Do you know what corporate politics, hidden agendas and manipulation are costing your business right now?
You might think, "But it doesn’t happen in my company". Well, that’s why they’re called ‘hidden’ agendas. You’re not supposed to know what’s going on. If you did, you’d try to put a stop to it.
You might think, "But this kind of thing is a way of life in companies, it happens everywhere". Just because this happens everywhere, is that a good enough reason to let it happen to you?
You might think, "But these problems don’t really cost us anything". We know a major engineering company that loses around £16 Million per year because of problems like this, and their annual turnover is only £65 Million.
What are the symptoms that hidden agendas and politics are harming your business? You may see low staff morale or high staff turnover. You may see a cause for concern in sales performance, costs or financial reports.
It may be that customer complaints increase, or you discover one day that customer complaints or production problems are not being communicated to you. Decisions are hard to reach, time scales and deadlines slip, hidden costs escalate and managers are losing control.
All of these symptoms add up to poor performance of the business, and what makes them important is that there is no consistent and satisfactory explanation. In fact, when you ask questions, you get so confused with the answers that you feel uncomfortable about asking. Your questions are met with excuses, blame and promises.
At first, some of the excuses seem plausible until you start to dig deeper. But there is a fundamental, underlying problem in every case that we come across…
Would you want to share your views and experiences on workplace bullying, manipulation, politics and hidden agendas? The Revelation survey is now ready and waiting for you if you do. Please take a few minutes to take part because the more responses we get, the more valuable the results will be.
We’ll be making the results available here once the survey is completed, and how long that takes depends on the number of responses we get, so please share this with all of your friends and colleagues, and also on any other networks or forums that you are a member of.
The survey is completely anonymous, just click on this link to go directly to it:
Peter Freeth is a director of business performance consultancy, Revelation Consulting Ltd.
We really welcome any and all contributions from the community, so please feel free to share your views and opinions with us, your colleagues and peers via our blogs section.
One Response
Cost
An interesting peice. It would be interesting to learn more about how to calculate the cost and about the stratergies that can be put in place.
Often such bullying is hidden or is sufficently high in an organisation to make tackling it a challenging task. I look forward to seeing the book.