IN THE WAR on internal politics HR professionals are often well placed to help foster a collaborative, problem solving approach, according to a workplace psychologist
IN THE WAR on internal politics, HR professionals are often well placed to help foster a collaborative, problem solving approach, according to a workplace psychologist.
Greg Cook, director of the Centre for Leadership and Management, said this is because HR is often not aligned with operational matters.
In circumstances where political discord makes life hell for managers, team leaders and staff, HR can be in position to act as an effective conduit to positive politics management.
“All organisations have conflict that arises over the allocation and especially the scarcity of resources. Consequently, many goals, strategies and other decisions emerge from bargaining,” Cook said.
“This is usual and will lead to internal politics. Hopefully it will lead to positive politics or at least to principled bargaining rather than negative politics.”
If an organisation is also in the habit of maintaining enduring and competitive coalitions of stakeholders, selectively managing or censoring information or having lots of “undiscussable” issues, then he said politics is more likely to be problematic.
This is potentially more obvious in the Australian public sector. “I suspect that the public sector is more ‘political’, but I don’t see this a criticism, just a reflection of their differences [to the private sector],” he said.
Under these conditions, he said the leadership and diplomacy skills of HR professionals will be tested. For a start, they “need to exercise high order leadership skills, including a capacity for positive politics – that is politics in the service of the task.
“This requires a clear understanding of the underlying issues; strong, diverse, organisational relationships and a personal capacity to not get side-tracked into narrow positions, personalities or petty negative politics.”
He said negative politics were all about winning, sometimes by any means. “Ongoing negative politics is very destructive of effective working relationships. In effect [HR professionals] are internal consultants and this slightly removed role can be used to help their colleagues reflect on their management of political issues,”Cook said.
Useful skills for HR professionals are a capacity for genuine, working relationships – based on clear values and a shared understanding of organisational purpose.
“These are sometimes described as ‘soft’ skills, but of course they are, in a different sense of the word, very hard – and still grossly under-emphasised in many organisations.”
“Political situations however do require an ability to identify the key stakeholders, their view of the issue, their authority and usual style and tactics. It is enormously helpful if the HR professional has enough organisational intelligence to also be able to map the networks and alliances of stakeholders”, he said.
