Office politics

Office anthropology™ Go Premium 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 Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

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 jiggery-pokery with other colleagues: do your talking on the pitch. You get out and sell.

What manoeuvring there is — to be sure, there will still be plenty — will be swift and brutal. Expect to find its victims bent double and dumped in a cupboard with a double-tap to the base of the skull, or wearing concrete sneakers and swimming with the fishes. Expect, one day, to just not find them: to learn through terse looks, with no words spoken, that the internal client you’ve been cultivating for seven years is no more. Gone. No lamentations will be sung.

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 if you can deftly tread the line between attracting the attention needed for promotion, and avoiding detailed scrutiny of your work that will find you out, while you rise.

To be sure there are plenty of vacuous thought-leaders in operations and credit, but they tend to be dim rather than 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 gauge or even detect directly. These groups are not part of front-line generation, or retention, of revenue and nor do the form part of the operational stack. (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 will be somewhere between prevalent and inevitable.

The skillsets required of an SME, and those of a legal leader, are so different as to be contradictory. If you want a job as a junior transaction lawyer, supporting a desk, structuring deals or punching through 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 and you enjoy town halls. 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