Apparently office politics is a horrible thing that other people do.

But many of the emerging IT leaders I speak to get told they need to be better at “soft skills” and “influencing at a senior level”.  What this often means is get good a politics.

Sadly a lot of office politics seems to involve people playing games to get their own way at the expense of everyone else. This skill can be learned and might seem useful, but it is not what I am going to talk about here.  I am going to talk about “how do the good guys get the right outcomes when people have competing interests or needs and some people seem like knob-heads”.

Continue reading “The dark art of office politics for IT leaders (part one – why is it stressful?)”