Why Designers Hate Politics (And What To Do About It)
Rethink what politics means and how it can help you
Designers often claim that they understand human behavior better than others, but our distaste for what we call politics reveals we do not understand one of the most natural behaviors people in groups have.
The confusion stems from the two different meanings of the word:
Politics (n): the things self-serving, manipulative people do.
Politics (n): the process of making decisions that apply to members of a group.
When someone says “I hate working in Stan’s organization, he’s so political” they’re using the first definition, and they specifically mean the abuse of power to serve someone’s self-interest or the creation of a culture of fear and dysfunction. These are bad things, for sure, but often the word politics is used in a lazy way, by someone who simply doesn’t understand why their ideas get shot down, or why they’re not given the power they think they deserve.
The hard truth is that human nature in groups is political (2nd definition above). The fields of sociology, anthropology, political science and psychology are largely about the complex challenges of people trying to get along with each other.
Put simply, when you organize people to do something, whether it’s throwing a party or starting a company, each individual has their own opinions on the right way to do it. And they have preferences for who they like to work with and what tasks they like to work on. This means no matter how talented leaders of an organization are, some people will not get everything they want.
This motivates people to influence those with power or to try and take it for themselves (and if raises, promotions and prestige are at stake the tendency for people to forget their ideals increases). There are of course many ways to express ambition, some much healthier and more transparent than others, but politics are everywhere people are.
“Every management act is a political act… in some way [it] redistributes or reinforces power.” — Richard Farson
Blaming “politics”, in the abstract, is a convenient way to avoid taking responsibility for solving problems. The same is true for pointing fingers at “management,” “engineering,” or “marketing” and saying how stupid they are (See: The Fallacy of ‘They Don’t Get It’). Of course it’s true you could work in a completely dysfunctional place where even Machiavelli could not succeed, but it’s far more likely there are reasonable forces at work you don’t fully understand.
Pointing fingers doesn’t make those you point at any less stupid or ineffective, and it deflects any personal responsibility for learning how to be more persuasive, collaborative or thoughtful in how you approach working with them. And who knows, it’s possible that with a careful eye, it might just be that what you see as incompetence in another is just a smart person constrained by similarly difficult political factors that you can’t fully see. Of course some workplaces are truly broken, but that mostly raises the goal of finding yourself a new place to work. When a designer, a natural optimist, is pessimistic about who they work for and with, it’s time to move on.
Designers love to talk about their mastery of problem-solving skills, but politics is just another kind of problem-solving: people problems. If you approach organizational problems with the same optimism, discipline and creativity that you approach a design or engineering problem, you can find alternatives to explore and use them to make better decisions. And this is the grand irony of designers complaining about politics: designers should be great at the combination of problem-solving and understanding people, yet so often they can’t escape their frustration that these problems even exist.
The greatest factor in your political experience of an organization is your boss. A good manager will buffer you from organizational drama and set you up to succeed, while a bad one will amplify the worst problems an organization has. For designers, this means the heaviest political burdens land on the most senior designer in their organization. It’s their job to pave the way for all the people who work for them, establishing relationships with other powerful people in the organization.
But sadly design as a profession suffers from the Peter Principle. The problem of overpromotion is universal in the working world, but design is a specialized enough field that often the people who become design directors, or executives, are far better at designing than directing, leading or managing. In the best cases they know their primary job is to be an ambassador of design to the CEO and other executives, to form partnerships, align goals and gain influence that can be transferred down into their own organization. But even as an individual designer without much support from above, there are still many things you can do.
The way forward is that politics, even in the healthiest organization, is based on your reputation. The same organization will feel very different if you have a great reputation for getting good work done vs. having a poor one (or no reputation at all). This means earning trust and cultivating respect from your peers and superiors is the path. This is far more productive than allowing your audible frustrations at “politics” in meetings be the primary way people know you. And much like designers study users, they can also study their coworkers and superiors. By asking simple questions, much can be revealed that makes healthier politics possible:
What is my reputation? How does this help or hurt my ability to influence decisions?
Who among my peers is thriving here? Why? (If no one is thriving, also ask why)? What can I learn from them?
What does my boss value? What problems is she trying to solve? How can my talents help solve them?What political skills are my weakest? How can I become a better facilitator? negotiator? persuader? listener?
Is my (design) work simply rated by leaders as low priority and what I see as “politics” is really just a prioritization decision?
Who frustrates me the most? Are my goals aligned with theirs? Why not? Who sets their goals? Do they have a good relationship with who sets mine? Who is the boss of all of them and why haven’t they fixed this problem yet?
Who has more influence than I do, that I trust, who can lend me their ear for advice?
Can I ask one of them to mentor me over coffee now and then about how to get things done here?
Who has a good reputation that I can partner with to pitch an idea and use their reputation to help grow mine?
Is there a manager here that I’d be better suited working for?
Or is it just time for me to find a new place to work?
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References:
This essay was originally published here, and was adapted from Chp 16. of my book Making Things Happen
Dealing with Organizational Politics, By Jorge Arango (his essay inspired me to write this one)
Ya, as Kaul said, thanks for surfacing something so elusive. I remember that as part of feminism, and expanding consciousness, in the 1970s, someone wrote a business book "Games Your Mother Never Taught You," (an acquaintance wrote the author a fan letter). At that time someone else wrote a book with a sentence like, "Young people hear their parents talk about something called office politics but they don't get it."
Some culture things are not common sense: They remain elusive unless you figure it out on your own or someone tells you.
Thanks, Scott, for surfacing this topic. I’ve been going through a LinkedIn Learning course on “Navigating Organizational Politics as a Senior Leader,” and one idea that stayed with me was the concept of Political Quotient (PQ) — a measure of how well we use political intelligence to be effective at work.
Your explanation made me realize that what we often see as ‘politics’ is just another design challenge — one we have to map, test, and iterate on like any other.
Thanks for sharing the list of reflective Questions!