Interview: Professor David Buchanan
Power, Politics and Organisational Change:
Winning the Turf Game
SM
This is a podcast from Cranfield School of Management. I am
Steve Macaulay and I am interviewing Professor David Buchanan
about a book Power, Politics and Organisational Change: Winning
the Turf Game that he wrote with Richard Badham. Now Power,
Politics and Change – these words are three big beasts in the
organisational world and they provoke quite a strong set of
emotions, from my experience, fear and loathing on the one hand
and an attitude of well, that’s what organisations are about. So let’s
start off with a definition first – what do you see politics and power
as being all about? What are they?
DB
Always tricky. Politics is sometimes defined as power in action, so
if I have, for example, coercive power – a gun in my back pocket –
and I ask you to do something and you say no, I might then ask you
to do it again even more politely, and you might then say no. It’s
only when I take the gun out and point it at you that you might
decide that what I have asked you is a good idea and you would do
as I am telling you. So organisational politics is sometimes defined
as power in action – power being a latent capability, the political
tactics being how we exercise that. I think it was Al Capone who
once said you can go a long way with a friendly smile, you can go a
lot further with a friendly smile and a gun in your hand. So it’s
nothing but a range of tactics here.
SM
I would be quite interested to hear what your approach to these
three big words are – you have written a book on it, you have spent,
I guess, a lot of your life looking at this issue. Where do you come
from on these?
DB
I’m an academic, but I have management experience both from
outside and inside higher education, and some of that management
experience – at least from my perspective – was primarily playing
the organisational politics game. Sometimes, as a manager with a
fancy job title, you think you have got buttons you can press and
levers you can pull to make things happen and one very often
discovers that these buttons and levers aren’t connected to
anything, so when you push them and pull them nothing happens
unless you are prepared to use, on the one hand what one might
call social skills, networking, negotiation, influencing skills, but those
very often fade into radical political tactics as well.
SM
One of the things I was interested to read in the book was your
spectrum of political behaviour – so, at the one end conversation
Professor David Buchanan
controls and pressure management, right through to dirty tricks and
illegal acts, which I have to say is where many people see politics.
DB
I think that is a fair comment and one of the discussions that I have
with management groups when I am working in this area is I ask
them to tell me what they would regard as political tactics and we
usually cover the wall with a list of these and they run across that
spectrum, from relatively harmless, routine, visible, taken for
granted, day to day activities like impression management, the way
you were, the way you present yourself, the way you stand and talk,
how you position yourself in the room – to the other end of the
spectrum which is about blackmail, spreading false rumours, taking
credit for other people’s work.
This tends to be a very rich, diverse, dare I say creative, side of
human behaviour that is a very creative and rich aspect of
management behaviour. And I don’t think that spectrum has any
closure. I have even had someone tell me that spreading false
rumours is a political tactic and also that using honesty is a political
tactic, because they use it in a surreptitious way – dare I say, a
manipulative way – to encourage someone to change their mind.
Another definition of politics would be getting your own way in the
face of opposition and we tend to use a variety of tactics to achieve
that.
SM
So I take it from the line of the conversation, and I noticed in the
book it said you won’t be a successful change agent unless you use
politics.
DB
The argument of the book is that if you are trying to change
something in an organisation or if you are trying to stop change that
someone else is trying to drive, if you are not prepared to play the
politics game you will fail sooner or later, and probably sooner. In a
very real, practical managerial sense it almost doesn’t matter what
your position on this is. The research evidence shows that most
managers will and do play politics. So if you take the moral high
ground, if you take a position that says no I am not going to get
engaged in this, then you take that stance safe in the knowledge
that somewhere between 70, 80 or 90 per cent of your colleagues
don’t think that way, and won’t behave that way either.
SM
So, you are faced with a potential political situation. You spell out
four factors in the book that you need to be aware of.
DB
I think one of the important factors is your own personal values,
principles and beliefs. Machiavelli says that if you are encumbered
with a lot of morals, principles and values, then you are potentially
heavily handicapped. Some of us believe that, some of us think
that that is a terrible thing to suggest, but nevertheless that
observation is out there and some people do believe that. And I
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Professor David Buchanan
think it is true to say that if you abide strictly by the code of ethics, or
by the code of conduct, or even a published management code of
conduct, that will not only stop you doing things, but it will
sometimes stop you from doing things that would benefit colleagues
and the organisation. But nevertheless, the first criterion I think has
to be personal values and beliefs. You have to live with your own
actions.
The second criterion for any behaviour from a practical
management point of view is will it work? Will this take me to the
end result that I want to achieve? And once again, Machiavelli
rears his head because Machiavelli above all talks about the means
justifying the ends. People tend to forget that Machiavelli didn’t just
refer to any ends, he was referring to the ends that you the prince,
the manager, the change agent, believe to be the right thing to do.
So it wasn’t just any old ends, it was about winning what you believe
is right. But one criterion here is if I do this, if I believe in this way,
will it work, will it take me to where I want to be?
A third criterion, I think, is if I do this and it doesn’t work, what is my
next option? There are a lot of situations in life where if you act in a
particular manner and it doesn’t work, you have other options open
to you but it doesn’t take long to think of situations where to do this
and it fails for whatever reason, you are stuffed – there isn’t another
option, you are leaving.
So those I think are three criteria: your personal values and beliefs;
will it work; and if this doesn’t work, what do I do next. One of the
most important criteria, I think, is what will this do to my reputation?
If I am seen to be behaving in this way and it is successful, will that
enhance my reputation, will it leave my reputation neutral or will it
put it at risk? I think it is the consideration for one’s reputation that
takes one into the politics game, otherwise you are pushed aside by
those who are playing. There are also considerations of reputation
that stop you using the dirty tricks, because that’s then what you get
a reputation for.
One has to get a reputation for making things happen and getting
things done, dealing with the difficult people, dealing with the difficult
issues – not walking away from them. If you get a reputation for
making things happen, getting things done, dealing with the difficult
issues, then that has other career implications. But if you get a
reputation for playing the dirty tricks, I don’t have to tell you what the
consequences of that are.
SM
I know that you have attempted to help people develop their political
skills and I would like to get some personal insights from you about
that process. I know you have worked with recent graduates
through to very experienced managers.
DB
Organisational politics is still a taboo subject for many people – not
all, but for many it is. That means on the one hand that it is not
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Professor David Buchanan
widely researched: the evidence base that we have is good, but it is
not great, but primarily it means that it is not a topic that we discuss.
It’s not usually discussed openly on management programmes and I
think one of the starting points here is to open the subject up for
discussion and that does two or three things. One is it generates
awareness – not only personal awareness, but also awareness of
the behaviour of other people round about you and I think that if you
don’t have the antennae switched on, if the radar isn’t active, you
can miss an awful lot.
The second thing which I think just talking about it does, is provide a
framework – so that is the decision making framework of the four
criteria, also I have another framework which deals with the different
categories of organisation political tactics. It’s like the old, possibly
untrue story about the Inuit, or the Eskimo, having twenty different
words for snow, I believe the same is true in Finnish language. If
you have only three words for snow, you can actually only see three
kinds of snow, if you have got fifteen or twenty different words for
different kinds of snow, you can actually see that variety.
So if you can provide someone not only with an opportunity to
become more aware of these issues personally and in the behaviour
of others, if you provide a framework, then that becomes a useful
conscious thinking tool both for analysing and deciding one’s own
behaviour, but also analysing, observing, interpreting other people’s
behaviour. Having said all that, I don’t think you can learn
organisational politics in the classroom, it’s like windsurfing, you
have got to go and get wet, you have got to go fall off the board.
So I am afraid that it is a skill that one learns with practice and some
of that practice is successful, but one also learns from one’s failures
– which is a negative thing to say, but it’s a long game. It’s not like
a game of tennis, it continues, so just because one has lost this
exchange this part of the game doesn’t necessarily mean to say one
is pushed out of the long game.
SM
One of the things I was interested to see was that gender makes a
difference. The research seems to suggest that women and men
behave differently in a political context.
DB
The research did – the standard stereotype looking at the research
data that we have, mostly American – not all – but mostly American
through the 1970s into the 1990s creates two caricatures. One of
women as wonderful, but weak, and the other of men as bad but
bold. And that research evidence is fairly consistent. The problem
I have is that today in the twenty first century I meet as many men
who regard organisational politics – to use your first statement –
with the fear and loathing response, and as many women who when
asked that question shrug and say yeah, it’s part of my job. So I
think those stereotypes are dated – at least they are no longer
current in my experience, although you will still see those
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Professor David Buchanan
stereotypes as always, they are no longer as common as they used
to be certainly in the experience of other managers that I have been
working with recently. So I would challenge that image. And I
think the rules have changed, and that is the position that we try to
set out in the book. Here is the evidence, it’s dated, let’s think
again.
SM
One of the aspects that rather intrigued me was the words political
entrepreneurial heroes – can you explain a bit more about that?
DB
It’s become fashionable to become a transformational leader and
that phrase has a certain cachet. There is a literature behind it and
a lot of evidence – and a lot of that is American, although it is a
concept that has been imported here into the UK. And that concept
of transformational leadership – as indeed leadership in a wider
sense – is usually described in apolitical terms. This is a purely a
technical exercise, or it’s to do with personality, charisma,
competence, communication skill. Politics don’t come into this.
I don’t think that is necessarily the case because transformational
leadership, being the political entrepreneur, the ideas person, the
innovator, getting ideas accepted, getting them through the
organisation, that requires a high degree of sophisticated political
skill. Good ideas very rarely sell themselves on their own merit –
they have to be actively sold.
And I think the problem that we try and pick up in the book is that
while that position of the entrepreneurial hero, the innovator, the
charismatic transformational leader is portrayed as a glowing,
shining, white, squeaky clean ethical stance – completely apolitical
– in practice it can’t be. A famous exchange, manager to
colleague, I don’t play these games at work; colleague: ah, so you
play the 'I don’t play these games at work' game. So I think one
has to look with a bit of scepticism at the way in which management
fads and fashions of that kind are presented.
SM
Interesting. What we have done here really is lift the lid on this
taboo – only just a little bit, no more than that. But thank you very
much David.
DB
Not at all – I hope this has been useful.
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