Office politics

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Office politics
/ˈɒfɪs ˈpɒlɪtɪks/ (n.)

A means for the neurotic to express themselves.

There is a simple rule. The more important and measurable your contribution to the bottom line, the less scope you have for office politics. The less time, interest or inclination you will have for it; the more naturally immune you will be to it.

It follows, therefore, that the amount of office politics corresponds to the economic significance of the function, and vice versa: the causal arrow is bi-directional.

The Machiavellian continuum

Angsty behaviour sits on a continuum.

Revenue generators

Generally, in a bank, those who bring in business — sales — and those who extract revenue from it — trading — will be the least political. Here there is least scope for dark arts: you eat what you kill, all can be measured in in a P&L statement, bullshit artists are quickly found out: there is little to be gained from passive-aggressive internal jiggery-pokery. What manoeuvring there is will be swift and brutal. Expect to find victims of a front office putsch dumped in cupboards, bent double with a double-tap to the base of the skull, or wearing concrete sneakers and swimming with the fishes. Expect, one day, not to find them, that is to say. No words will be spoken. No lamentations sung.

Middle office engineers

Next least political will be key middle office and risk functions like operations, credit risk and compliance. Here there is scope for ineffectual grandstanding, especially if you tread the line between attracting enough attention for rapid promotion, while at the same time avoiding detailed scrutiny while you rise. There are tendentious thought-leaders in operations and credit, but they tend to be dim rather than malicious, and they are largely the exception. In the main, fundamental weaknesses will be quickly found, and rooted, out.

Grandstanders

There is sure to be a solid heft of perfidious manoeuvring among the softer, less effable back-office functions like marketing, legal and financial reporting — functions you can’t really not have, in this day and age, but whose positive impact on the organisation is hard to gauge or even detect directly. They are not part of front-line generation, or retention, of revenue. (Sorry, legal eagles, but it is true: the roll of honour refers.)

Here, earnest subject matter experts will inevitably suffer at the hands of those with a taste for the game. The “lions led by donkeys” effect is somewhere between prevalent and inevitable.

The skillsets required between the two modes are quite different for the most part contradictory. If you want a job as a transaction lawyer, supporting a desk, punching through equity derivative confirms, expect to have to prove you have at least 5 years action with a crack Freshfields special ops unit embedded behind enemy lines. But if you want to be GC, to get that seven million buck sign-on bonus just make sure your D&I fit is immaculate; financial services experience of any kind is preferred but not essential.

HR

Last of all — still on the Machiavellian continuum, but so far along it as to be all but out of sight from any other vantage point — is human resources. HR will be a vipers’ nest of nettlesome, and supremely passive-aggressiveg, fear and loathing, because HR’s main reason for existing is to persuade other parts of the bank it is needed. It can only do this by a campaign of terror, espionage and misinformation. HR rules are accordingly more formalistic and less flexible than any other policies in the organisation, and the consequences for transgression all the more gruesome.

Now these divisions are not necessarily absolute — and you can therefore rank which is the more important between department and roles by the relative degree of office politics in evidence.

See also

• Ouija politics