Corporate Politics

Enterprise Design Patterns | Practice Patterns

#24: Corporate Politics

"People must collaborate in pursuit of a common task yet are often pitted against each other in competition for limited resources, status, and career advancement."
- Gareth Morgan

Related Patterns:

#2: Pre-existing Wisdom, #3: Coalition Building, #4: Executive Buy-In, #13: Nurtured Trust, #18: Walking Your Talk

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You are faced with corporate politics which imposes significant constraints on the Enterprise Design initiative.

In this context:

People’s behaviours are guided by a mix of explicit goals and hidden agendas and your co-creators often put their own goals before the enterprise’s vision and interests. They can see your attempts to optimise the wider enterprise as a threat to their position and an obstacle to achieving their goals.

Therefore:

You intervene in the political networks to nudge co-creators in the direction of a common Enterprise Design. You carefully manage your political relationships with the major co-creators. To gain influence you:

• Try to understand what is on your co-creators’ agendas and find ways to work with these forces;
• Draw a conflict & power map to visualise the different interests and conflicts between co-creators;
• Find the most influential co-creators and engage them in conversations to find common ground and alternative ways forward;
• Build strong coalitions with willing and supportive co-creators, helping them with your design skills;
• Use Enterprise Design maps to create a shared understanding of misalignments. Such maps help you expose political games being played without making you the bearer of bad news.

Consequently:

Dealing intentionally with corporate politics significantly increases Enterprise Design’s impact on the enterprise. Co-creators’ individual goals and actions become better aligned with the enterprise’s vision and interests. You have established a better shared ‘us’ and better ways of working together. Political conflicts probably remain but become less dominant and disruptive.