A: I received a number of responses about my recent post, If I ran for office, one of which is posted as a comment below the blog entry. The issues raised in the comment are ones I sometimes hear from coaching clients who are frustrated at their inability to make headway trying to move The Political Machine.The issue is, in short, that when you’re young, you can often feel stuck: if you say you have no power then people call you lazy and tell you you’re not trying hard enough, and if you exert yourself, then those in power tell you you’re going about it all wrong and admonish you for your lack of political astuteness. No energy or no power. Either way, you get nowhere.So what gives? How–as a member of society, or even a local organization–can you take on the power structure?I recognize myself in this question; I am frequently asking the same thing. For a long time, I went right at it, and as a result, I heard all kinds of wonderful feedback, such as: I should do my job and not the job of my boss; I am arrogant and brash; I have an edge; I lack political astuteness; and I don’t know what I’m talking about, among other things. Some of this feedback was true, some of it was a projection of someone else’s issues with himself, some of it was meant for someone other than myself, and some of it was nothing more than a red herring designed to steer me away from making someone else’s life hard. But which was which?Ah… that’s the question! Because if you can answer that, then you can work with, around, and through the existing power structure to effect real change…Here are several steps to effecting change in an organization when your power base is nil.1. Find an high level insider you can trust who is willing to talk with you. When we get to step two, you’ll need to have this already in place. Otherwise, you really will be stuck! This can be a formal mentor, a friend of your mom or dad, or an informal friend in the office. It’s the person with whom your conversations are easy, meandering, challenging, and uplifting.2. Question everything. Ask “Why?” If you get feedback, ask why you’re getting that feedback. If you fail to make headway with a proposal, ask yourself why not. Everything that happens to you is feedback to you about your effectiveness, so constantly question what’s happening. Not getting a call back? Ask yourself why. Everyone lining up outside your cube to see you? Ask yourself how come.When you’re just starting out, you generally lack the scope of vision to project out far enough to interpret this feedback correctly, which is why having someone you can trust is so important: you’ll need that person to help you make sense of what’s going on. (You’re not as good at filtering information as you think. None of us are.)3. Consider social and personal factors. When I say that you need to expand your perspective and extend your scope of vision, I don’t mean just a little; putting yourself in your boss’ shoes and then stopping isn’t nearly enough. You need to be able to become someone else for a moment in order to understand where and how politics are at work. You need to feel someone else’s hopes and fears in order to correctly interpret their feedback of you. The way to do this is to constantly remind yourself that everything is in play.Young professionals have a tendency to want work life to be work life and private life to be private life. (I think this is because at early stages of career life, friends still hail from high school or college, while work people are different and the worlds don’t generally collide much. Just a guess.) When trying to understand how a senior executive reached a conclusion, the young professional therefore considers only the business implications of the decision. He fails to understand how personal and social factors play into the decision. He also probably fails to grasp the full complexity of the business decision, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume this is not an issue.4. Don’t solve the organization’s problem, solve the person’s problem. Once you recognize that everything is in play, you can start to dissect the feedback you get more accurately, and you can start to plan for action with more certainty. And the first thing you’ll realize is, an organization is a collection of people who all need to be accounted for individually.The cost of overlooking individuals’ issues in favor of organizational ones is high. In college, I spent a summer working as an intern in a bank and about halfway through the summer, the other intern started dragging his feet on a project we were doing together. When I started picking up his slack, he threatened to beat me up. Why? Because he needed the job (we were paid), and he was afraid that if we finished the job, we’d be fired early. I’ll never forget our conversation; ignoring the people in favor of the organization almost got me my ass kicked. Usually, the cost is not meted out physically, but the ultimate result is the same.I am not suggesting that you sacrifice your goals in order to accommodate others’ personal issues; nor am I suggesting that personal hang ups should interfere with business. And I am definitely not saying that you consider any feedback you get as misplaced projection of someone else’s problem. I am simply being a realist and stating that–right or wrong–personal issues do get in the way of business, and if your goal is to create change, then you need to make it your business to understand what personal issues are at play, why they are impacting peoples’ behavior, and how you can deal with them. On top of this, you need to layer on the what, why, and how related to your own imperfections… again, this is a perfect place for you to leverage that trusted insider: this should be the one person who’s feedback you pretty much take at face value, painful as it might be at times.5. Speak in terms of the organization’s problem, not the person’s problem. Here’s where the real test comes in: for all your awareness of individuals’ issues, you generally can’t speak them. Forget being impolite, it just doesn’t work! If I came up to you and said, “I believe you don’t like my idea because it requires you to make a presentation to your boss and you’re afraid of public speaking,” I wouldn’t finish my sentence before you’d get defensive and throw me out of your office. So what you need to do instead is spell things out very carefully, in a way that addresses my concerns without stating them. There is a great example of this toward the end of the movie Shakespeare in Love, in which Queen Elizabeth addresses Thomas Kent in a conversation that happens smoothly on two levels. Contrast this scene with the one in A Few Good Men where Lt. Kaffee asks Col. Jessup directly about the log books, resulting in the log books getting doctored. (Btw, what makes the ending of A Few Good Men so surprising to the characters in it is that none of them really believe Lt. Kaffee’s direct approach would be as successful as it turns out to be. It’s the exception that proves the rule.)6. Change your time perspective. I’m not a patient guy. When I see the answer, I go right for it. Always have. I used to hate it when people would tell me to slow down and have patience: I saw that as an excuse to accept mediocrity.But here’s the deal: as you get older, your entire concept of fast and slow changes. For instance, at 25, one year is 4% of your life. By the time you are 50, that same year is only 2% of your life; that same time period feels shorter. In other words, two years at 50 feels roughly the same as one year at 25… There are also other factors involved, of course. At fifty, your attention is split across far more things than at 25. At fifty, you have your work, your hobbies, yourself and, likely, your spouse, your kids, your kids’ significant others, maybe even a grandkid or two. At 25, your attention is much more concentrated. So not only does the 25 year old perceive time to be crawling, but the 25 year old has more time to sit there and dwell on it! Again, this isn’t to say one way is right and one way is wrong–I’m still young enough to side with the 25 year old on this one–but it is to say that the young professional needs to understand that the concept of time is relative, and needs to account for that in his or her thinking.There’s a lot to each of these steps; I will break them down in future posts.As for effecting societal change, the process is the same, but at a much higher level. I once voted against a promising Chicago Alderman because, despite my suspicions about my then-current Alderman’s personal indiscretions, our Ward was well maintained, safe, and thriving. The up and comer didn’t offer to solve any of my problems, nor did she create a problem to solve. And if she couldn’t do that with me, I imagined she wouldn’t be able to do that on the City Council, either… which meant that all the great service I was accustomed to would be put at risk the day she got installed.

Posted under Coaching & Consulting, Succession Planning, Personal