Not Office Politics!

Avoiding the political swamp...

When someone tells you that there are no politics in their organization, consider that their opening political statement.

What is office politics? The dictionary says "...competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership..." Sounds like a national pastime to me. Given this definition, there will always be politics in product development projects. 

Support the Great Ideas...

One of the things that makes great products is having a group of outspoken people who have a lot of ideas to be considered for the product.

In this environment it is the competition around which ideas will be used in the product that often gives rise to politics.

The more ideas that are discussed, the more likely that the product will be great. The team needs to hear, process and prioritize all of the ideas, without "competing for power and leadership."

Leading Away From Politics...

So the leader needs to walk the line, to get the ideas out, to debate and sort out the greatest ideas and get them into the scope of the product, but avoid the negative of any person using the ideas to gain power in the group.

So how do you do this? You work incessantly to bring all of the people into the discussion, to bring all of the ideas to the table, and to debate them all thoroughly.

Stifling Politics Forever...

While there are many variations on how to get rid of the politics in a project, the most successful products that I have seen went to the extreme of bringing the team into a room and not leaving until there was a unified product idea. It worked well, but the price at the time seemed very high. For the start of one product line that turned into a billion dollar business, the initial meeting lasted ten months.

A ten month meeting? You’re kidding. No, actually that is the same process that most startups use, only in the case of a startup company that "meeting" is the entire business of the company.

For another product line that was a major expansion, the meeting took seven weeks. But when completed, we knew how to work together. Sound intense? You bet it was, and it was harder than it sounded. Those meetings took active management, active leadership, and a lot of work before and after every day's meeting to be sure the time was productive. That product grew into a multi-hundred million dollar business.

The openness and intensity of these meetings built an environment where politics could not easily exist. Any statement that looked or sounded political was challenged so intensely and immediately, it could not stand.

You Can't Be Politics-Free

But you can build a team environment that will minimize the chance of politics damaging your project.

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