Chapter 13 --  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership
The Manager as Politician

We need to develop an image of positive politics and of the manager as constructive politician.

Two Faces of Politics

Two faces of power: Negative face -- Power as exploitation and personal dominance.  Positive face -- Power as a means of creating visions and collective goals.

A fundamental dilemma leaders and managers must address is how to confront the realities of diversity, scarcity, and self-interest, and still channel human action in cooperative and socially valuable directions.

It is in the best interests of both individual and organization for managers to be "benevolent politicians."

Sills of the Manager as Politician

Agenda Setting

The first step in effective leadership is setting an agenda.

Effective leaders create an "agenda for change" that has two major elements:  A vision and a strategy for achieving that vision.

Political reality contains no automatic agenda.  Order must be imposed.

The bigger the job, the more difficult it is to wade through all the issues clamoring for attention and to bring order out of chaos.

Networking and Coalition Building

A memo to your boss is sometimes an effective political strategy, but is more often is a sign of powerlessness and lack of political skill and sophistication.

Four steps for dealing with the political dimensions in managerial work:

1. Identify the relevant relationships
2. Assess who might resist cooperation, why, and how strongly
3. Develop relationships with those people to facilitate the communication, education, or negotiation process needed to deal with resistance
4. When step three fails, carefully select and implement more subtle or more forceful methods.

Moving up the ladder brings more authority, but also brings more dependence because the manager's success depends on the effort of large and diverse groups of people.

As a manager, you need friends and allies to get things done.  

Political dynamics are inevitable under conditions of ambiguity, diversity, and scarcity.

Bargaining and Negotiation

Bargaining is central to decision making in organizations.

Negotiation is called for whenever two or more parties have some interests in common and other interests in conflict.

The fundamental dilemma in negotiations is the choice between "creating value and claiming value"

Principled bargaining is build around four strategies:

1. Separate the people from the problem
2. Focus on interests, not positions
3. Invent options for mutual gain
4. Insist on objective criteria

The ideal situation for the bargainer is to have considerable resources and freedom to act but to be able to convince the other side that just the opposite is true.

Ask how much opportunity is there for achieving a win-win solution.

If the manager will have to work with the same people again in the future, it would be very dangerous to use value-claiming tactics that leave anger and mistrust in their wake.

Morality and Politics

We empower ourselves by discovering a positive way of being political.

Managers need to support organizational structures, policies, and procedures that promote empowerment.

Managers need to differentiate between those with whom agreement and trust are initially high and those with whom they are low.

In situations where resources really are scarce, and where there are real and durable differences in values and beliefs among different groups, bringing politics into the open may simply make everyone more tense and uncomfortable.

Moral leaders appeal to higher levels on the need hierarchy.

Questions to help managers decide whether an action is ethical:

• Are you following rules that are understood and accepted?
• Are you comfortable discussing and defending your action?
• Would you want someone to do it to you?
• What if everyone acted that way?
• Are there alternatives that rest on firmer ethical ground?

Important principles of moral judgment:

• Mutuality-  All parties operating under the same rules
• Generality-  Action follows principle of moral conduct applicable to comparable situations
• Caring-  Showing care for legitimate interests of others

Organizations can make it clear that they expect ethical behavior, and they can validate the importance of dialogue about the moral issues facing managers.

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