Cranfield School of Management
Interview: David Butcher
Smart Management: Using Politics in Organisations
SM
So, David Butcher, I want to look at Smart Management and what
prompted you to write the book with Martin Clarke.
DB
Well, I suppose the most important reason Steve, is that we kept
bumping up again, and again and again for years on end against
managers with the experience that what formal organisation was
all about and how it should work, was not what they experienced
every day and there were a range of reactions to that – one of
which was of course, that it was all wrong and inappropriate that
it didn’t work in the way it should work and another was the
opposite extreme, well, that is the name of the game and so
therefore we have to work with that. But an awful lot of
confusion in the middle. And so we started to think about that
and to ask ourselves why is this, because it does seem so terribly
important and of course you must recognise it in the context of
executive development.
Understandably people coming through executive education
want something beyond prescriptive answers, they don’t want
simply to know what it is that they ought to do when they already
know what they ought to do, and so we began to look for
something that would be more useable for them that they could
take and somehow integrate in a meaningful way into their
managerial lives. So that is how we got started on that book.
SM
Looking at the forces which are driving the political approach to
management, what would you see that they are?
DB
Above all I would say that it is to do with the fact we probably
have for the last thirty, even forty years, had to recognise that
organisations are multipurpose, and what I mean by that is not
simply that they have more than one product line, or more than
one service offer, or even that they serve more recently a range
of stakeholders inside and outside the organisation. It’s more
fundamental than that.
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 1
Cranfield School of Management
David Butcher
It's something to do with when people become responsible for
what they do in an organisation, and of course that is associated
with career moves upward through a hierarchy, they have their
own view about what the organisation should do and of course the
interesting thing about that is that we want them to do that, we
pay them to do that, that is why they do, and they get well
remunerated for that amongst other reasons, but the moment you
say that, the moment you say we want individuals particularly
senior, responsible individuals to have their own view of the
organisation, not simply to fall in line with what everybody else
thinks, then you have a political environment in which you
operate. It was always thus, but the fact that organisations are
the complex, decentralised entities that they are, all the things
that we have known about for a long time now, means that it is
more likely, more obvious that those political agendas – in other
words people with their own views about the way the organisation
should move - come to the fore and somehow or other it has
become a little more legitimate. But the interesting problem is, it
isn’t yet legitimate and that is where the confusion arises.
SM
That legitimacy seems to me to evolve around this idea of
rational management which you describe in the book and you
said that that rational management and reconciling diverse
interests need to be put together – can you elaborate a bit on that?
DB
It's really difficult, but I will try. That is what we set out to do of
course, in the book. Rational management, the rational values
of economic efficiency and effectiveness, and order, formal order,
are deep. They exist as long as we have had the modern era in
the world of work, so since the industrial revolution you could say
that rational values predominate. It’s the fundamentals behind
the concept of bureaucracy, whether we like bureaucracy or we
don’t. And so when you have a way of working that is so
fundamentally apparently opposed to it, then of course you have
the conflict that I was trying to refer to a few minutes ago. How
do you bring those things together? Because of course, nobody
is going to, nor would they want to, dispense with the values of
rationality. They are deeply important and of course we can
relate very fundamentally to them. There is no reason to
somehow or other, in some sense, discard them. But they are
not fit for purpose in the sense that organisations are the complex
entities that they are and ever more so. How do you bring them
together? But, on the one hand, of course, preserving all that is
good about the rational approach, but on the other hand
recognising and being prepared to accept that it is entirely
legitimate that there are diversity of views. There is a pluralism
of views that must and should prevail in any organisation.
Nobody wants an executive full of yes people. We don’t want
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 2
Cranfield School of Management
David Butcher
that – we don’t management teams and boards who simply say
yes all the time. How to bring all that together? Well, in the end
of course, it is that rationality, the structure, the formal structure,
the hierarchy of an organisation which will always be there and
always needs to be there, is a guide rather than a straitjacket.
And that is of course the difficulty, because it can very easily
become more of the straitjacket than the guide, particularly if
people don’t understand the importance of diversity of views and
if they of course, are in some way threatened because they only
know one way to use power. So therein lies the problem.
Ultimately the way forward is to educate better people in
positions of responsibility, who will move into positions of
responsibility, to make this very difficult synthesis. It’s a complex
process.
SM
I would like to pick up one word you have used there – and that is
power. In your book you refer to people not really often fully
understanding the nature of power and where it comes from – I
wonder if you could talk a bit about the implications of power and
managers?
DB
Well, I suppose depending on your point of view, power is the
age old problem in society of any kind. In the world of
organisations, business organisations, public organisations, if
one were to look simply at power, one would simply associate it
with of course, hierarchy, in other words the position of power, if
you are the boss you can exercise power over the people who
work for you. It's always there, it will always be there, but it is but
one form of power and there has been much, much thought has
gone into what power is all about in organisations over many
years. It is beyond question that it is a very diverse and complex
phenomenon. So, for example, it's quite possible, the opposite of
formal power, the authority of being the boss for people who have
no formal authority whatsoever to hold power over those who do
by simply saying, no I can’t do that, no it's not my job, no it's
against the rules – whatever they might say in order to actually
exercise, at least temporarily at a moment in time, power. And
there is a huge amount in between. Now given that is the case,
given that power comes from many, many different sources, you
can use it many, many different ways, it is much more
complicated than just being able to map it onto the formal
structure of an organisation, the hierarchy in other words. Then
to use it well is to understand that complexity, on the one hand,
and to use it well is to when you have understood the complexity,
to exercise power in a principled way. And of course that ties us
very much into the world of politics – if we think about politics in
the formal sense, politicians – in the parliamentary situation, we
worry about them if we start to think that they are not using their
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 3
Cranfield School of Management
David Butcher
power in a principled way. In other words, not towards some just
cause, some good cause that they espouse, but instead have
some other way of working – another reason, another agenda
that is not so clear to us. And so the problem of using power in
the principled way is at the heart of being a good constructive
politician in a business context.
SM
If I move on to look at how you help people to move from what
can be quite often be a very negative view of politics – I mean we
mentioned governmental politics, but I mean people would see
people as lying, as self serving, as kind of say anything to get
where you want to get to, now that is a very stereotypical way,
but people bring some of that to the workplace and say, I am a
manager, so if you are developing people and you have got a lot
of experience of doing that to be much more aware and skilful in
politics, how do you go about that?
DB
Well I think it is no different to being a politician in a formal
governmental societal parliamentary sense. The same problem
essentially exists in businesses. But you are quite right, Steve,
that many people would stereotype politics and politicians and
somehow see a negative view and they would be inclined to
mistrust. It's an easy way to think about politics. Some of which
is justified, of course. But the problem underlying all of this,
where we are talking about politics with a big P, as in parliament
or a little P as in organisations, it's how the politician – the person
with the agenda – does what he or she needs to do in order to
realise that agenda in a principled way, in an honourable way if
you so wish. Now if you think about parliament, in theory, you
might say, the theory of democracy says what we need to do is
debate totally openly. Well we don’t do that, that is why we have
parliamentary representatives, they represent other people and
not everything happens in the debating chamber – it happens in
the corridors, it happens on aeroplanes, on trains, in taxis, over
dinner, just like it does in business. So, you can say that an
executive director will sit with another executive director on a
flight to New York, if they have got business there, and coming
back again and they will concoct all kinds of solutions together
with regard to the business at large and then they will sit on the
board and of course, because they have already had those
conversations, not heard by anybody else except perhaps
passengers on the same flight – hopefully not, but it happens –
well, then of course you could say there is not going to be an
open debate. Have they debated reasonably, fairly and tried to
take account of the views of others, well, it’s the means ends
problem. That’s the essence of using power and therefore being
a good politician as opposed to a bad politician. It is how you
exercise that power and how you convince other people that you
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 4
Cranfield School of Management
David Butcher
are doing something in a way which you can’t be open all the
time, it will sometimes exclude other people, but you are doing it
with the interests of the business at heart and enough people can
buy into that. Now that is exactly the same problem as we were
talking about when we were talking about parliamentary politicians
and it’s a very, very difficult balance to strike.
SM
So, if we move on to saying how do we get people in a
development context to move away from any misconceptions they
might have? At one level you can say well, I will explain that to
them and they will understand, but I suspect is deeper than that.
DB
It is indeed. In executive development, as a part of the
education, the adult education process, at its best, when it really
is at its best, it's something to do with liberating people –
managers – from beliefs that don’t help them, from attitudes that
don’t help them. It is far beyond simply teaching them certain
kinds of skills so that they can do one part or another part of their
job that much better – important as those things are – because if
you can help people to see that rational organisation, the formal
way of doing things, the logical way of doing things, and they
would say of course, the most orderly way of doing things, is only
over layered upon something else altogether which is just as
valuable – the diversity of opinion – and help them to actually see
that through talking about it at some length and helping them to
think about why those beliefs and those attitudes that they have,
understandable as they are, are not terribly helpful sometimes,
then of course the light dawns and all kinds of possibilities open
up for them. I would go so far as to say that once they start to
understand that it substantially changes the way they spend their
days, their weeks and their years in managerial roles because
they understand that they have to spend a lot of time convincing
other people about why you might do one thing rather than
another when those other people have got just as good as
reasons for doing something other than what they would want.
And that is time well spent, it is not an inconvenience, it is not a
distortion of what they should be doing, it is fundamental that kind
of debate which takes place, not in a formal way much of the
time, but in myriad different ways across every organisation,
every day, if you work at it, if you try to think that through you
work through who you should be talking to and in what way, and
it is going to take quite a lot of time, then you are contributing
something hugely important to the leadership of the organisation.
Another way of putting all of that is to say that no one person
leads an organisation, certainly not just somebody who happens
to be in the most senior role, but that leadership is a distributed
task, it is for many of us, and it is a negotiation and that of course
is in the end what politics is all about. And I don’t want to
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 5
Cranfield School of Management
David Butcher
suggest that politics in organisations and politics in government
are one and the same thing – of course, they are not. There are
all kinds of ways in which they differ, but some of the parallels
from government politics are very, very important for us to
understand in the realm of business.
SM
In future editions of your book, what would you like to add or to
clarify or to put in there that wasn’t in the first edition?
DB
I think we are actually revising it at the moment, as you probably
know Steve. I think if there is one thing in particular, it would be
to try and draw out how adult education more generally, and I
really mean that in the business school and related consultancy
training sector, would try to make part of their educational agenda
this difficult area of reconciling alternative agendas, particularly
amongst senior managers, and help people to develop a different
understanding about it. We didn’t really put enough emphasis in
the original book. But, I think it would be fair to say that more
and more we have noticed both that the level of practicing
managers and also, of course, what people write about, there is a
deepening understanding of the role of politics in a positive
sense in business, so I think what we need to do is to emphasise
that it really is important that adult educators take this as part of
their agenda.
SM
OK, thank you.
Transcript prepared by Learning Services for the Knowledge Interchange
www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 6
Cranfield School of Management
Produced by the Learning Services Team
Cranfield School of Management
© Cranfield University 2007