Office politics continued

We recapped our definitions of office politics from last Sunday emphasizing the importance of good Christian leadership in resolving complex political situations at the office. We elaborated the importance of communications. Engineers model communications as: source, encoding, the message corrupted by channel noise, decoding and recipient. Proper encoding allows CDs to take scratches without the music being lost. Surprisingly, marketing professionals and advertisers use exactly the same model. Proper phrasing of the message takes into account how the recipient will decode the message so that the right ideas get through.

Conflicts are all too often a result of poor communications and misunderstandings. When the parties understand each other, conflicts can be from differing objectives. Often parties will agree on long-term goals (e.g. make money), but differ on intermediate goals to get there. Secular conflict resolution courses attempt to provide a framework for rationally reconciling such differences. As Christians, it is important to understand the purpose of our work as it relates to God's creation. That can often provide the long-term goals and thus guidance on how to proceed.

Conflicts can also have roots in irrational behaviour; humans are sometimes irrational. Strong communications and political skills take that into account and give room for irrational behaviour. The whole dating process deals with an often irrational behaviour. Dating is political, an act of leadership as well as a sales situation. Christian behaviour in that arena is can be a model for Christian behaviour in the office.

We continued open sharing of political situations at the office. A class member shared a wonderful example of how a senior staff member actively solicited her input to get her to do something. She was, in a sense, manipulated and even recognized it as such. But the process was open and ethical and achieved the active buy-in of all parties. It was an example of good leadership and good politics.