The Complete Project Manager, 2nd Edition

4

Political Skills

I’ve always said that in politics, your enemies can’t hurt you, but your friends will kill you.

—Ann Richards

With developing skills in leadership, influence, and negotiating, we can in this chapter now address how to optimize project results in politically charged environments. A political environment is the power structure, formal and informal, in an organization. It is how things get done, within day-to-day processes and through a network of relationships.

Organizational politics is often viewed as the pursuit of individual agendas and self-interest in an organization without regard to their effect on the organization’s ...