Being politically savvy is critical to getting and maintaining high-level leadership roles. While some people don’t want to engage in the political nature of organizations, it is a normal and natural part of how systems function.
The psychology of organizational politics influences how things operate. As Dale Carnegie says, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic but creatures of emotions.” When we deal with emotions, they are often riddled with unconscious bias, insecurities and can lead to needing to compromise between what we want and what another person wants.
Therefore, emotional intelligence is a key skill in developing good political savvy. Emotional intelligence is defined as “the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.” Author Daniel Goleman breaks down emotional intelligence into four components:
• Self-awareness: Knowing yourself, your own strengths and weaknesses, and being self-confident
• Self-management: Managing your own emotional state so that you don’t always act out when you are emotional
• Social awareness: Understanding the environment around you and other people, what's going on for them and showing empathy
• Relationship management: Conflict resolution, influence, negotiations and change management
Political savvy as a leader is all about leveraging emotional intelligence so that you can handle sensitive and emotional situations at work. Political savvy takes a lot of understanding about yourself, the environment around you and how to navigate and influence that environment for the best outcome.
So, what are the key skills needed for political savvy?
1. Be sincere. Show integrity, authenticity and genuineness when meeting, speaking to and getting to know people around you.
2. Understand the organization and how it functions. Be aware of how things are running in the organization. When you are in a meeting, watch where are people sitting, who’s speaking, who’s speaking after that person, what questions they are asking, etc. The more you watch what is happening in the organization, the more you realize what the implicit rules are and, therefore, how to navigate within them.
3. Build a strong network. Create relationships and build support across the organization (not just within your own team/group) in order to learn how to interact with different kinds of people, the needs or motivations of other parts of the organization and provide a give and take of information/support to each other.
4. Learn to influence others. Influence means that you can communicate well, share a vision of something you want to do and have people follow. The stronger your interpersonal relationships are, the more you are going to be able to bring them along your way of thinking while still taking into consideration what is important to them. People who influence are not overtly political, but they play the game fairly.
5. Don’t say everything on your mind. Learn to manage your emotional state. Know when to speak and when not to speak, but mainly what to say in order to help people follow you.
Being politically savvy can be a lot of work. Being emotionally intelligent is critical to building up these skills, but they are learnable by becoming more astute in learning the organization and how to maneuver within it.
