Office politics
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Office anthropology™
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If we take it that office politics is basically an 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 there is for office politics: the less time, interest or inclination you will have for it and the more naturally immune you will be it.
It follows, therefore, that you can measure the degree of office politics by reference to the significance of the function comma and vice versa. It is a bi-directional causal chain.
The general proposition is that sales and trading will be the least political. Here you eat what you kill, all can be measured in in a p&L statement, bullshit artists are quickly found out, and there is little to be gained from passive-aggressive internal jiggery-pokery. What what internal manoeuvring there is will be swift and brutal. Expect to find its victims dumped in cupboards doubled over with a double-tap to the base of the skull, or wearing concrete sneakers and swimming with the fishes.
Important middle office and risk functions like operations, credit risk and compliance will be next. Here there is scope for ineffectual grandstanding, especially if you can attract enough attention to be promoted to managing director while avoid proper scrutiny while you do — but in the main, fundamental weaknesses will be quickly found out.
Then marketing, legal and financial reporting — functions you can’t really avoid in this day and age but are not part of the front-line generation, and preservation, of money. (Sorry, legal eagles, but it is true.) Here subject matter experts will suffer at the hands of those with a taste for the game, so that the “lions led by donkeys” syndrome is somewhere between prevalent and inevitable. If you want a job punching through equity derivative confirms, expect to need 5 years at a crack Freshfields special ops unit on your CV. If you want to be GC of a global universal banking group these days, D&I fit is imperative; financial services experience preferred but not essential.
Last of all — on the spectrum but so far along it as to be all but out of sight will human resources, which will be a vipers’ nest of nettlesome fear and loathing.
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.