The Politics Problem

How organizational politics crush high-performance

Elite performers often consider their organization more stressful than their competition. There’s a reason that crossing the lines, for players and coaches alike, becomes an escape. Though we often assume the escape is from life outside sport, what happens within the building can be just as troubling. 

Your organizational politics drain your performer’s capacity.

Organizational politics defined

This conception that the organization is a major source of stress applies equally to the HPKW and the athlete. Though much of the research in this area has been conducted with Olympic-level athletes, emerging research on the health and wellness of coaches supports a strikingly similar conclusion: much of how professional and elite sport is structured, including the unrealistic expectations, interpersonal relationships based on exchange and transaction, and team chemistry (or lack thereof) creates untenable anxiety and stress.

Though what’s described as political behavior comes in varying forms, there’s some agreement that politics often circles around power, influence, and controlling outcomes. A more technical definition put forth in the management literature is:  “Organizational politics is the management of influence to obtain ends not sanctioned by the organization or to obtain sanctioned ends through non-sanctioned influence means.” A less technical way of describing it might be to say it involves using influence to attain things that the organization may not be looking for, or to attain things the organization is looking for using harmful or nefarious mechanisms. Either way, it’s a bit unorthodox and likely unrelated to the ultimate goal of the organization, both of which can be difficult for people to understand.

Politics vs. Performance

People instinctively understand that politics is a part of their organization, but are much less aware of how these politics influence their day-to-day performance. Because the impact and influence of politics can be invisible and play out over extended periods of time, there’s a tendency to discount the importance of addressing political behavior and instead assume that political behavior is simply part and parcel of the organizational citizenship experience. This helplessness about the role of politics in the organization can lead to a sense of despair about things happening “to” people instead of “for” people. 

In the case of high performers, the sense that something is happening to them can lead to behavior that directly undermines their ability to deliver over the long term. For example, people who perceive themselves to have less control over particular outcomes might be more likely to give up early to preserve a sense of competence and dignity, rather than strive continuously only to be met with disappointment and failure. Psychologists call this having an “internal locus of control” or an “external locus of control.” People with an internal locus tend to believe that outcomes are influenced by their own abilities; people with an external locus of control believe outcomes are more strongly influenced by external events.

We can start to see now how political forces can interact to impact the high performer. As politics begins to dictate outcomes unrelated to the ultimate goal, or the ultimate goal is achieved in nefarious ways, performers feel an increasing sense of disconnection from their ability to influence the outcome. The belief in their ability to deliver the outcome they want starts to shift. High-performers go from feeling a sense of autonomy, mastery, purpose, and connectedness to the mission to seeing themselves as cogs in a wheel, unable to influence the direction of the organization or mission.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Because political behavior can obscure a person’s ability to determine the political actor’s true intention, it can be a major drain on the energy efficiency of the performers. Ambiguity and uncertainty are incredibly taxing on the brain’s processing efficiency. Ambiguity and uncertainty wrapped up in human connection can be even more problematic, as humans have evolved to co-regulate one another’s energy efficiency. Politics quite literally drain your energy resources, whether you want to tune into their impact or not.

As problematic political behavior plays out over time, this drain on resources becomes more intense. As people become more driven by power, influence, and status, and begin to work toward uncommon or unshared goals, it becomes increasingly complex to predict their behavior. The more unpredictable someone is, the more resources it takes to figure them out. The more resources spent on figuring out a problem unrelated to performance, the fewer resources available to solve the performance puzzle. 

Contrast this experience with the performance itself. Performance often has strict constraints, with a clear start, end, and set of rules. Preparation via film review and scouting renders opponents more predictable, and efforts to counter that predictability tend to be limited. High performers can learn what to expect in competition, and there are restrictions to the nefarious means through which people can obtain the ordained end.

Managing the risk

Undoubtedly politics play a role in any human endeavor. Power and influence have evolved to be important signals of the ability to provide resources and marshall support. While we likely can’t completely eliminate organizational politics (people are going to inherently be competitive for resources), it’s important to try and take steps to manage the politics to not interfere with elite performers.

Building trust

In a team setting, including a team of players and a team of coworkers, one of the fastest ways to optimize performance is to build trust. Fundamentally, trust is the ability to predict with some degree of accuracy how your teammates are going to behave in certain conditions. The ability to predict efficiently means that any extra energy expenditure can be directed to the task of performing optimally. If you have to spend energy figuring out whether or not your teammate supports you or is trying to stab you in the back, you’re going to have less energy to give in the game. The simplest way to build trust is to reward people for acting consistently and predictably. Being a good teammate is quite literally showing up the same day each day for those around you.

Managing expectations

As sport has become increasingly commercialized and capitalized, the expectations surrounding the performance of coaches and players have grown to an unrealistic, nearing superman level. Psychological research has demonstrated that the gap between what people perceive as possible and what is expected can be a major source of distress. 

Players and coaches are critiqued for single-digit mistakes made over the course of a 3 hours performance under pressure. Coaches are given increasingly less time to create a “winning culture”. Players are expected to perform immediately after signing a major contract, as though putting their name on the dotted line somehow speeds up their learning curve. As the expectations become more unwieldy, the management of internal resources to combat the stress associated with meeting those expectations becomes increasingly more challenging.

Having high expectations isn’t problematic in and of itself. What’s problematic is when those expectations are outsized relative to the current ability (or sometimes reality altogether). Organizations would do well to try and realistically assess their current capabilities, and to better plot how they’d like their organization to develop, rather than focusing exclusively on what they’d like their organization to achieve. This is not to say that the outcome doesn’t matter - outcomes matter in all performance settings - but we need to maintain a realistic sense of the range of possible outcomes, rather than measuring people against what we dream of.

Appreciating social connection

Humans have evolved as social creatures. There are many reasons that so much emotion is expressed in sport, but one critical factor is the relationship between players and performance, and the sense of togetherness they feel working toward a common goal. The more deeply connected teammates are, the more emotional expression we’d expect - because that emotion is a real and valuable signal to one another of the current needs and status of resources amongst the team. We prize the expression of the emotion for the length of the game and value team chemistry during the game but don’t strive to cultivate it outside of performance. 

For a long time, sport has dramatically undervalued the role of interpersonal relationships in supporting and enhancing elite performance. Members of the front office or coaching staff are expected to not invest too heavily in their players, and instead treat their players like commodities. Players resist developing a closer connection for fear that their teammates will try to “expose their weaknesses.” The focus on winning at all costs has cost us the ability to form authentic relationships.

The best teams are the teams that care most about one another. Truly caring about someone for who they are as a person not only enhances their ability to use energy efficiently but is a more efficient use of your energy. True connection between teammates is actually a performance enhancer, but the culture and politics of sport and business undermine it at every turn

Building predictability

Although theoretically it would be fair to assume that everyone working for a sport organization (or any organization, for that matter) shares a common goal, the reality is that individual needs, goals, and motives often subvert a sense of belonging and larger team camaraderie. We would expect to be a place of safety, where we can welcome trust and vulnerability. What we find is typically the opposite.

Part of why having a common goal is important is that it shapes the context in which performers operate. This context, or shared mental model, typically has shared constraints, similar to the constraints of performance mentioned above. For example, if the goal of the team is to deliver a sales pitch for next Friday, the goal itself has a set of constraints that will dictate what behaviors to expect – namely, in this case, making slides, working hard, and completing tasks by the deadline.

When individuals bring their own goals to bear in the same context, it can start to hurt the team’s ability to deliver if it’s not monitored closely. If Suzie is part of the team working on Friday’s pitch but has the personal goal of making sure she shows better to upper management than anyone else, she may do things like delay her contribution to the group, put down someone else’s work or try to lead the pitch by herself. Each of these things is difficult for her teammates to predict, and makes it harder for them to deliver their best performance. Suzie is reaching her goal at the cost of her team delivering their best performance.

The antidote is to reward prosocial consistency. Nice people should not finish last. People who go out of their way to help someone else or who support the team or organization’s mission above their own goals should advance faster than those who consistently try to outshine their peers. Recognize, reward, and reinforce behavior that moves the team forward, not just a person forward.

Conclusion

Politics drain your performers, but they don’t have to. We allow that to happen by reinforcing the social norms around politics. We reward people who get the job done by any means necessary, we relish the chance to gossip about our coworkers, and we prize power and influence above competence and compassion. Making an active effort to eliminate organizational politics can have an outsized influence on the performance of an organization’s very best.

Reflective Questions:

• Do you contribute to your organization’s political climate? 

• Where can you make an immediate impact on reducing political harm to your performers?

• How would your organization improve if the politics were minimized?