You Can’t “Learn Politics”

“Learning politics” is like learning chess: understanding the rules of the game accounts for about 1/1000% of mastery.

If that.

If you truly want to understand politics, you need to be able to shift your entire perspective of the world around you. You need to cultivate a deeper appreciation for what drives people. And you need to be willing to answer tough questions of yourself that defy easy, black-and-white answers.

All of which takes time, and the ability to go beyond a by-the-book appreciation for what’s happening.

A coachee of mine recently wanted to put “learn politics” on his development plan as an action item. That didn’t fly with me. What we ended up doing, though, was putting the following on his development plan:

• Meet regularly, but informally, with my boss and key client contact until the relationships are deep enough that it becomes uncomfortable to continue to have these meetings on my development plan

The idea behind this is that eventually, these relationships will develop to the point where it will begin to feel disingenuous to have these meetings on a development plan—he’ll want to have those meetings because it’s the right thing to do… not because he’s “supposed to.”

This may not get him the intellectual understanding of politics he wants, but that he can learn later. The intellectual part he can learn it quickly. It’s the relationships, and the resulting shift of perspective that inevitably happens when one surround him or herself with new and different people, that’s most important. And since those relationships take awhile to form, that’s where we need to start.

A few months from now—or maybe a few years from now—once he has an adequate foundation for the discussion, we’ll circle back to start talking “politics.”

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.