Office politics

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Office politics
/ˈɒfɪs ˈpɒlɪtɪks/ (n.)

A means for the neurotic to express themselves.

The rules is simple: the more measurable your contribution to the bottom line, the less scope there is for office politics: the less time, interest or inclination you will have for it; the more natural immunity you will have to it.

Office politics corresponds to the economic significance of your function, and vice versa: the causal arrow is bi-directional. Just as relative worth sits on a continuum, so does angsty behaviour.

The Machiavellian 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, violence exists in plain sight, so 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 and liquidated: there is little to be gained from passive-aggressive jiggery-pokery: you do your talking on the pitch. You get out and sell.

What manoeuvring there is will be swift and brutal.

Expect to find its victims bent double and stuffed in a cupboard, with a double-tap to the base of the skull.

Expect to find them wearing concrete sneakers, swimming with the fishes.

Expect, one day, to just not find them: to learn through terse looks and pursed lips, with no words spoken, that the internal client you’ve been cultivating for seven years is no more. Gone.

Expect no lamentations.

Middle office engineers

Next least political will be key middle office and risk functions like operations, credit and compliance. Here there is scope for ineffectual grandstanding, especially for those who can tread the line between attracting enough attention for promotion, and but not enough to be found out, while you ascend the greasy pole. There are plenty of vacuous thought-leaders in operations and credit, but they tend to be dull rather than outright malicious.

Still, 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 measure or, directly, even detect. These groups are not part of front-line generation, or retention, of revenue. They do the form part of the operational stack.

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 will be somewhere between prevalent and inevitable.

The skillsets required of an SME are so different those needed by a legal leader as to be contradictory: if you want a job as a junior transaction lawyer, supporting a desk, structuring deals or just punching out structured equity derivative confirms, expect to need at least 5 years service with a crack Freshfields special ops unit embedded behind enemy lines before a bank will so much as look at you.

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, you look good in a power wardrobe and you enjoy presenting at town halls. Financial services experience of any kind? Preferred; 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. The only thing that saves the rest of the bank from this unspoken viciousness if how much of it is internally directed.

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