Last week, I read Colleen Sharen’s blog post titled “Political Skill & #Leadership” in my free time. Colleen is an associate professor doing organizational studies in University of Toronto, and her blog is rated as one of the top organizational behavior blogs to read.
This blog post addresses most of people’s common misunderstandings that effective player of office politics often manipulate others to achieve their self interests, and it gives the facts from research that effective leaders with strong political skills actually always experience much better relationships with others. Those effective leaders and their supporters always perceive better performance evaluations mutually.
What is particular interesting to me is the different definitions and understandings of political skills in my textbook and the blog. our OB course textbook defines the political skills as “the ability to influence others in such a way as to enhance one’s objectives”, which leads to the traditional and common misunderstandings that political skills are used to manipulate or detriment others for self interests. However, in this blog post, the author defines the political skills as “the ability to identify and understand the motivations and needs of others to influence others to ensure the attainment of individual, group and organizational goals”.
First of all, although both definitions are about to influence others in order to achieve goals, the definition of political skills in the blog post suddenly appears to make political skills stronger, more powerful, and more positive when it is based on the consensus and mutual understandings of groups and organizations.
Second of all, the OB textbook definition says political skills are aimed at achieving one’s objectives while the definition in the blog post says that political skills are aimed at attaining goals at both the individual and organizational levels for a win-win purpose.
This blog post really gave me some fresh ideas on political skills. I also used to consider of political skills as nasty as the blog author Colleen and majority of others did, and I never liked reading anything about them. However, the new definition of political skills makes me imagine that leadership styles incorporating the “political skills” could manage organizations, run business, and do any other activities involved at an organizational scope much more efficiently and make greater impacts.
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Reference:
Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition