Face It: You Are
Going to Have to Manage Politics at Work
People
are going to bring everything to work, including all the baggage that will come
with the midterm elections, and beyond. You can't stop them. You can help them
to be open minded.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
I've been surprised at how naïve or oblivious
many of the folks running large and small companies have been about the
political and emotional workforce challenges they're going to face through the
2024 elections, as their teams slowly if reluctantly return to the office and
the management tries to get them refocused, centered, and back to building
their businesses. It's not going to be
an easy process. And anyone who thinks that they can neatly separate
the politics of our time from the operations of their particular business is
kidding themselves.
Like it or not, and whatever side of any political
conversation they happen to find themselves on, every business owner will be
affected not just by the political, financial, and regulatory consequences of
the midterm elections, but far more importantly by how the new facts of life
are going to change the ways they are able to run their firms. The best
businesses tell stories that help them to build trusted
brands, which are shorthand for the promises and commitments they
make to consumers and employees. How do you build trust in a post-truth world?
In a universe where trust is increasingly
imperiled and undermined, it's going to be very difficult for businesses to
rebuild critical relationships with customers, clients, partners, regulators,
and their own people. They have to figure out how to develop and tell a
coherent, consistent, and credible story about their business, products and
services that speaks fairly and accurately for their entire workforce and to a
very diverse and fragmented consuming population.
In the old days, if two people in business
together agreed on everything, it generally meant that at least one of them
wasn't listening. In today's post-truth world, it seems that no two people can
consistently agree on much of anything and it's increasingly hard to imagine
how we're going to get much work done in places where people are constantly at
each other's throats. How will companies create a single source of truth - a
set of agreed-upon facts - as the foundation of their outreach to the world when
everything in the world is actively conspiring to make acknowledgement,
acceptance, and agreement on virtually anything a matter of confusion,
conflict, and debate. If your own people no longer trust you to tell them the
truth, why would you imagine any different reaction from your customers?
There's a seriously deluded group of owners
and managers who are just foolishly hoping and praying that after November all
the drama and noise about our local and national political systems will just
magically disappear - not unlike Trump's many early claims about Covid-19,
and we all know how well that
turned out. Pretending that what's happening outside the four walls
of your building won't creep inside and that these issues don't matter to your
business and your future success is simply stupid.
There's another willfully ignorant group who
believe that they will be able to promulgate rules and regulations and erect
behavioral prohibitions and barriers to keep "politics" and political
issues and concerns out of the office. That's turned out to be just a little
harder than trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. I thought that there were some viable
steps that companies could take to try to manage the inevitable conversations
that are part of the very
fabric of the office but, in practice, more and more of these
issues are consuming significant parts of the day-to-day lives of your team
members. They're not able or interested in leaving all these feelings and
emotions at home. They're bringing all their baggage and their whole selves to
work and if anyone doesn't like it, too bad.
And that leads to the third group of owners
and managers who still want to think that they are presiding over a relatively
homogenous group of employees - basically with shared beliefs and values - who
are all more or less headed in the same direction and closely aligned with the
company's own culture, objectives and goals. This simply couldn't be further
from the reality of the current workforce - and that's largely without regard
to their age or length of service. Everyone's got issues; and most of them are
unhappy about something.
Their attention, priorities, and resultant
one-sided perceptions - never mind which side - are continually driven by our
media- and technology-saturated worlds. Making and marketing mischief,
mayhem, angst, and anger are the core reasons and operating principles of some
of the biggest media and tech firms and they're not likely to change or abandon
their business models or their attempts to tempt, taunt, and torment your
employees any time soon.
Our kids and young employees have all grown up
believing that the primary "search" tools are objective and neutral
rather than basically bought-and-paid-for advertising channels that shamelessly
prioritize whatever products, services, solutions, stories, candidates, or
other schemes the biggest available dollars are looking to sell.
There's no quick cure for truth decay on the
horizon - no new truth machine or gospel giver - and no magical way to restore
overnight people's trust and confidence in your honesty and leadership. But, in
the war on truth that we're living in, doing nothing is a sure way to lose.
Democracy needs a ground to stand upon, and that ground is the truth.
There is one important tool that you can
provide for your employees to try to interrupt - at least momentarily - the
non-stop flow of lies, fantasies, fictions, and frauds that they are drowning
in every day. The idea of interruption as one of the best defenses to the
automatic, unthinking, and unrestricted absorption and spread of these waves of
crap and condemnation is something that has been shown to be quite effective in
cutting down bullying among teens. Just a moment's thought and the slightest
hesitation saves tons of pain and problems. The most powerful version of this
tool, which is called ReThink,
was invented by Trisha Prabhu, a teenager from Naperville, IL., who's now at
Stanford.
Along the same "stop and think"
lines, and something I'd suggest for all the people in your business, is a news
vetting and validation service called NewsGuard, which evaluates
and provides trust ratings for thousands of news outlets. They employ dozens of
journalists to investigate, review, rank, and annotate individual news sites,
sources, and publications, according to a published set of criteria relating to
the accuracy of the material published, various disclosures regarding ownership
and conflicts, error corrections, labelling of news, advertising, and opinion,
and other yardsticks. (Full disclosure: INC.'s website is ranked 100/100 in
this system.)
With a simple mouse rollover on the NewsGuard
shield which will appear on sites you search for once you've installed the app,
you can see the rankings for the site in question and - if you want further
information - you can see a detailed breakdown of their findings with another
simple click.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of their
efforts or their own objectivity or agenda (although transparency is a central
premise of their whole business) but as I have suggested above the context in
which we receive information these days and the sourcing are just as important,
if not more important, than the content itself. Having a simple and readily
available "second source" - a way to look for just a moment before
you or your people waste time leaping down another make-believe rabbit hole -
seems to be a worthwhile investment. After all, how much is it worth to know
the truth?