Political Savvy – February 2006

"Political Savvy - A Critical Management Competence"

Tuesday 21 February 2006 - Novotel Tower Bridge
Tuesday 28 October 2006 – Reading Moat House, Nr Wokingham

Organisational politics is an activity that is derided by all, played by many and ignored by the rest. Many people, even Senior Executives maintain that politics aren’t important or don’t exist. Yet, every day in their organisations, power plays, ego trips, turf battles and deception hurt careers and the bottom line. At it’s extreme when corrupt people with strong political skills (‘sharks’) in power, the results can be devastating, as recent corporate scandals have shown.

Despite excellent intentions, many managers and executives are too narrowly focused on their own results and projects. Assuming that their work will speak for itself, they may become the victims of behind-the-scenes politics operating in their organisations. Like ostriches, they can inadvertently stick their head in the sand, hoping that organisational politics will go away.

Some of you may have read the Harvard bestseller ‘Survival of the Savvy’ by Dr Rick Brandon which looks at ‘High-Integrity Political Tactics for Career and Company Success’. MaST has recently been licensed to work with his materials and the online Organisational Savvy questionnaire.

Summary of forum

Politics operates at all levels of organisations. Recent corporate scandals (Enron/Barings) highlight the dangers of politics without integrity. Handling internal and external politics successfully has a massive impact on business, careers, bottom line and reputation. The leaders and managers within your organisation are the stewards of the company’s resources, profitability and reputation. Being politically savvy will enable them to ethically navigate organisational politics and build high-integrity political relationships in today’s marketplace. This programme has been developed in conjunction with the best selling Harvard authors Dr Rick Brandon and Dr Marty Seldman.

At this forum we gave a taster of the programme by exploring our negative associations with politics in the workplace and reframed them in a more constructive light to overcome prejudices to developing these skills. We introduced the Political Savvy model and participants carried out some self analysis of where they fell on the scale of under to over political and the implications of this on themselves, their teams, their function and organisation. Armed with this knowledge we gave an overview of street savvy actions that can be simply implemented to create impact with integrity. This was followed up after the forum with the offer of a free online assessment for each participant to examine their own political savvy in more detail.

What our delegates said:
‘Very stimulating – useful for hi-potential and mentor scheme’
‘Good interactive session’
‘Very useful topic and interesting’
‘Very interesting, would like to know more’

If you would like to know more about the topics discussed or about Political Savvy, please contact Helen Hill at MaST.

MaST team on the day:
Helen Hill
Michelle Brailsford
Zara Hobley
Simon Kennedy
Paul de Zulueta
John Royce