The Manager as Politician Chapter 10 PDF

The Manager as Politician chapter 10 Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. —Edmund Burke Borntoawealthy but unorthodox family, Aruna Roy decided early in life that her mission was to do something for India’s poor. After getting a master’s degree fro...

The Manager as Politician chapter 10 Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. —Edmund Burke Borntoawealthy but unorthodox family, Aruna Roy decided early in life that her mission was to do something for India’s poor. After getting a master’s degree from the University of Delhi, she became one of the few women whopassed the national test to join India’s elite civil service. Thrilled at first, she gradually became disillusioned with the rigid, top- down Indian bureaucracy and concluded she could do more out of government. She joined a nonprofit her husband had founded in a poor rural village. It was not an easy transition. She had to walk miles to get there, the village lacked electricity and running water, and the women she hoped to work with were initially suspicious. But Roy persisted, adapted to village life, made friends, and worked on issues of incomes and children’s education. Through several years of travel and discussion, she came to a clearer sense of what rural womenneededandbuiltasupportnetworkofindividuals andagencies willing to help on her goal of systemic change. Roythen tookanother, even more radical step. She recruited a few allies who shared her vision, and together they moved into a two-room hut in a remote village. They began by building relationships, listening, learning, and looking for opportunities. One came when they helped a nearby village reclaim 1,500 acres previously misappropriated by a well connected landowner. Over time, Roy and her group built a support base. In May, 1990, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, Sixth Edition. Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal. 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by Jossey-Bass. 201 WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:32 Page 202 they were able to bring a thousand people together to form a new organization, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), or Worker and Peasant Empowerment Union. As they continued to press for better village conditions, they realized that money intended for workers’ pay or village improvements was often disappearing. On the rare occasions that they could get access to government records, they found that officials were generating reams of falsified documents to hide corruption. Roy and her allies began a campaign for more government transparency and drew support from the middle class as well as the poor—both suffered when money to repair roads or put a roof on the local school disappeared into someone’s pocket. Roy and her allies began to hold public hearings, with little more than a tent and an open mike for people to voice grievances. The government tried to shut down the hearings, which only intensified support for the campaign. Trade unions got on board, national media covered the story, and approxi mately 400 organizations joined the cause. It took years of hard work, but in 2005 India enacted the National Right to Information Act (Krishnamurthy and Winston, 2010). Aruna Roy’s ability to mobilize power, assemble coalitions, and champion a noble cause paid off. It may not be obvious that political skill is as vital in business as in community organizing, but a case from Microsoft provides an example. Bill Gates and his tiny software business got their big break in the early 1980s when they obtained the contract to supply an operating system, DOS, for IBM’s new line of personal computers. IBM PC’s and clones soon dominated the PC business, and Microsoft began a meteoric rise. Ten years later, everyone knew that DOS was obsolete and woefully deficient. The replacement was supposed to be OS/2, a new operating system developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM, but it was a tense partnership. IBMers saw “Microsofties” as undisciplined adolescents. Microsoft folks moaned that “Big Blue” was a hopelessly bureaucratic producer of “poor code, poor design, and poor process” (Manes and Andrews, 1994, p. 425). Increasingly pessimistic about the viability of OS/2, Gates decided to hedge his bets by developing his own new operating system to be called Windows NT. Gates recruited the brilliant but crotchety Dave Cutler from Digital Equipment to head the effort. Gates recognized that Cutler was known “more for his code than his charm” (Zachary, 1993, p. A1). Things started well, but Cutler insisted on keeping his team small and wanted no responsibility beyond the “kernel” of the operating system. He figured someone else could worry about details like the user interface. Gates began to see a potential disaster looming, but issuing orders to the temperamental Cutler was as promising as telling Picasso how to paint. So Gates put the calm, understated Paul Maritz on the case. Born in South Africa, Maritz had studied mathematics and economics in Cape Town before deciding that 202 Reframing Organizations WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:32 Page 203 software was his destiny. He joined Microsoft in 1986 and became the leader of its OS/2 effort. When he was assigned informal oversight of Windows NT, he got a frosty welcome: As hebegan meeting regularly with Cutler on NT matters, Maritz often found himself the victim of slights. Once Maritz innocently suggested to Cutler that “We should—” Cutler interrupted, “We! Who’s we? You mean you and the mouse in your pocket?” Maritz brushed off such retorts, even finding humor in Cutler’s apparently inexhaustible supply of epithets. He refused to allow Cutler to draw him into a brawl. Instead, he hoped Cutler would “volunteer” for greater responsibility as the shortcomings of the status quo became more apparent (Zachary, 1994, p. 76). Maritz enticed Cutler with tempting challenges. In early 1990, he asked Cutler if he could put together a demonstration of NT for COMDEX, the industry’s biggest trade show. Cutler took the bait. Maritz knew that the effort would expose NT’s weaknesses (Zachary, 1994). When Gates subsequently seethed that NT was too late, too big, and too slow, Maritz scrambled to “filter that stuff from Dave” (p. 208). Maritz’s patience eventually paid off when he was promoted to head all operating systems development: The promotion gave Maritz formal and actual authority over Cutler and the entire NT project. Still, he avoided confrontations, preferring to wait until Cutler came to see the benefits of Maritz’s views. Increasingly Cutler and his inner circle viewed Maritz as a powerhouse, not an empty suit. “He’s critical to the project,” said [one of Cutler’s most loyal lieutenants]. “He got into it a little bit at a time. Slowly he blended his way in until it was obvious who was running the show. Him” (Zachary, 1994, p. 204). Chapter 9’s account of the Columbia and Challenger cases drives home a chilling lesson about political pressures sidetracking momentous decisions. The implosion of firms such as Enron, WorldCom, and Portugal’s oldest bank, Banco Espírito Santo, shows how the unfettered pursuit of self-interest by powerful executives can bring even a huge corporation to its knees. Many believe that the antidote is to get politics out of management. But this is unrealistic. Enduring differences lead to multiple interpretations of what’s true and what’s important. Scarce resources trigger contests about who gets what. Interdependence means that people cannot ignore one another; they need each other’s assistance, support, and resources. Under such conditions, efforts to eliminate politics are futile and The Manager as Politician 203 WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:32 Page 204 counterproductive. Aruna Roy’s passion and persistence and Paul Maritz’s deft combina tion of patience and diplomacy offer hope—positive examples of the manager as construc tive politician. Kotter (1985) contends that too many managers are either naive or cynical about organizational politics. Pollyannas view the world through rose-colored glasses, assuming that most people are good, kind, and trustworthy. Cynics believe the opposite: Everyone is selfish, things are always cutthroat, and “get them before they get you” is the best survival tactic. Brown and Hesketh (2004) documented parallel stances among college job seekers. The naive “purists” believed hiring was fair and they’d be rewarded on their merits if they presented themselves honestly. The more cynical “players” gamed the system and tried to present themselves as whatever they thought employers wanted. In Kotter’s view, neither extreme is realistic or effective: “Organizational excellence... demands a sophisticated type of social skill: a leadership skill that can mobilize people and accomplish important objectives despite dozens of obstacles; a skill that can pull people together for meaningful purposes despite the thousands of forces that push us apart; a skill that can keep our corporations and public institutions from descending into a mediocrity characterized by bureaucratic infighting, parochial politics, and vicious power struggles” (p. 11). In a world of chronic scarcity, diversity, and conflict, the nimble manager walks a tightrope: developing a direction, building a base of support, and cobbling together working relations with both allies and opponents. In this chapter, we discuss why this is vital and then lay out the basic skills of the manager as politician. Finally, we tackle ethical issues, the soft underbelly of organizational politics. Is it possible to play politics and still do the right thing? We discuss four instrumental values to guide ethical choice. POLITICAL SKILLS The manager as politician exercises four key skills: agenda-setting (Kanter, 1983; Kotter, 1988; Pfeffer, 1992; Smith, 1988), mapping the political terrain (DeLuca, 1999; Pfeffer, 1992; Pichault, 1993), networking and building coalitions (Brass and Krackhardt, 2012; Burt, 1992; DeLuca, 1999; Kanter, 1983; Kotter, 1982, 1985, 1988; Kurchner-Hawkins and Miller, 2006; Pfeffer, 1992; Smith, 1988), and bargaining and negotiating (Bellow and Moulton, 1978; Fisher and Ury, 1981; Lax and Sebenius, 1986). Agenda Setting Structurally, an agenda outlines a goal and a schedule of activities. Politically, an agenda is a statement of interests and a scenario for getting the goods. In reflecting on his experience as 204 Reframing Organizations WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:32 Page 205 a university president, Warren Bennis arrived at a deceptively simple observation: “It struck me that I was most effective when I knew what I wanted” (1989, p. 20). Kanter’s study of internal entrepreneurs in American corporations (1983), Kotter’s analysis of effective corporate leaders (1988), and Smith’s examination of effective U.S. presidents (1988) all reached a similar conclusion: Regardless of the role you’re in, the first step in effective political leadership is setting an agenda. The effective leader creates an “agenda for change” with two major elements: a vision balancing the long- term interests of key parties, and a strategy for achieving the vision while recognizing competing internal and external forces (Kotter, 1988). Aruna Roy always knew she wanted to do something for the poor, but she had to live and work with them over time to develop an agenda rooted in their needs and concerns. Her effectiveness increased dramatically when she seized on information transparency. The agenda must convey direction while addressing concerns of major stakeholders. Kanter (1983) and Pfeffer (1992) underscore the intimate tie between gathering information and developing a vision. Pfeffer’s list of key political attributes includes “sensitivity”—knowing how others think and what they care about so that your agenda responds to their concerns: “Many people think of politicians as arm-twisters, and that is, in part, true. But in order to be a successful arm twister, one needs to know which arm to twist, and how” (p. 172). Kanter adds: “While gathering information, entrepreneurs can also be ‘planting seeds’— leaving the kernel of an idea behind and letting it germinate and blossom so that it begins to f loat around the system from many sources other than the innovator” (1983, p. 218). Paul Maritz did just that. Ignoring Dave Cutler’s barbs and insults, he focused on getting information, building relationships, and formulating an agenda. He quickly concluded that the NT project was in disarray and that Cutler had to take on more responsibility. Maritz’s strategy was attuned to his quarry: “He protected Cutler from undue criticism and resisted the urge to reform him. [He] kept the peace by exacting from Cutler no ritual expressions of obedience” (Zachary, 1994, pp. 281–282). Avision without a strategy remains an illusion. A strategy has to recognize major forces working for and against the agenda. Smith’s point about U.S. presidents captures the importance of focus for managers at every level: The paramount task and power of the president is to articulate the national purpose: to fix the nation’s agenda. Of all the big games at the summit of American politics, the agenda game must be won first. The effectiveness of the presidency and the capacity of any president to lead depend on focusing the nation’s political attention and its energies on two or three top priorities. From The Manager as Politician 205 WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:32 Page 206 the standpoint of history, the flow of events seems to have immutable logic, but political reality is inherently chaotic: it contains no automatic agenda. Order must be imposed (1988, p. 333). Agendas never come neatly packaged. The bigger the job, the harder it is to wade through the clutter and find order amid chaos. Contrary to Woody Allen’s dictum, success requires more than just showing up. High office, even if the incumbent enjoys great personal popularity, is no guarantee. In his first year as president, Ronald Reagan was remarkably successful following a classic strategy for winning the agenda game: “First impressions are critical. In the agendagame,aswiftbeginningiscrucialforanewpresidenttoestablishhimself asleader— toshowthenationthathewillmakeadifferenceinpeople’slives.Thefirst100days are the vital test; in those weeks, the political community and the public measure a new president—to see whether he is active, dominant, sure, purposeful” (Smith, 1988, p. 334). Reagan began with a vision but without a strategy. He was not a gifted manager or strategist, despite extraordinary ability to portray complex issues in broad, symbolic brushstrokes. Reagan’s staff painstakingly studied the first 100 days of four predecessors. They concluded that it was essential to move with speed and focus. Pushing competing issues aside, they focused on two: cutting taxes and reducing the federal budget. They also discovered a secret weapon in David Stockman, the one person in the Reagan White House whounderstood the federal budget process. “Stockman got a jump on everyone else for two reasons: he had an agenda and a legislative blueprint already prepared, and he understood the real levers of power. Two terms as a Michigan congressman plus a network of key Republican and Democratic connections had taught Stockman how to play the power game” (Smith, 1988, p. 351). Reagan and his advisers had the vision; Stockman provided strategic direction. Mapping the Political Terrain It is foolhardy to plunge into a minefield without knowing where explosives are buried, yet managersunwittinglydoitall the time. Theylaunch anewinitiative withlittle or no effort to scout and master the political turf. Pichault (1993) suggests four steps for developing a political map: 1. Determine channels of informal communication. 2. Identify principal agents of political influence. 3. Analyze possibilities for mobilizing internal and external players. 4. Anticipate counterstrategies that others are likely to employ. 206 Reframing Organizations WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:32 Page 207 Pichault offers an example of planned change in a large government agency in Belgium. The agency wanted to replace antiquated manual records with a fully automated paperless computer network. Proponents of the new system had little understanding of how work got done. Nor did they anticipate the interests and power of key middle managers and frontline bureaucrats. It seemed obvious to the techies that better data meant higher efficiency. In reality, frontline bureaucrats made little use of the data. They applied standard procedures in 90 percent of cases and asked their bosses what to do about the rest. They checked with supervisors partly to get the “right” answer but even more to get political cover. Because they saw no need for the new technology, street-level bureaucrats had incentives to ignore or work around it. After a consultant clarified the political map, a new battle erupted between unrepentant techies, who insisted their solution was correct, and senior managers who argued for a less ambitious approach. The two sides ultimately compromised. Asimple way to develop a political map for any situation is to create a two-dimensional diagram mapping players (who is in the game), power (how much clout each player is likely to exercise), and interests (what each player wants). Exhibits 10.1 and 10.2 present two hypothetical versions of the Belgian bureaucracy’s political map. Exhibit 10.1 shows the map as the techies saw it. They expected little opposition and assumed they held the high cards; their map implied a quick and easy win. Exhibit 10.2, a more objective map, paints a very Exhibit 10.1. The Political Map as Seen by the Techies: Strong Support and Weak Opposition for Change. The Manager as Politician 207 WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:33 Page 208 Exhibit 10.2. TheReal Political Map: A Battleground with Strong Players on Both Sides. different picture. Resistance is more intense and opponents more powerful. This view forecasts a stormy process with protracted conflict. Though less comforting, the second map has an important message: Success requires substantial effort to realign the political force f ield. The third and fourth key skills of the manager as politician, discussed in the next two sections, respond to that challenge. Networking and Building Coalitions Managersoften fail to get things done because they rely too much onreason and too little on relationships. In both the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle catastrophes (discussed in Chapter 9), engineers pitched careful, data-based arguments to their superiors about potentially lethal safety risks—and failed to dent their bosses’ resistance (Glanz and Schwartz, 2003; Vaughan, 1995). Six months before the Challenger accident, for example, an engineer at Morton Thiokol wrote to management: “The result [of an O-ring failure] wouldbeacatastrophe of the highest order—loss of humanlife” (Bell and Esch, 1987, p. 45). A memo, if it is clear and powerful, may work, but is often a sign of political innocence. Kotter (1985) suggests four basic steps for exercising political influence: 1. Identify relevant relationships. (Figure out which players you need to influence.) 2. Assess who might resist, why, and how strongly. (Determine where the leadership challenges will be.) 208 Reframing Organizations WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:33 Page 209 3. Develop, wherever possible, links with potential opponents to facilitate communica tion, education, or negotiation. (Hold your enemies close.) 4. If step three fails, carefully select and implement either more subtle or more forceful methods. (Save your more potent weapons until you really need them, but have a Plan B in case Plan A falls short.) These steps underscore the importance of developing a power base. Moving up the managerial ladder confers authority but also creates more dependence, because success requires the cooperation of many others (Kotter, 1985, 1988; Butcher and Clarke, 2001). People rarely give their best efforts and fullest cooperation simply because they have been ordered to do so. They accept direction better when they perceive the people in authority as credible, competent, and sensible. The first task in building networks and coalitions is to figure out whose help you need. The second is to develop relationships so people will be there when you need them. Successful middle-management change agents typically begin by getting their boss on board (Kanter, 1983). They then move to “preselling,” or “making cheerleaders”: “Peers, managers of related functions, stakeholders in the issue, potential collaborators, and sometimes even customers would be approached individually, in one-on-one meetings that gave people a chance to influence the project and [gave] the innovator the maximumopportunitytosellit. Seeing them alone and on their territory was important: the rule was to act as if each person were the most important one for the project’s success” (p. 223). Once you cultivate cheerleaders, you can move to “horse trading”: promising rewards in exchange for resources and support. This builds a resource base that h elps in “securing blessings”—getting the necessary approvals and mandates from higher management (Kanter, 1983). Kanter found that the usual route to success in securing blessings is to identify critical senior managers and to develop a polished, formal presentation to nail down their support. The best presentations respond to both substantive and political concerns. Senior managers typically care about two questions: Is it a good idea? How will my constituents react? Once innovators get a nod from higher management, they can formalize the coalition with their boss and make specific plans for pursuing the project. The basic point is simple: As a manager, you need friends and allies to get things done. Tosewuptheirsupport, you need to build coalitions. Rationalists and romantics often rebel against this scenario. Why should you have to play political games to get something accepted if it’s the right thing to do? One of the great classics of French drama, Molière’s The Misanthrope, tells the story of a protagonist whose rigid rejection of all things political is destructive for him and everyone close by. The point that Molière made four centuries ago The Manager as Politician 209 WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:33 Page 210 still holds: It is hard to dislike politics without also disliking people. Like it or not, political dynamics are inevitable under three conditions most managers face every day: ambiguity, diversity, and scarcity. Informal networks perform a number of functions that formal structure may do poorly or not at all—moving projects forward, imparting culture, mentoring, and creating “communities of practice.” Some organizations use measures of social networking to identify and manage who’s connected to whom. When Procter & Gamble studied linkages amongits 25research and development units around the world, it discovered that its unit in China was relatively isolated from all the rest—a clear signal that linkages needed strengthening to corner a big and growing market (Reingold and Yang, 2007). Ignoring or misreading people’s roles in networks is costly. Consider the mistake that undermined John LeBoutillier’s political career. Shortly after he was elected to Congress from a wealthy district in Long Island, LeBoutillier fired up his audience at the New York Republican convention with the colorful quip that Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill was “fat, bloated, and out of control, just like the Federal budget.” Asked to comment, Tip O’Neill was atypically terse: “I wouldn’t know the man from a cord of wood” (Matthews, 1999, p. 113). Two years later, LeBoutillier unexpectedly lost his bid for reelection to an unknown opponent who didn’t have the money to mount a real campaign—until a mysterious flood of contributions poured in from all over America. When LeBoutillier later ran into O’Neill, he admitted sheepishly, “I guess you were more popular than I thought you were” (Matthews, 1999, p. 114). LeBoutillier learned the hard way that it is dangerous to underestimate or provoke people when you don’t know howmuchpowerthey have or who their friends are. Bargaining and Negotiation We often associate bargaining with commercial, legal, and labor transactions. From a political perspective, though, bargaining is central to decision making. The horse trading that Kanter describes as part of coalition building is just one of many examples. Negotiation occurs whenever two or more parties with some interests in common and others in conflict need toreach agreement. Labor and managementmayagreethatafirmshouldmakemoney and offer good jobs to employees but part ways on how to balance pay and profitability. Engineers and managers in the NASA space program had a common interest in the success of the shuttle flights, but at key moments differed sharply on how to balance technical and political tradeoffs. A fundamental dilemma in negotiations is choosing between “creating value” and “claiming value” (Lax and Sebenius, 1986). Value creators believe that successful negotiators 210 Reframing Organizations WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:33 Page 211 must be inventive and cooperative in searching for a win-win solution. Value claimers see “win-win” as naively optimistic. For them, bargaining is a hard, tough process in which you have to do what it takes to win as much as you can. One of the best-known win-win approaches to negotiation was developed by Fisher and Ury (1981) in their classic Getting to Yes. They argue that parties too often engage in “positional bargaining”: They stake out positions and then reluctantly make concessions to reach agreement. Fisher and Urycontendthat positionalbargaining is inefficient and misses opportunities to create something that’s better for everyone. They propose an alternative: “principled bargaining,” built around four strategies. The first strategy is to separate people from the problem. The stress and tension of negotiations can easily escalate into anger and personal attack. The result is that a negotiator sometimes wants to defeat or hurt the other party at almost any cost. Because every bargaining situation involves both substance and relationship, the wise negotiator will “deal with the people as human beings and with the problem on its merits.” Paul Maritz demonstrated this principle in dealing with the prickly Dave Cutler. Even though Cutler continually baited and insulted him, Maritz refused to be distracted and persistently focused on the task at hand. Thesecondstrategyistofocusoninterests,notpositions.Ifyougetlockedintoaparticular position, you might overlook better ways to achieve your goal. A classic example is the 1978 CampDavidtreatybetweenIsraelandEgypt.Thesideswereatanimpasseoverwheretodraw the boundarybetweenthetwocountries.IsraelwantedtokeeppartoftheSinai;Egyptwanted all of it back. Resolution became possible only whentheylookedatunderlyinginterests. Israel was concerned about security: no Egyptian tanks on the border. Egypt was concerned about sovereignty: The Sinai had been part of Egypt from the time of the Pharaohs. The parties agreed on a plan that gave all of the Sinai back to Egypt while demilitarizing large parts of it (Fisher and Ury, 1981). That solution led to a durable peace agreement. Fisher and Ury’s third strategy is to invent options for mutual gain instead of locking in on the first alternative that comes to mind. More options increase the chance of a better outcome. Maritz recognized this in his dealings with Cutler. Instead of bullying, he asked innocently, “Could you do a demo at COMDEX?”Itwasanewoption thatcreated gains for both parties. Fisher andUry’sfourthstrategy is to insist on objective criteria—standards of fairness for both substance and procedure. Agreeing on criteria at the beginning of negotiations can produce optimism and momentum,whilereducing the use of devious or provocative tactics that get in the way of a mutually beneficial solution. When a school board and a teachers’ union are at loggerheads over the size of a pay increase, they can look for independent The Manager as Politician 211 WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:33 Page 212 standards, such as the rate of inflation or the terms of settlement in other districts. A classic example of fair procedure finds two sisters deadlocked over how to divide the last wedge of pie between them. They agree that one will cut the pie into two pieces and the other will choose the piece that she wants. Fisher and Ury devote most of their attention to creating value—finding better solutions for both parties. They downplay the question of claiming value. Yet there are many examples in whichshrewdvalueclaimershavecomeoutahead.In1980,BillGatesofferedto license an operating system to IBM about 48 hours before he had one to sell. Then he neglected to mention to Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer that Microsoft was buying his operating system to resell it to IBM. Gates gave IBM a great price: only $30,000 more than the $50,000 he’d paidfor it. But he retained the rights to license it to anyone else. At the time, Microsoft was a flea atop IBM’s elephant. Almost no one except Gates saw the possibility that consumers would want an IBM computer made by anyone but IBM. IBM negotiators might well have thought they were stealing candy from babies in buying DOS royalty-free for a measly $80,000. Meanwhile, Gates was already dreaming about millions of computers running his code. As it turned out, the new PC was an instant hit, and IBM couldn’t make enough of them. Within a year, Microsoft had licensed MS-DOS to 50 companies, and the number kept growing (Mendelson and Korin, n.d.). Twenty years later, onlookers who wondered why Microsoft was so aggressive and unyielding in battling government antitrust suits might not have known that Gates had long been a dogged value claimer. A classic treatment of value claiming is Schelling’s 1960 essay The Strategy of Conflict, which focuses on how to make credible threats. Suppose, for example, that I want to buy your house and am willing to pay $250,000. How can I convince you that I’m willing to pay only $200,000? Contrary to a common assumption, I’m not always better off if I’m stronger and have moreresources. If you believe that I’m very wealthy, you might take my threat less seriously than you would if I can get you to believe that $200,000 is the highest I can go. Common sense also suggests that I should be better off if I have considerable freedom of action. Yet I may get a better price if I can convince you my hands are tied. Perhaps I’m representing a very stubborn buyer who won’t go above $200,000, even if the house is worth more. Such examples suggest that the ideal situation for a bargainer is to have substantial resources and freedom while convincing the other side of the opposite. Value claiming provides its own slant on the bargaining process: Bargaining is a mixed-motive game. Both parties want an agreement but have differing interests and preferences, so that what seems valuable to one may be negligible to the other. 212 Reframing Organizations WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:33 Page 213 Bargaining is a process of interdependent decisions. What each party does affects the other. Each player wants to be able to predict what the other will do while limiting the other’s ability to reciprocate. ThemoreplayerAcancontrolplayerB’s level of uncertainty, the more powerful A is. The more A can keep private—as Bill Gates did with Seattle Computer and IBM—the better. Bargaining involves judicious use of threats rather than sanctions. Players may threaten to use force, go on strike, or break off negotiations. In most cases, they prefer not to bear the costs of carrying out the threat. Making a threat credible is crucial. A threat works only if your opponent believes it. Noncredible threats weaken your bargaining position and confuse the process. Calculation of the appropriate level of threat is also critical. If I underthreaten, you may think I’m weak.If Ioverthreaten, you maynotbelieve me, maybreakoffthenegotiations, or may escalate your own threats. Creating value and claiming value are both intrinsic to the bargaining process. How do you decide how to balance the two? At least two questions are important: How much opportunity is there for a win-win solution? And will you have to work with these people again? If an agreement can make everyone better off, it makes sense to emphasize creating value. If you expect to work with the same people in the future, it is risky to use scorched earth tactics that leave anger and mistrust in their wake. Managers who get a reputation for being manipulative, self-interested, or untrustworthy have a hard time building the net works and coalitions they need for long-term success. Axelrod (1980) found that a strategy of conditional openness works best when negotiators need to work together over time. This strategy starts with open and collaborative behavior and maintains the approach if the other responds in kind. If the other party becomes adversarial, however, the negotiator responds accordingly and remains adversarial until the opponent makes a collaborative move. It is, in effect, a friendly and forgiving version of tit for tat: do unto others as they do unto you. Axelrod’s research found that this conditional openness approach worked better than even the most fiendishly diabolical adversarial strategy. A final consideration in balancing collaborative and adversarial tactics is ethics. Bargainers often misrepresent their positions—even though society almost universally condemns lying as unethical (Bok, 1978). This leads to a tricky question for the manager as politician: What actions are ethical and just? The Manager as Politician 213 WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:33 Page 214 MORALITY ANDPOLITICS Burns (1978), Lax and Sebenius (1986), Messick and Ohme (1998), and Svara (2007) explore ethical issues in bargaining and organizational politics. Burns’s conception of positive politics (1978) draws on examples as diverse and complex as Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, Gandhi and Mao, Woodrow Wilson and Joan of Arc. He sees conflict and power as central to leadership. Searching for firm moral footing in a world of cultural and ethical diversity, Burns turned to Maslow’s (1954) theory of motivation and Kohlberg’s (1973) treatment of ethics. From Maslow, he borrowed the hierarchy of motives (see Chapter 6). Moral leaders, he argued, appeal to higher-order human needs. Kohlberg supplied the idea of stages of moral reasoning. At the lowest, “preconventional” level, moral judgment rests primarily on perceived consequences: An action is right if you are rewarded and wrong if you are punished. In the intermediate or “conventional” level, the emphasis is on conforming to authority and following the rules. At the highest, “postconventional” level, ethical judgment rests on general principles: the greatest good for the greatest number, or universal moral principles. Maslow and Kohlberg, intertwined, gave Burns a foundation for constructing a positive view of politics: “If leaders are to be effective in helping to mobilize and elevate their constituencies, leaders must be whole persons, persons with full functioning capacities for thinking and feeling. The problem for them as educators, as leaders, is not to promote narrow, egocentric self-actualization, but to extend awareness of human needs and the means of gratifying them, to improve the larger social situation for which educators or leaders have responsibility and over which they have power” (1978, pp. 448–449). Burns’s view provides two expansive criteria: Does your leadership rest on general moral principles? And does it appeal to the “better angels” in your constituents’ psyches? Lax and Sebenius (1986) see ethical issues as inescapable quandaries but provide a concrete set of questions for assessing leaders’ actions: Are youfollowing rules that are mutually understood and accepted? In poker, for example, players understand that bluffing is part of the game but pulling cards from your sleeve is not. Are you comfortable discussing and defending your choices? Would you want your colleagues and friends to know what you’re doing? Your spouse, children, or parents? Would you be comfortable if your deeds appeared on the Web or in your local newspaper? 214 Reframing Organizations WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:33 Page 215 Would you want to be on the receiving end of your own actions? Would you want this done to a member of your family? Would the world be better or worse if everyone acted as you did? If you were designing an organization, would you want people to follow your example? Would you teach your children the ethics you have embraced? Arethere alternatives you could consider that rest on firmer ethical ground? Could you test your strategy with a trusted advisor and ask about other possibilities? These questions embody four principles of moral judgment: Mutuality. Are all parties to a relationship operating under the same understanding about the rules of the game? Enron’s Ken Lay was talking up the company’s stock to analysts and employees even as he and others were selling their shares. In the period when WorldCom improved its profits by cooking the books, it made its competitors look bad. Top executives at competing firms such as AT&T and Sprint felt the heat from analysts andshareholders and wondered, “Whycan’twegettheresults they’regetting?” Onlylater did they learn the answer: “They’re cheating, and we’re not.” Generality. Does a specific action follow a principle of moral conduct applicable to comparable situations? When Enron and WorldCom violated accounting principles to inflate their results, they were secretly breaking the rules, not adhering to a broadly applicable rule of conduct. Openness. Are wewilling to makeourthinking anddecisions public and confrontable? As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed many years ago, “Sunlight is the best disinfec tant.” That was why Aruna Roy was so passionate about making government more transparent. Keeping others in the dark has been a consistent theme in corporate ethics scandals. Enron’s books were almost impenetrable, and the company attacked analysts who questioned the numbers. Caring. Does this action show concern for the legitimate interests and concerns of others? Enron’s effort to protect its share price by locking in employees so they couldn’t sell the stock in their retirement accounts, even as the value of the shares plunged, put the interests of senior executives ahead of everyone else’s. Business scandals come in waves; they are a predictable feature of the trough following every business boom. After the market boom of the Roaring Twenties and the crash that began the Great Depression, the president of the New York Stock Exchange went to jail in The Manager as Politician 215 WEBC10 05/26/2017 1:46:33 Page 216 his three-piece suit (Labaton, 2002). There was another wave of corporate scandals in the 1970s. The 1980s gave us Ivan Boesky and the savings and loan crisis. And in the early years of the twenty-first century, we have seen scandals at Enron, Siemens, Volkswagen, Wells Fargo Bank, and WorldCom, among many others. There will always be temptation whenever big egos and large sums of money are at stake. Too many managers rarely think or talk about the moraldimensionofmanagementandleadership.Porternotesthedearthof such conversation: In a seminar with seventeen executives from nine corporations, we learned how the privatization of moral discourse in our society has created a deep sense of moral loneliness and moral illiteracy; how the absence of a common language prevents people from talking about and reading the moral issues they face. We learned how the isolation of individuals—the taboo against talking about spiritual matters in the public sphere—robs people of courage, of the strength of heart to do what deep down they believe to be right (1989, p. 2). If we banish moral discourse and leave managers to face ethical issues alone, we invite dreary and brutish political dynamics. An organization can and should take a moral stance. It can make its values clear, hold employees accountable, and validate the need for dialogue about ethical choices. Positive politics without an ethical framework and moral dialogue is as unlikely as bountiful harvests without sunlight or water. CONCLUSION The question is not whether organizations are political, but what kind of politics they will encompass. Political dynamics can be sordid and destructive. But politics can also be a vehicle for achieving noble purposes. Organizational change and effectiveness depend on managers’ political skills. Constructive politicians know how to fashion an agenda, map the political terrain, create a network of support, and negotiate with both allies and adversaries. In the process, they will encounter a predictable and inescapable ethical dilemma: when to adopt an open, collaborative strategy or when to choose a tougher, more adversarial approach. In making such choices, they have to consider the potential for collaboration, the importance of long-term relationships, and, most important, their own and their organi zation’s values and ethical principles