally to others in an organisation and working virtually also provides a lot of chances to talk to others ‘off the record’

c)    The achievement of organisational and or personal goals by using appropriate skills and strategies

This is a definition that also went down very well particularly as it linked getting things done whilst achieving organisational goals as well as the achieving an individual's goals – in other words aligned behaviour. ‘I do something that is clearly good for the workplace, but it is also good for me’

d)    politics isn't what I do it's why you think I'm doing it

This definition ended up being very helpful as it included the fact that an individual's behaviour when seen by a third party can be interpreted in many different ways depending on e.g. environmental factors, on the relationship with the individual concerned, your own mood and also on many other factors That we may/may not be aware of.

Number 2…

We measured, through a 12 question assessment how an individual experiences their workplace in political terms. The questionnaire asked if it individual were familiar with certain behaviours which were political. The scores were then added up and the totals could range from 0 to 24. Higher scores indicated a very political workplace with low scores showing less political behaviour going on.

Over time we were able to plot the results from literally thousands of responses and we found some interesting findings. By organisation - Large PLC's are seen to be moderately political with scores ranging from 15 to 18. Public sector organisations including the NHS, were more political scoring higher numbers but were still less then the not-for-profit sector where the scores were very high indeed.

We also analysed the scores by the level of management. Graduate populations typically scored lower mainly due to organisational naivety whereas Middle and Senior Management scores were considerably higher. Rather surprisingly Executive Management and Boards ended up with scores which were very low -  explained by one board member as ‘I don't see these questions as being political, this is just the way in which we do things around here'. In other words political behaviour had become so normalised with it that they didn't see anything wrong with behaving in a political way.

The Marketing………

Before launching the 1 day workshop into the big wide world it was important for us to do some market research on how organisations would respond to being approached with the request ‘Is the running of a workplace politics workshop of interest to you?’

Again we had some interesting findings. We chose to work with a separate marketing organisation to do the work for us, mainly so that we didn't add in any bias from our own belief positions about our product - and they came back with some fascinating data.

1/3 of organisations that they contacted responded with ‘we couldn't possibly run a workshop here on the subject of workplace politics as it is politically unacceptable to raise this issue in this organisation at this time’ When we heard this we did have a giggle to ourselves!

1/3 of organisations would welcome running a workshop on the subject of workplace politics but because of the sensitivity in the organisation of the word ‘politics’ they felt that the workshop needed to be renamed - since then we have run workshops in these organisations with titles such as ‘strategic influencing,’ ‘advanced influencing’ and in one organisation the workshop is called ‘managing the shadow side’. (Seriously!!) 

1/3 of organisations expressed an interest in running the workshop immediately. This was great news for us. Our initial marketing focused on this third group as this seemed to provide us with the opportunity to not only continually develop and refine the content of the workshop but this would also enable us to have a fast start in the market which we knew would provide us with some useful feedback and excellent PR.

The Next Blog………How the Workshop and Assessments have developed since the initial launch, including a version for Women only and also a version for people working in the NHS which is due to be published very soon.