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October Is Workplace Politics Awareness Month

October is Workplace Politics Awareness Month, a time when employers and employees everywhere can pause for an hour or so to look at what they can do to convert toxic workplace politics into a force for creativity.



Workplace politics can be creative or toxic. Anyone who works knows of tangles about office assignments, misallocation of resources, favoritism, and lots more. And we also know about collaborative efforts that result in better outcomes than anyone could have imagined.



Richard Brenner of Chaco Canyon Consulting, a management consultancy in Boston, Massachusetts, developed Workplace Politics Awareness Month to address the problem of toxic politics in the workplace.



We need to change the way we view workplace politics, says Brenner. Too many of us believe that politics is always bad. We push it out of sight, where it can turn toxic. Toxic politics is a vehicle for the unethical among us to distort decisions, which can harm careers, organizations and even the enterprise.



The message of Workplace Politics Awareness Month is that we can'st eliminate politics, but we can eliminate toxic politics. And making this change has a huge return on investment. When we keep politics creative, organizational decisions are fairer and more in alignment with organizational objectives.



Mr. Brenner offers employers and employees Ten Insights for Managing Politics. Here are his top three:

* Workplace politics comes in two flavors: Toxic and Creative.

* Dealing openly and honestly with politics -- both creative and toxic -- is a safe way to manage it.

* For toxic politics, the point at issue is rarely the problem. Something else is going on.



In 1993, while researching low-cost software development methods for the Department of Defense, Mr. Brenner began to suspect that part of the solution to lowering development costs lay not in the next new technology, but in finding better ways for engineers to work together. That work eventually led Brenner to develop Workplace Politics Awareness Month.



Chaco Canyon Consulting is making available a Workplace Politics Awareness Month kit, including a slide presentation and an e-booklet, 101 Secrets of Workplace Politics. For more information visit our Web site at http://www.ChacoCanyon.com/wpam.shtml.

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