Kathleen Kelley Reardon
In her 2000 book, The Secret Handshake, management professor and consultant Kathleen Kelley Reardon tackled the politics of the business inner circle. In her new book, It's All Politics: Winning in a World Where Hard Work and Talent Aren't Enough, Reardon provides practical techniques to help break down office politics. Her no-nonsense approach focuses on gaining political intuition and advancing in the workplace.
Q: How important is office politics in business?
A: You have to look at your own organization and decide what level you're operating on. Without political knowledge, you're not going very far. You begin to open your eyes and see that there are people you'll need to know, ways to develop your reputation, ways to say things if you want to be listened to.
Q: Aren't hard work and talent enough?
A: I think of it as a two-legged stool that you rest your career on. One of the legs is talent, and the other is hard work. Without the third one, when people have similar degrees of competence, politics is going to make all the difference.
Q: Are relationships more important than skill?
A: I would say that skills and hard work are what get you a long way, but there is a point in everyone's career where politics becomes more important.
Q: What is the relationship between office politics and effective communication?
A: They are inseparable and define each other. Politics is largely communication but on several levels--it's knowing how to position something so that people can be more receptive to it.
Q: You suggest people develop intuition about the office. How do you do that?
A: There's a lot of deception in human communication. You have to gain the ability to detect patterns in your company. What garners disdain? How do people say things to each other? You don't have to adopt them, but you have to recognize them. We don't take the time to actually listen and find out what's going on at all levels.
Q: Can political intuition be confused with manipulation?
A: I see it as the way to not be manipulative, because you don't panic. You don't manage people in a manipulative way because you understand them, so you have the ability to move people from position A to position B without trying to do it behind their back.
Q: What advice would you give to employees just starting to address these issues?
A: Know the political climate of your company. Don't be the last person to understand how people get promoted, how they get noticed, how certain projects come to attention. Don't be quick to trust. If you don't understand the political machinations, you're going to fail much more often.
This story appears in the July 25, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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