Kathleen Kelley Reardon

With all the information that we take in everyday, it’s difficult to get a word in edgewise – so to speak.  And yet unless people know what you contribute at work, all the effort you put in can pass unnoticed and unappreciated.  While loving what you do can be enough at times, it’s rare to find someone who doesn’t care if anyone ever knows what they’ve contributed.  Yet, bragging can be very uncomfortable.  Maybe if we called it “self-praise” it wouldn’t seem to gratuitous.  The truth is that it’s important to share what you do, especially at work — and equally important to do so effectively.   There’s no need to pound people over the head with insistent claims of having done amazing things, but when it counts it’s good to know how to share what you’ve done well.  Here are a few thoughts on how to make that happen.  http://bit.ly/1ouhrDT

I’ve been asked this question many times.  And also about persuasion, which I have studied and taught even longer.  I learned long ago that all the persuasion strategies in the world are useless if you don’t understand the political climate in which they’re being applied.

Probably, the real question being asked is can political skill be improved beyond what is learned as a child.  We know children aren’t born knowing what it means when someone poisons your well at work.  We learn over time that people operate often in their own best interests and when those goals cannot be overtly expressed, they turn to subtle, sometimes damaging, forms of managing others.  As they take hold within a group, these practices become part of the culture.  The ones who created them may leave, but their mark remains.  It then becomes the task of those who follow to figure out how things are done aside from how they’re supposed to be done and to keep track of changes.  That takes study and often learning the hard way.

Mentors can help in the learning process — if they’re adequately skilled at understanding and managing politics.  To help further, I wrote a few books on politics at work, including The Secret Handshake and It’s All Politics.  To show how virulent politics can function beneath the surface and because it’s a story I couldn’t get out of my mind, I wrote a fictional account of how politics can usurp an otherwise good environment — Shadow Campus.  Here you see how political operatives work behind the scenes, applying unwritten rules, forcing others to follow them all in the context of academia — but it’s much the same everywhere.  I know because of the years I’ve spent consulting for various types of organizations.

Stories are how we learn much of what we know and so while Shadow Campus is a mystery-thriller, not a how-to about politics, it is a means of learning politics by observing the characters’ attempts to unravel and understand how their political climate functions.

Elizabeth Warren’s stories in her new book, A Fighting Chance, are ways that women, and men, can learn what it takes to deal with negative politics.  There are no step-by-step instructions in the book, but you do get a sense of what it takes to fight against people who are used to working behind the scenes ruining careers, if need be, to get what they want.

At this blog site, you’ll find more on politics.  What to say to whom when, issues of timing, how to identify unwritten rules, using choice points in conversation to turn things around, and more.  There are tutorials for women (see category list in right column) and more. You’ll find blogs not relevant to your interests, but hopefully ones that are helpful in expanding your knowledge of politics or helping your son, daughter, grandchild or someone you’d like to see avoid being blindsided.  Welcome to the blog.  If you have a specific question, send it along in the comments section.  I’d be glad to hear from you. Kathleen

The blog below was published today on the front page of Huffington Post.  Like the war stories blog posted yesterday, on Big Think, it’s about Elizabeth Warren’s new book, A Fighting Chance and why it’s a bracing dose of political reality for women who work, for profit or not, in highly political organizations.

Warren Offers Women a Bracing Dose of Reality

Unlike so many of her Washington colleagues, Senator Elizabeth Warren has developed a hard-won political intelligence without selling her soul.

Nothing in her new book denies that the old boys network got in her way. She doesn’t accuse anyone who experiences its existence of suffering from a feminist hangover. There are no paragraphs about how most men in government have the best interests of women deep in their hearts — no apologist claims that some of her best friends are men.

The Massachusetts senator doesn’t pretend that being a woman has never been an issue for her (with its rich implication that there are no issues unless you’re a troublemaker). Spooning out such happy hogwash isn’t her style.

Instead, Warren shares war stories, which is something that women do far too infrequently. She toils in a snake pit, but she’s learned how to wrench power from venomous opponents, buoyed by extraordinary tenacity and her conviction that she is fighting the right battles.

It has been quite a while since a woman emerged on the national political scene who hasn’t felt compelled to repeatedly remind us that she is a mother, and therefore not as threatening as someone who isn’t. Warren is a mother, but not yours. So if you’re one of the bad guys stealing from the less fortunate, don’t expect to get a pass.

While A Fighting Chance was not written to awaken women to the need for political astuteness, it does have that potential. It’s a trenchant reminder that no matter how nice things may seem early in a career, moving ahead requires competing for ground on playing fields the other guys designed. It means studying your surroundings, seeing what matters and what doesn’t, who gets ahead, how much of your soul you’ll need to sacrifice to do things their way and, in that regard, whether where you work is where you belong.

There must be days when Warren wonders why she keeps fighting a system that is so thoroughly rigged. She could walk away. She reminds us, and herself, of the people who need someone to work on their behalf. She learns the ropes, takes risks, deals with setbacks, gets knocked down and gets back up to fight another day. She’s pugnacious, unafraid of politics and of being labeled.

Read the book once for the truth about how a bunch of groupthink, greedy, power-hungry sharks nearly ruined the country. Then read it to learn how to get around, over and though nasty politics because someday you just may need the lessons.