what is the political game and why do we have to play it at work?

A reader writes:

I quit my entry-level job after three years with nothing lined up, judge it how you will. I want to describe one of my final straws, being told that I have to “play the political game” by my manager.

As one example, we had a situation where the senior team over-promised and under-delivered on an automation project. I was left with clean-up duty and basically had to operate like an automation and a human at the same time to cover the failure. This increased my workload significantly, and I had to work for extremely needy stakeholders.

One day my manager called me into a meeting and said that the stakeholders wanted weekly meetings to ask me updates. She began by saying she wasn’t going to agree to anything without asking me first.

I told her I was already in constant communication with the stakeholders via Teams and service tickets and managed a private email for them and their candidates and I updated after each transaction. I said more communication would slow things down. It would be repeating the same thing for fifth time.

My manager proceeded to say, “You have to play the political game.”

I couldn’t understand this. I was letting her know what she was asking wasn’t viable and received this response.

What’s the political game and why do we have to play it?

The political game means that there’s an informal system of power and influence at work that affects what decisions are made, how decisions are made, whose input matters most, what agendas are in play, and who can influence who.

With no political game, decisions at work would be entirely based on merit and logic. They’re … not. In a healthy, well-functioning company, merit and logic count for quite a lot, but even then politics still influence things.

So in your manager’s usage, playing the political game is understanding that there are people in your workplace with more power and influence than you who sometimes have to be catered to, even when what they want is nonsensical, will create unneeded work or other inefficiencies, and/or won’t get the organization closer to its goals. It’s understanding that sometimes you need to do what they want even if it’s obviously not the best approach, because ultimately they’re the ones calling the shots and the ones with the standing to insist on something. It’s also understanding that even if you successfully argue against their proposal, in some cases doing that might carry longer-term opportunity costs or outright risks, such as a VIP making future decisions that aren’t in your or your team’s interests because they don’t like you or find you troublesome.

That doesn’t mean that you should never point out the downsides of a proposal. Very often, you should! In most cases, good employees should be willing to say, “My concern about that would be X” or “Have you considered downside Y?” or “Doing Y will cause Z problem and we should factor it in.” But you also need to accept that people with more power than you might hear those downsides and decide to proceed anyway, and at that point it’s your job to do it.

Sometimes, too, a manager might realize that they could get a bad proposal shut down but it would take a ton of their capital, and they’d rather save that capital for something that will matter more. (Some managers decide that about everything and never actually spend any of the capital they’re carefully saving, which is bad management and bad playing of the political game.)

So when your manager said to you, “You have to play the political game” about your stakeholders’ requests for weekly meetings, she was saying, “Yeah, it’s a pain and doesn’t make sense, but people with power want this and it’s not worth the cost of pushing back.” The cost referenced there could be anything from “it would take a ton of energy and/or capital to fight it and it’s not a big enough deal to warrant that” to “I’m already having to argue with this same group to get X, and I need that more than I need them to give in on this” to “Ron is a vindictive jerk who will make life harder for us if we don’t just do it.”

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