Office Politics
Working in a soul crushing bureaucracy has certain benefits - Medical, Dental and Defined. That last is the pension, which is solid gold. But apart from those it's all detriments. And it doesn't have to be - if everyone were in any way playing for the same team there might be the occasional win, but since the bureaucratic primordial toxic ooze rewards individuals and not teams, any team that manages to evolve out of the muck then devolves pretty much instantly into so many single celled power struggles. These struggles are quite literally monkey business. If you are blessed and live in sunny climes then you can look up into any tree and observe these behaviours (watch out for the excrement). So you know all about them. If, on the other hand, you live sufficiently far north your trees tend to be full of squirrels and not monkeys, and squirrel behaviour can only be described as squirrelly. So in the frozen wastes of Canada we are not used to monkey behaviour naturally and have to learn to recognize it. The first step is to name it. In a corporate setting, the behaviour of monkeys in trees is called Office Politics.
I used to be a Database Administrator, the exact nature of the business being somewhat hard to explain, even to those with whom I used to work. Broadly speaking, the DBAs are the group that get the corporate data out to the corporation. This is a fuzzy endeavour, unlike other things in Information Technology which tend to be binary: on or off, hardware or software, management or plebe, IT or the rest of the organization. DBAs work in a world where a bit can be on, off or null. A database runs in a somewhat virtual world straddling both hardware and software. DBAs are often not in management since no one reports to them, but they'll speak with authority to one and all. And since they are the conduit through which the rest of the organization can get at its data, they have to interact with the unwashed masses, something no one else in IT would ever willingly do. So they are an anomoly.
Especially within IT. Everyone generally agrees that things continue to work if there is a DBA around, and quite often fail to work if not, but people tend to file this bit of wisdom in the same bin in which they store the knowledge that letting your beard grow and not changing your shirt during playoffs will clinch a win. And so the DBAs are hard to place on the departmental org chart - the people to whom they report really have no idea what they do; they have no one reporting to them but routinely need to (or at least, attempt to) delegate tasks to others; they have no particular spot in the pecking order and so are easy to take advantage of, but if you cross one sufficiently that they are unavailable for your next project, that project is likely to be a technical disaster. They can never progress in IT and can't even exist outside that department; they are "well placed", whereas everyone else generally claws their way up the corporate tree in direct proportion to how nasty they are. So the lower manager a DBA tangles with today will likely come back tomorrow as a senior manager with a grudge. DBAs make no decisions about any corporate direction, but whatever that direction turns out to be, the DBAs will generally be tasked with turning the rudder. DBAs are at once loathed and venerated, powerless and omnipotent; in short, they have to watch their step.
And so, DBAs tend to be careful observers of the office politic. It is a survival skill. Even if their work is a stroll in the park, it is still useful for them to know where the mines are buried. There are probably more comprehensive and scholarly treatments on the subject of office politics, but, at least for the purposes of being a DBA in a large, soul crushing bureaucracy, here are some of the key points that I have observed, staring up into the corporate monkey tree, and avoiding the showers of excrement.
The Screaming MeeMees
As I write this, there are 7.753 billion people on Earth. That means that there are 7.753 billion people who have it all figured out and are 100% correct in everything they do. And each of them has 7.753 billion minus one people inhabiting their world who are dead wrong and have stupid opinions. So the odds of any one of them having anything approaching the right idea about anything is 1 in (7.753B) / ((7.753B -1) * (7.753B)) or slightly less than the odds of winning Lottomax. Math cannot lie. So statistically, there is no chance that anyone is right about anything. Nonetheless there are a large number of people who persist in their dellusion that what they think really matters in any way. Most people are happy to simply be the only smart person in a crowd of idiots and they keep that knowledge to themselves. But even though everyone else already has the correct view of things, a disturbing number of corporate monkeys try to assert their opinions on others. These are the alpha animals. Their attempts to subvert others is really just an attempt to get the highest spot in the tree, as excrement is easier to fling downwards. If I had to guess (and I routinely have to do just that) then I would say that 99% of all office politics boils down to stupid but aggressive alpha monkeys attempting to gain the corporate spotlight and impose their ideas and will upon others.
You can spot alpha monkey behaviour easily. Amateur alpha monkeys will literally use sentences heavy on "I" or "Me", as in, "I can solve that problem. Leave it to me.", when the boss is around, or "You must have me mistaken for someone else. I'm not your mother." when talking to lower downs. In purely social settings, an alpha monkey can talk for hours about themselves, quite often without the need to breathe. Over time the sly ones will modify their choice of words to sound like they're not being totally self serving wads. They'll use words such as "We", "Together" and "Team". But they'll still be the only actor on their particular stage, any others being props at best. At the office, they will sit at the head of the table during a meeting, will have supplied the agenda, have their name next to the low outlay/high reward/high visibility action items, and get the DBAs to do any actual work.
I find it is helpfull, when you find yourself dealing with this sort of behaviour, to visualize that person's inner monkey. Their simian is jumping up and down on the table, beating its chest and screaming "Me! Me! Me!". It may also be masturbating - that's actually a dominance thing. If you keep this visualization in mind during the meeting you will find it easier to treat the person with all of the respect they deserve.
Another thing that I find helps when an alpha animal is being annoyingly assertive is to ask them to give you their thoughts (orders) in an email. This will completely kneecap the less serious monkey, as they will no doubt be vocal communicators and probably cannot type, unless there is an infinite number of them. The more important benefit of getting them to send you an email, though, is that it creates a paper trail which we'll talk about later.
The screaming meemees are quite often the extent of office monkey business, as it takes no brains for an alpha to pull it off, and the bulk of them are well suited to working at that level. But some of the more cunning monkeys use the meemees as a sort of foundation for increasingly complex behaviours. We'll be taking a look at some of those shortly, but in the meantime, when faced with aggressive monkeys at work:
Recognize people for what they are. Monkeys.
Divide and Conquer
Monkeys have invented and perfected the art of war. They continually wage war on each other - for territory, sex, and, more often than not, to eat each other. But the first thing a monkey needs to know about waging war with other monkeys is that in troop form there is nothing quite so ethereal as a monkey. If you want to actually grab one, you first need to isolate it from the rest of its friends. Otherwise you are chasing screaming, poop-flinging phantoms. So while the general hullabuloo of the war is being waged by one troop against the other, the real action is taking place between an alpha animal, who has risen from the ranks of the screaming meemees, and that one smaller, weaker individual it has culled from the other, or possibly even its own, troop. As it approaches its victim, the alpha will invariably smile - this exposes its canines and is an unmistakable prediction of how things will go.
In the corporate jungle, divide and conquer often presents as unwelcome visitors in your cubicle. They will approach, smiling, and say something like, "I just want to make sure we're on the same page" which is monkey speak for "Me eat you. Num-num-num." During meetings, when the rest of the troop is present, alphas will cull victims by sitting between them and the head of the table and having a non-stop side bar of the meeting, explaining how the things that are being said should be interpreted by the weaker animal. After the meeting, and before the subsequent meeting, they may say something to the effect of, "Let's make sure we present a united front on this." which is also monkey for "Me eat you. Num-num-num."
The easiest defence, when you find yourself singled out by an alpha, is to wave your arms about and scream and fling whatever is handy at the attacker. But this is really submissive behaviour and is, in fact, what the alpha expects. So it is by far better to, firstly, always try to have some of the troop nearby. If that is not possible, you can sort of retroactively threaten to have the troop handy by sending an email to the alpha summarizing what was said, "Just so we're on the same page. Num-num-num." This is, of course, a loosely veiled counter-attack and may be dodgey ground. You may find yourself being eaten. But it does tend to create a paper trail, which leads to what is quite often the correct response, which is to simply do whatever the alpha wants. Whatever the alpha wants is bound to be self-serving and will quickly cause the rest of the alphas in the tree to go quite literally ape-shit on your alpha, whom everyone will know is the real culprit, especially if your paper trail leaks out. So when an aggressive monkey at work goes on the attack, simply turn the other monkeys against it. And then get a bag of peanuts, maybe a banana or two, lay back and watch all the fun going on in the top of the tree.
Most monkey fights do not require your involvement.
The Monkey-in-the-Middle
As a data professional I quite often found myself wandering the halls trying to track down information - where it came from, where it went, and what it was used for. No matter how well thought out a large corporation's business systems, over time things change. Departments spring into being or disappear; federal and provincial regulations change (continuously), and, strange but true, even new office furniture can seriously impact the flow of corporate data.
There was a certain form in use back in the day, when paper was a thing, that let the manager at some level of the organization convey attendance information concerning their direct reports to the gods on the upper floor. They weren't sure what the gods did with the information, but it was a commandment that the information should be gathered and offered up (stairs) and so it was. So step one on the paper trail was a random front-line manager, in the Registrar's Office since it was close to IT.
The managers had been instructed at the inception of this particular form to send it to a certain person in HR every pay cycle and so they did. This was through inter-office mail which meant there were any number of interim steps in the mailroom that we'll totally ignore. The certain person in HR had some manner of hands-on function back in the day but must have been exceptionally good at it or maybe just particularly nasty because they had been promoted and no longer did hands-on work. Instead, they delegated most things, such as this particular form, which found itself bouncing off of step two and landing at step three in record time, these steps being both within the same physical office space.
Step three was a summer student who had no idea what this form was about but knew that it arrived in their In basket on the HR side of the desk and had to be forwarded to Payroll, which for all practical purposes was the Out basket on the other side of the desk. The student was only to be around for a couple of months and so a temporary desk was set up in the only spot available - the no-man's land between HR and Payroll, at one time the same department but some time ago hived into two distinct entities.
Once safely in the out basket of a temporary employee whose very desk would cease to exist in a matter of months, the form mysteriously disappeared. No one could really account for this; things were a little more fluid on the Payroll side of the office and whomever was walking past to get a coffee may or may not grab the form and usher it on to some other place, it was speculated.
In due time, and with a trail that even a bloodhound could not follow, the form would end up in a dead file in the vault that used to be an office until someone got fired, coincidentally around the time a vault was needed, since there was so much paper. When asked what use this file of attendance reports was being put to, a nearby Payroll manager stated with pride that they were ready with a paper trail in case of litigation. What they were not ready for was a fire, but that's a whole other issue.
So a couple of things here. No one on the paper trail was overly happy to have the secret life of this form exposed and documented. Especially the black hole that occured after HR but before Payroll. Knowledge is power, and I was trying to take power away from people. It turns out that this particular paper form was used in a bygone era to be keyed into a payroll system no longer in use to feed the program that printed payroll cheques, back before everything was direct deposit. With the newer system, and the newer subdivision of duties between HR and Payroll, there was another form the frontline managers would send upstairs to indicate any variation in attendace from the previous payroll. This could mean months and months of no need to send such a form in a static department. Much more efficient. But the old form remained. And there were employees who, for the purposes of this one form at least, made a living by passing its information from this person in this office to that person in that office. So there was quite a bit of incentive to maintain the status quo, and the complete irrelevancy of the form never came up. Knowledge is power. Even irrelevant knowledge.
Monkeys have long known that knowledge is power. Of course, when I say monkey, it would probably be more accurate to say ape; I have some knowledge of the corporate jungle but am quite ignorant about actual jungles. Be that as it may, monkeys have generally well-defined social structures as regards gender. So while the males are crashing about the top of the tree screaming Me! Me! and eating others, the females are to be found lower in the tree keeping society together. Specifically the older, wiser, alpha females, who are all about relationships and, in monkey terms, the flow of data.
The alpha female generally has or at least had some relationship with the alpha male. No one will mess with her on account of the screaming idiot at the top of the tree. When any decisions are to be made, it is best to bounce them off the alpha female first so as to avoid misunderstandings. So when monkey A steals an item from monkey B, monkey B will go to the alpha female for instant frontier justice. When you are picking your spot to sleep for the night you had better make sure to have it approved by the alpha. And in particular, when the handlers in a zoo or rescue situation interact with the troop, they are really interacting with the alpha female who then interacts with the troop. When the treats are handed out, the monkey who scores the best treat will automatically trade for whatever the alpha has. And if an item needs to be retrieved from the monkey enclosure, say a broken toy, the handlers will point at it or whatever form of communication works with monkeys, and the alpha female will generally go get it, for a reward of course. She is the point of dissemination for information, goods and services flowing into and out of her department, a monkey enclosure in this case.
Clever monkeys in the corporate world have taken this interconnected knowledge/power dichotomy to amazing heights, and it has nothing to do with gender in a bureaucracy; it is all about how far up the tree you are. So at the very bottom, the office secretary is the only one who knows where the staples are stored. When this person is on holidays, nothing gets stapled. Further up, another monkey will be the only one who was around when the wayback payroll system was designed, the one that knows about volunteers such as the gardeners and their stipends, the thing that no one has yet figured out how to explain to the newer, more modern payroll system, and so there has to be a special run of the wayback system every month and this monkey is the only one who can do it. And towards the top of the tree, of course, are the monkeys who talk to the monkeys who talk to the monkeys who talk to the supreme alpha monkey. The closer a monkey is to the top of the tree, the easier it is to make an entire living by simply passing information either up or down.
This situation is difficult for the monkeys with no particular status, that is, the DBAs, who have to know that the patron of whatever project is on the go actually has the authority to make decisions. While quite often it is sufficient to take one's direction indirectly, as it were, through the monkey-in-the-middle, sometimes you want to make sure you aren't sailing off on the Titanic in project terms. And while DBAs tend to have no particular status, any managers they have to deal with will assume that since they are technical they are therefore below them in rank (even if the DBA makes a great deal more money than said manager) so they are limited in how far up the tree they can interact. So the solution is to go straight to the bottom.
At the bottom of every structure within your organization, be it a department or a school or a division, or whatever else is appropriate in your particular tree, you will find the alpha female. The alpha females in a corporate structure could well be male, that is irrelevant, much like the overall alpha male could well be female. What is salient about the corporate alpha female is that this is the individual who knows where the staples are stored. But they also tend to know where the bodies are buried. It is they who give tacit approval (or not) to everything that goes on in their structure, their part of the tree. They will know that the boss in charge of the project you are researching plans to be out of the country at go-live; a bad sign. They'll know that no purchase orders have gone out for additional hardware. They'll know there's nothing in the overtime budget. They'll know a hundred other bits of trivia that individually are not secrets but collectively paint a picture and they're quite happy to share if you show up with monkey treats - I found doughnuts to work quite well.
If you want to find out what the monkeys at the top of the tree are doing, ask the ones at the bottom.
The Flying Monkeys
In 1944, Charles Boyer drove Ingrid Bergman nuts, in part by fiddling with the gas lighting in use back then (do you know they sometimes used carbon monoxide to power those things?) to make the lights dim and brighten. He then assured Ingrid that the lights weren't doing anything and it had to be in her mind. Charles was a narcissist, or somone who thinks quite highly of himself. The technique he was employing to subvert Ingrid had no name at the time, but is now called gaslighting, and it is the noble art of undermining another's confidence in themselves so as to make them more pliant and submissive. And nuts.
Monkeys have a very direct approach to gaslighting - they call it the Stick Thwok. To stick thwok another monkey, and therefore undermine its confidence, you pick up a stick and thwok it as hard as you can. Monkeys have no subtlety and in particular no subtlety of language (so far as anyone knows) or else they'd be a little more refined in their gaslighting techniques. Like people are.
The lowest form of gaslighting amongst people is something I call The Mother Superiority Complex, and it is the type of gaslighting you can picture a teacher doing to children, the slower ones at least. As with all gaslighting, you can tell it's being used by the choice of words and phrases the gaslighter will use. In the case of the lower forms, you will hear things like "You need to (do something or other)" or "I know I'd get angry (if you did something or other)." These phrases are designed to completely undermine the simple child's confidence in themselves while at the same time not exposing the inflictor in any way - they have not ordered the victim to do anything, so if the victim refuses then another tactic can be tried, and the game continues, possibly in a less passive-aggressive manner.
Of course, the Mother Superior only works when there is a massive power imbalance in the attacker's favour, and rarely works on adults. Adults have much more subtle ways of brainwashing others, but again, you can tell by the phrases being used. Phrases like "Don't you think you're over-reacting? (I know I do)", "I know what you're thinking,... (and I will tell you what that is)", "It's not your fault (although really it is; everyone knows it but you)", "We already talked about this (so let's change the subject)", "Let's just move on", "Tommorrow will be another day" and I could go on and on. Just google "Narcissism" and "Gaslighting" and you'll get enough insight into that guy at work to make you go quite nuts, saving him a great deal of effort.
But the lower forms of gaslighting - child level and adult level - still only work on the weak. You can either just ignore them or even fight back by saying things like "My needs are not a fit subject to discuss around ladies", "If you need to tell people when you are angry then you don't know what anger is (but keep talking and you'll learn)", "Actually, I was thinking that I could really use a good fart right about now", or "Damn straight it's not my fault. No one thinks that but you (this is another lower form of gaslighting)." Of course, the experienced narcissist will generally not use these lower forms directly on their victim simply because they only work on the weak. Instead, they will recruit others to do their bidding: the flying monkeys.
Flying monkeys are people the narcissist monkey recruits to do their dirty work for them. They may be weak, subverted monkeys. But more often they're strong, and a little narcissistic themselves. They kind of enjoy being unleashed on the rest of the tree. And they're probably waiting for a sign of weakness in their patron alpha so they can eat him (or her) and become alpha themselves. In any event, if a monkey of no particular status stands up to an alpha they may find themselves being attacked on all sides by a swarm of flying monkeys.
This is a tough one. You can probably guess which monkey is actually looking to thwok you but since they're hiding behind a curtain of flying henchmen you can only do yourself a disservice by trying the direct approach. So, as with most issues to do with monkeys, the correct approach is the judicious use of monkey treats.
All lower monkeys in a bureaucracy at least nominally report to someone. And as long as that someone is not the suspected narcissist then you can ground a lot of flying monkeys by going to their boss and supporting that stupid chocolate bar fundraiser they're doing for their kid's soccer team. This will make that boss very confused, because there is every chance they have been gaslighted to some extent about you. But now they can't say anything bad about you for a while at least. Their subservient monkeys will sense this and will be themselves confused. It's hard to fly when you're confused. You can add fuel to this fire by leaving the hated chocolate bars by the coffee pot for anyone's use. Then look for the confused people and they will likely be sort of a cloud around a monkey who is holding a big stick.
When you think you're going nuts, look for the monkey with the stick.
The Wheel of Blame
So this is where it all comes together. The summary if you will. The punchline. Where the rubber hits the road. Or, in our monkey tree analogy, picture the lower branches of the tree being occupied by DBAs, all using fans as umbrellas. This is where, in spite of everyone's best efforts, something has gone wrong.
Whenever something goes wrong in the monkey tree - maybe the rope swing breaks, or perhaps a vicious fight breaks out and someone important gets hurt - it is easy to know who's to blame. It's the lowest ranking animal. So it's only fair to set things to rights by punishing that individual until everyone forgets about what the original issue was. It's a bit more complicated in the corporate jungle of course. But not really.
Your average technical project in your average bureaucracy starts with an alpha animal who has perfected the art of the screaming meemees to the point that they are in charge of some branch on the tree. They then get it in their heads to mount some form of project, to streamline some facet of the business of their particular branch. So they assemble a team to make it so. Of course, they'll really only assemble a business analyst and that person will then assemble the team. A business analyst is like a DBA except they have no technical skills. What they do have, though, is a fluent command of the Weasel language. For whatever reason, upper management has no time for technical words, but they could listen to weasel words all day long. So the business analyst, while having fewer skills than a DBA, actually has a higher status within the organization and while, like a DBA, has no direct reports, is likely to be a form of manager, higher in the tree, and therefore in a position to literally shit on the DBAs.
So once the business manager has assembled a team then for reasons known only to monkeys it will immediately be sabotaged by either the alpha in charge (the patron of the project) or by his or her flying monkey (the business analyst), or by flying monkeys of lesser stature further down the chain of command. The sabotage effort will generally be in the form of a gross underestimation of the technical, financial, time and/or political logistics of the project if at the top level, maybe some form of work-to-rule campaign in the middle, and at the bottom of the structure the technical people will be bickering about the latest technologies with which only a few people have familiarity. Whatever the threat, it won't become evident to the powerful monkeys that there is a problem until it is too late to do anything about it. So the monkeys who are attempting to remain neutral and keep the project on track, seeing these "gaps", will do everything in their power to set things to rights. But all they can really do is point out those gaps. When these are pointed out, the alpha or one of their flying monkeys will say things like "Imagine yourself at the successfull completion of this project. What is that one thing you did that made the problem go away?" or some other such platitude that is actually thinly veiled gaslighting. So the people on the front lines will dig their trenches a little deeper and wait for the shelling.
Sometimes temporary groups form within the matrix established for the project. Ordinarily, DBAs and the hardware folks get along like cats in a bag but every once in a while it is in their mutual self interest to form a coalition - let's say to petition the higher ups for Linux instead of Windows (a technical detail, ignore it) which will be viewed by the higher ups as a technical detail to be ignored. The coalition, of course, cannot directly speak with the patron, so they have to go through the monkey-in-the-middle, the business analyst, to flow information up the tree. When their information gets ignored and if it is important in any way to acknowledge the coalition's efforts (or very existence) by rubbing their collective nose in it, then the information will flow back down the tree, again through the monkey-in-the-middle who will have put on their flying monkey outfit prior to the meeting.
Eventually, in spite of the gaps and the ignored technical details, the project will come to some sort of completion, as all projects, by definition, must. The relative success of the project will vary depending upon at what level in the tree you are looking - it will range from a triumphant success towards the top of the tree to a dismal failure towards the bottom of the tree. Towards the top, even though the project was a triumphant success, there are always things that could have been done better, otherwise why would a project need managers, and so there will be a post mortem. It is at this post mortem that the lower rung of monkeys will talk about things that have gone wrong. And since the higher monkeys have no idea what the lower monkeys are talking about, then the failings are obviously a result of something that the lower monkeys did or did not do. This is where blame comes in.
One of the first things a high ranking monkey discovers, shortly after the screaming meemees, is the wheel of blame. They likely studied its precursor in undergrad monkey school - The Swiss Cheese Model of Risk Assessment, which presents risks as a stack of slices of swiss cheese, and if the holes line up they let a risk through and it becomes a threat. But alpha monkeys quickly discover that risk assessment is for losers, whereas risk taking is what winners do. And for that they need a new model - The Swiss Cheese Model of Risk Taking. In that model, the swiss cheese is an entire wheel of cheese, rolling uphill because the Swiss are a clever people. Wherever the cheese stops rolling a risk has suddenly turned into a threat and then immediately into blame, for whomever is close by. But they, being higher up, can see where the wheel has come from and the people lower down, and they will pick one of those at random and assign the blame to them. That person will be higher than someone further down, past whom the wheel also rolled, and they will assign the blame to them. And so on. So the Wheel of Blame frees winners up to take risks, free from the unpleasantness sometimes associated with failure domains, which are really more of a risk assessment concept anyway.
Drunks instinctively know about the wheel of blame. When they smear someone driving home from the bar they look downhill (metaphorically) and see the tavern owner, who should not have been serving drinks to an inebriated patron. When a surgeon cuts you open with unsterilized tools there is someone downhill from them who was in charge of sterilization. Even my dog knows about the wheel. When he has an unholy fart he will stare at his own ass and bark, in his version of "blame the dog". So blame is a wheel rolling uphill, and there is always someone downhill from you who is really at fault. As long as you outrank that person. Which means there is no one downhill from the DBA.
Therefore DBAs are responsible for 99% of the technical cockups in any given project. But only at the unspoken level. At the spoken level, someone higher up in the hierarchy will magnanimously chair a post mortem. They will applaud the efforts of the DBA, so that the DBA is the person everyone has in mind when the chair continues, and says things like "Now I know what you're all thinking, but I don't believe we should overreact on this. It's not anyone's fault. So let's just move on and I'm sure tomorrow will be another day. We all had a win here today. We did it as a team." And a huge smile for all of the victims at the far end of the table, with a wink for those closer to the head, who flew in special for the meeting. Num-num-num.