Automotive pioneer Henry Ford once quipped, “Why is it that I always get the whole person when what I really want is a pair of hands?” While Ford may have been a business genius and ahead of his time, he definitely would not have the contemporary relationship currency of savvy to count him among today’s great organizational leaders. People are messy — different personalities, different baggage and expectations — but as leadership success consultant Todd Nielsen puts it, “…if there are no people to lead, then there is no leader!” Every success that an organization has comes as a direct result of its people, not its machines, processes or even strategies. Even the greatest strategy will fail if the leader fails to unite the people he or she expects to execute it. The most successful leaders have the savvy to know that they have to be deliberate in cultivating their people and in cultivating relationships with their people.
“I have worked with lots of leaders who absolutely hate dealing with people,” continues Nielson. “Many leaders just want to tell their people the goal, and then expect them to just go out and create amazing success without any guidance, coaching, managing or…leading.”
But it’s not just leaders who need to possess people-savvy skills. If psychologist Abraham Maslow had published a Hierarchy of Workplace Needs, navigating the complexity of the workplace water-cooler moment would be a base-level need. “The rules for work are changing,” says psychologist and emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman. “We’re being judged by a new yardstick: not just by how smart we are, but by how we handle ourselves and each other.”
“Workplace savvy” requires the development of a wide range of skills and behaviors that all have distinctly different purposes and implications. I believe the most important of these can be grouped into the three areas of professional maturity, emotional intelligence and office politics.
Professional Maturity
Career strategist Danielle Forget Shield says professional maturity “does not mean age” but instead is defined by your ability to understand, accept and model these five concepts:
Consider others. This is not about showing empathy or sympathy, but a recognition that it’s not all about you. “Instead of complaining about how horrible your manager [is], consider how difficult things must be for everyone else too.” It’s easy to get too focused on your own success in a competitive environment, but “a lot more is accomplished when we quit worrying about who gets the credit.”
Remove emotions. Don’t diminish your passion for your work or pretend you don’t have feelings about work-related issues, but an imperative of maturity is accepting that business decisions are business decisions. “Comments about the outcome of a project or product are not direct attacks on your efforts,” but simply a reflection of what is (or is not) in the organization’s best interests at this time.
Accept your pay grade. This does not imply a blockade on your career advancement or provide an excuse for poor communication from the top down, but “there are a lot of factors that go into business decisions that you might not know about…. Maturity at work comes with realizing you don’t have all the answers and you are not privy to all the information that goes into a business decision.”
You can’t know everything. Relying only on what you know yourself or what you can learn on your own is a recipe for failure. “You’ll be significantly more successful if you fill your extra time identifying and getting to know the people who will complement your skills and knowledge. Part of maturing is realizing that you don’t and can’t know everything.”
Enjoy the silence. In a society that suffers greatly with a busyness epidemic, it’s easy to forget the importance of quieting your mind and making the time to develop your thoughts before expressing them or acting upon them. “Become comfortable stopping and thinking and absorbing the information that has or is being presented to you.”
Emotional Intelligence
The term “emotional intelligence,” or “EQ,” refers to “a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way,” as defined by Multi-Health Systems.
These skills are not only critical in life in general, but they are a collective expectation of the workplace. Developing emotional and social competencies is essential to your individual success and your ascension through management and leadership. You may never hear those precise words used to describe that expectation, but based on the reactions of the leaders around you to people who do not possess a well-developed EQ, it should be obvious that it’s a requirement.
Understanding the complexities of EQ can be a bit daunting. The easiest approach would be to use one of the many EQ assessment tools out there to walk you through your current assets and development opportunities and then learn what you can do to improve. My personal preference is for the Bar-On Emotional Intelligence model, or EQ-i 2.0 assessment, but without an EQ test at hand, here is a quick snapshot of the five areas of Emotional intelligence that the EQ-i 2.0 assessment measures and why they are important:
| EQ Focus area… | Includes the concepts of… | In the workplace, people with well-developed EQ would… |
| Self-Perception | self-regard, self-actualization and emotional self-awareness | be understanding and accepting of their strengths and weaknesses, feel strong and self-confident, be committed to self-improvement, recognize and understand their emotions (and emotional reactions) as a factor in how they interpret the actions and behaviors of others |
| Self-Expression | emotional expression, assertiveness and independence | have appropriate expressions of their feelings (both verbally and nonverbally); appropriately communicate and defend their ideas, rights and values in a socially acceptable, nonoffensive/nondestructive manner; and have the ability to be autonomous, self-directed and free of emotional dependencies |
| Interpersonal | relationships, empathy and social responsibility | develop and maintain relationships that are characterized by trust and respect, appreciate their co-workers’ perspectives, and have a social consciousness that frames or filters their perspective |
| Decision- making | problem solving, reality testing and impulse control | have the ability to find solutions to problems where emotions are involved, remain objective by seeing things as they really are (resisting the emotional biases that can cause us to be less objective) and resist the temptation to act rashly in behaviors or decisionmaking |
| Stress Management | flexibility, stress tolerance and optimism | adapt their emotions and reactions to unexpected circumstances or ideas, manage difficult situations with the belief that they can influence the outcome in a positive manner, and remain hopeful and resilient, despite occasional setbacks |
Office Politics
Both professional maturity and emotional intelligence focus more on how your internal process impacts your perception of your external environment, driving your choices, actions and behavior in that environment. Office politics may start more with the external drivers of the work environment, but it requires a highly developed aptitude for objective perspective, which is more easily achieved if you have mastered those first two sets of skills.
According to management training group Mind Tools, office politics is simply “the [collection of] strategies that people play to gain advantage, personally or for a cause they support.” Now that doesn’t sound so menacing, right? Yet more often than not, there is a tone of negativity and judgment when someone is seen as playing office politics to get things done. And to be fair, if a person is employing those strategies to reap an advantage for personal gain and/or at the expense of others, then the negativity and judgment about playing office politics is rightly placed.
“Good ‘office politics,’ on the other hand, helps you fairly promote yourself and your cause, and is more often called networking and stakeholder management,” says Dianna Podmoroff, a manager at Mind Tools. “But the truth is, to ensure your own success and that of your projects, you must navigate the minefield of office politics.” Here are a few tips from Mind Tools for making office politics a positive experience for you (and those around you).
Re-map the organization chart. It’s not about who has what title or what department they sit in. Figure out who are the influencers, who is respected, who are consistently the mentors and champions of other people, and who is always in conflict with those around them.
Build relationships. Now that you have your “impact” map, start building relationships across multiple networks to keep your finger on the pulse of the organization.
Make the most of your network. While the purpose of building relationships is to practice “good office politics,” in gaining information, improving difficult relationships and capitalizing on opportunities, you can use them to stay clear of negative politicking, too.
Neutralize negative play. Your impact map should also identify those people who use others for their own purposes, and not necessarily for the common good. But as the saying goes, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” You can’t just avoid them, but you can learn how to avoid or counter the impact of their negative politicking.
Govern your own behavior. Be careful that your own efforts to build useful, positive relationships don’t get misinterpreted by others as the “bad” kind of office politics. Don’t gossip, don’t get sucked into arguments, avoid whining and complaining, and when voicing objections or criticism, make sure you take an organizational perspective, not a personal one.
The expectations I’ve just detailed, while absolutely critical to your success, are numerous and may feel a bit daunting. Author and career coach Billi Lee, who founded The Savvy Institute, brings it all together much more succinctly:
“Get real. Grow up. Savvy is the acquired ability to operate successfully in any environment. It is the organizational ‘street smarts’ that allow you to deal with the world the way it is, rather than the way it is supposed to be. Don’t whine about the political, economic or social realities of your workplace situation. Deal with them. Savvy people are flexible, adaptable, capable of reading people and situations, and are able to respond effectively — they are truly ‘response-able.’”
Lauren Yost is NRPA’s Vice President of Operations.