USE OF POLITICS
There are occasions when a subtle appeal rather than a direct
attack will pay dividends; and sometimes you have to exercise
your powers of persuasion indirectly on those whose support
you need. The following case study illustrates the legitimate use
of politics.
James Hale was the personnel director of a large divisionalized group
in the food industry. The rate of growth by expansion and acquisitions
had been very rapid. There was a shortage of really good managers
and a lack of coordination between the divisions in the group and
between those divisions and head office. Hale believed that setting
up a group management training centre would be a good way of
helping to overcome these problems. He knew, however, that he
would have to get agreement to this plan not only from the managing
director, who would be broadly sympathetic, but also from his co-
directors. The MD would not act without the support of a majority on
his board.
In any case Hale genuinely felt that there was no point in devel-
oping a facility of this sort for people who were not interested in it.
He therefore sat back and deliberately worked out a strategy for
getting agreement to his proposal. He knew that a frontal attack
might fail. Management development was perceived by his
colleagues as a somewhat airy-fairy idea which had little relevance to
their real concerns as directors. He therefore had to adopt a more
subtle approach. He did not call it a political campaign, but that is
what it was. He was setting out to influence people indirectly.
The basis of his plan was an individual approach to each of his
colleagues, adjusted to their particular interests and concerns. In the
case of the marketing director, he got the general sales manager to
advocate the need for training in sales management for divisional
sales staff. He ran several pilot courses in hotels and invited the
marketing director to the winding-up session. He made sure that the
marketing director was impressed, not only by what the divisional
sales staff had learnt from the course, but also by the new spirit of
identification with group aims and policies engendered by the
training. Casually, the personnel director let slip the thought that if
the group had its own training centre this feeling of commitment
could be developed even more strongly.
The same basic technique was used with the production director.
In addition he was helped to come to the view that a centre owned
by the group could speed up the introduction of new ideas and
provide a facility for communicating directly with key staff which
was not available at present.How to Deal with Office Politics 257