Corporate culture is not the “real world” we live our personal lives in. Each corporate culture is its own world, with its own rules and its own version of reality. To understand it, you have to understand the direction and priorities of that world, then figure out how to adapt to the vision and mission of the company.
Integrity and politics
I’ll say it plainly: the words “integrity” and “politics” don’t usually sit in the same sentence. That’s not an insult to corporate politicians, but politics on its own isn’t a reflection of a person’s integrity. For how this plays out in practice, read Making It Through Office Politics At Your New Job.
The main function of politics is to produce an outcome. Managers often won’t tell you directly what needs to happen. Instead, they create an imbalance, or a gap, which forces the need for change and action.
Understand that among the many reasons for this approach, one of the main goals is delegating responsibility to subordinates. If a manager creates an imbalance in front of you, it falls to you to work out a solution, chart a course, and produce a workable outcome that restores the balance.
The thin line
While I’d argue that modern ideals of integrity don’t map cleanly onto corporate politics, there are certainly cases where people abuse their political power, and those cases are the ones that give the whole idea of “office politics” its bad reputation. Ethics and principles do come into play once that line gets crossed. Employees need to understand the reasons behind office politics and how it’s applied in day-to-day decisions, but the people wielding political influence also need to understand how to use that power responsibly, without stepping over the line into something closer to manipulation.
Until someone has built up real experience with corporate cultures, my usual advice is this: once you’re in the business setting, treat it as a political landscape you’re navigating. Try not to take things personally in a corporate environment, because it usually isn’t about you as a person. It’s about results, plain and simple.
The line gets crossed by the inexperienced or the power-hungry office politician. The clearest way to judge whether that’s happened is against your own personal boundaries.
The single most important lesson here is that you should never give the corporate world access to your personal world. Keep a real distance between the facts of your “personal world” and the facts of your “business world.”
How many versions of you are there?
To balance your personal life with your corporate life, it helps to treat the corporate world as a “sub-world” within your larger life. You have your work world, your friend world, your hobby world, and your family world, just as examples. By learning the rules of the corporate sub-world the same way you learned the rules of your other worlds, you can fold politics into the mix and manage it without losing ground in your career or your life outside it.
What’s next?
Inside a company, the question is rarely one of ethics or integrity. It’s a question of results. Well-trained managers use politics as an effective tool to get outcomes that match the company’s vision and mission. As an employee, you need to learn how to separate your personal world from your business world, so you can understand the company’s purpose and direction without your own personal ideals getting in the way.
Every corporation is as much a living, breathing entity as a person is, constantly adjusting to stay alive in its own environment. Just as your cells work to keep you alive without you consciously directing each one, office politics isn’t about any single individual inside the company. It’s about the survival of the company as a whole. Once you understand where the line falls between your two worlds, and once you accept that political motivation is fundamentally about results rather than personalities, your dealings inside this strange new world will go more smoothly and more effectively.
The single most important lesson to learn is that you should never give the corporate world access to your personal world. Keep real distance between the facts of your “personal world” and the facts of your “business world.”
To balance your personal life with your corporate life, it helps to treat the corporate world as a “sub-world” within your larger life. You have your work world, your friend world, your hobby world, and your family world, just as examples. As an employee, you need to learn how to separate your personal world from your business world so you can understand the company’s purpose and direction without falling victim to your own personal ideals. Also worth a read is our article When the elections come and there is a heated argument that tops the views of all, there are some years.