040: Tactics for Office Politics with Casey Hawley

Pete Mockaitis
Casey, thank you so much for being on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job Podcast.

Casey Hawley
I’m so pleased that you called.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, yes. No, I’m tickled. I think you’ll be a lot of fun for us. Tell us, when you’re not coaching, and teaching, and writing, what do you do for fun in Georgia?

Casey Hawley
What do we do for fun? The Chattahoochee River is within walking distance of my house. There are all kinds of walking trails all up and down the Chattahoochee. You can be right in the heart of the city, and feel like you’re in a deep forest. My favorite place to go, there’s a coffee shop that is right on the river. You can actually put your feet in the river while you sip your coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s delightful.

Casey Hawley
Mm-hmm. It’s good on a hot day like this.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Is it iced coffee, or is it hot coffee?

Casey Hawley
I do the hot coffee, but most of the people I go with do the iced coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm. The debate rages on.

 

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve written the book, 100 Plus Tactics For Office Politics, and when I kind of perused that, I thought, “Wow. That’s a lot of tactics.” I’d love to maybe start off by hearing your thoughts on, what do you think are some of the absolute, kind of most powerful, that when you share them with folks, they say, “Yes, that is so right. How come I haven’t already been doing that?”

Casey Hawley
One of the ones that comes back to me over and over again, when people say, “This really helped me out, and I’ve never really thought of it that way,” it’s I talk about your dragons in the workplace. The old school approach was you go into the workplace, and you’re going to face people and problems, and those are your dragons, and you got to slay your dragons. You got to be ferocious. That’s very, very, very much the old business school model.

Then, we got a little bit more enlightened, and the model was to teach your dragons to dance. In other words, you manipulate people in order to make them do what you want them to do. Today’s model, because people are really looking for authenticity today. What you really need to do, is to learn to dance with your dragon. Your dragon has traits and characteristics that may look hostile to you, but they may not be. It may just be they’re very, very different, it could be they’re protecting their territory because they’re fearful, just like you’re fearful.

You kind of learn a little bit about your dragon. You come to understand what he’s afraid of, what his goals are, what he’s trying to do, and his dance, his pattern, what he’s trying to do every day when he comes into the workplace, or she comes into the workplace. Then you look at what you’re trying to do in your own little dance, and you learn to dance together. It’s very much like learning to dance, where sometimes both people want to lead.

That is one thing that people come back to me over and over again when they encounter people that they find challenging, and at one time, they would have been threatened, and they go more into an observation mode and learning, kind of a learning stance instead of a defensive stance. It can be transformational. That pause is very significant. When you don’t react, but you intentionally go into a learning stance and say, “I want to learn about this person. I want to know why that person reacted to me this way.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you maybe share with us a story, maybe from a client, or someone you’ve shared this advice with and how that comes to life?

Casey Hawley
I can actually share a story that happened with me. When I was younger, I went from a large consulting firm, and I was very, very low in the hierarchy in the company, but this was when biased towards females was much stronger than what it is now, and I was at a very big dinner. We were preparing for a meeting with a client the next day.

Everyone was a little bit nervous that we might lose the client, so there was a lot of pressure in the room, but there were all these people at this dinner table. A lot of partners from our firm were there. It was amazing I even got to attend, but because I had written some of the reports, I held a lot of information, so I got to attend the meeting.

In the middle of it, one of the partners starts making fun of me. He tells the whole table, he says, “I have to tell you something so funny. Casey wants to be an analyst.” At that time, that company had never had a female analyst. They very much believed that men were more analytical, and they had never had a female analyst. He was very taunting, very much so.

I said to him, instead of reacting, I just asked him some questions. I said, “What makes you think that I should not be an analyst?” He said some very sexist things, including the fact that I was blonde. That was one of the things on his list. As he went through this list of all these reasons, I just decided I was going to outperform everybody on my team, and I was going to prove him wrong, and I didn’t lose my temper. It was very difficult not to lose my temper and tell him what I really thought, but I didn’t.

A year later when I became the company’s first female analyst, he was the partner who put my name forward to be an analyst.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Talking about the dragon metaphor, I could see how you’d be the one to slay him in that moment.

Casey Hawley
I really wanted to slay him.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Casey Hawley
It’s a good thing there wasn’t a lance anywhere near. I probably would have.

Pete Mockaitis
Kudos for that self-control. That’s kind of eye-opening. I think that’s enough to make some people just fly off the handle, or just say, “Forget this guy, forget this job, forget this company. I’m out of here.”

Casey Hawley
Yes, exactly. Sometimes that’s the right decision, but for me at that time, that was the best role for me. I knew I could do that job, and I thought, “I’m not going to let one person stand in my way of that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. In your book, you also list 25 critical moves every professional must make. I’d like to know, within those 25, what are some of the top one, two, three moves that every professional must, must make?

Casey Hawley
I think you should always, always be ready to go. When I say go, I mean be ready for a merger, be ready for a promotion, be ready to be fired, be ready for downsizing, be ready for anything. That means that you have your resume ready at all times, and you constantly update it. You keep a file, at all times, I call mine the Valentine file.

Whenever anything good happens to my career, someone compliments me, if my boss commends me, if a client says something, or says, “You got the top evaluations from all of our workshops this year,” anything, I document that, and I keep a file of those, because what happens is when you do need them, and you never know when you’re going to need them, a lot of us forget things. We let those little things, we think we’re not going to forget them, but we do. You have all that documented when you get ready to interview, when you get ready to try to land a new client, you have all that documentation you can just pull from it.

The other thing I highly recommend is you should routinely go on informational interviews. You may not be in the job market. That’s okay. You plan to stay with your company for the next 20 years, but you can go on informational interviews with people in your industry. If your company runs the mail room one way, or the print shop one way, go and see how someone else does it. Sometimes you can learn different twists on what you’re already doing from someone else who has a similar situation.

When you go on an informational interview, when you call someone up and ask if you can come and just have about 20 or 30 minutes of their time, you are ethically bound to only ask them for information. You cannot, at that point, ask for a job, I believe. You just call them up and you say, “I’m looking to make a change in my career at some point this year, and I want to know a little bit about what your company does. I’m not looking for a job currently, but I would like to know a little bit about your role, and what you do as the CFO there, as an analyst there,” or whatever that person’s position is. “I’m just in the information-seeking mode.”

It’s very non-threatening. A lot of people will grant those interviews, but they will not grant a job interview, so it’s a wonderful way to get people, slowly, to become your advocate. They will see jobs that are open before they ever get posted. Many of the good ones never get posted. That would be one thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you also share with us a bit about, you mentioned some pro tips for dealing with difficult boss situations. What are some of those?

Casey Hawley
One of the things is to just accept the fact that statistically, more people think they have a bad boss than think they have a good boss. When I first began to write about office politics, the first thing you do, is you study your competition. When I went into the bookstores and I did searches online, 80% of the books about office politics are about, I hate my boss. The first thing that you have to realize, is that you probably, for most bosses, will need to learn to accommodate and bite your tongue for awhile. That’s just part of the process.

Then, as you begin to assess, objectively, what the real issues are, and it really depends on what the problem with the boss is. Some bosses are just very erratic, or they forget that you did the work, or it was your idea, and all of a sudden, they’re coming up with these ideas, and they’re telling everybody that they’re their own. In a very cordial, pleasant way, communicating, documenting is a really good idea.

You can give your boss credit for things, and say, for instance you can say, if you’re in a meeting, “As I was putting together this information, I found thus and so, and I want to thank my boss, because he did chapter three, or he did the section on,” and you give your boss credit for what he or she did, but you also give yourself credit. You don’t do that in any way that you’re contradicting the boss, but you get your information out there.

Sometimes you just have someone who is very negative, and very hostile, who doesn’t see your accomplishments. In that case, you need to turn the tables on them. You need to put the responsibility on your boss to concretely define what it is that he or she wants, and for you to be that ideal employee, or if you’ve gotten a bad performance review, for you to get a good performance review the next quarter.

What precisely would you need to be doing differently? What would that look like? What kind of numbers are you not meeting now that the boss would like for you to? Is it that you want higher customer satisfaction ratings, does the boss want you to process more invoices? Get the boss to really define that, and the two of you document that together.

Do that, again, you go into this learning mode, this learning stance, and you say to the boss, “I understand you are not happy with my customer satisfaction ratings. I understand you are not satisfied with the quality of my reports, and I really want to improve in this area. You are an expert in this area. Would you work with me to define, and teach me, because I don’t know anyone else who would be better than you would be to teach me exactly how to do this.”

Once your boss commits and defines what he or she wants, and you revisit that three months later, then you can measurably show that you’re doing what the boss wants, because sometimes they’re valid things that you need to improve on, but sometimes the boss just has this general complaint against you. This helps you defend yourself in a way that’s very positive, and only shows that you want to meet the boss’s criteria.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Thank you. Can you also tell us a little bit about how you go about gaining the buy in ownership support of other folks to champion you, your ideas, your projects and proposals?

Casey Hawley
Part of that is just to include them as much as they’re comfortable with from the very beginning. When you have a project, and let’s say you’re in sales, but it is going to involve the operations people, and it’s going to involve HR people, I would go to them, first of all, one on one, and I would say, “I understand that when we undertake,” we’ll call it the Nike project, “When we undertake the Nike project, this is going to cause extra work for you, and you’re going to have to do this hiring, and you’re going to have to do this distribution,” or whatever they’re doing, “and I just want your ideas going in, about how I can make that process better for you, and if you have any suggestions for us, because you’ve worked on large projects like this before, what are the mistakes that have been made in the past, because I don’t want to make those mistakes.”

If you do those one on one meetings first, and sometimes people like to get everybody in the room also after that and have a group meeting. Then, if something does go wrong, you have people who tend to want to support you a little bit more. They know that on the front end you made an effort. What you’ve also done, is you have started to get to know these people a little bit better, and people move in between departments in a company, and divisions in a company all the time. I’ve seen a lot of people go from say the operations side to the marketing side, and back and forth, and sometimes people see the kind of performer you are, and they want to hire you over to their area, so that’s one thing I would do.

I would also be very aggressive, not aggressive, but you have to be intentional to get mentors. Quite often, if you ask someone to be your mentor, they’ll say no, because it sounds like a huge time commitment, so I probably would not use that word. I would go to people who are higher up than I am in the company, and I would say, “I would like to be able to come and spend about 20 minutes with you three times this year, or once a quarter,” something that sounds like it would have very little impact on their time.

“I would like to have a phone coaching appointment with you once a quarter, and I would just like to bounce ideas off you because I like the way you handled your career,” and you can make any comparisons between yourself and that person, and say, “Because you’ve walked in this path that I’m on right now, I would just like to get a few ideas. Would that be alright if I called you?” Most people will say yes, but if you start out with the word mentor, people feel like it’s going to be a huge responsibility and they back away.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, yes. It also just seems a little bit like, where did I hear this, “Will you be my mentor?” It’s almost like, “Are you my mommy?” It’s a little, it just doesn’t feel so good to be on the receiving end, whereas people do appreciate being valued for their wisdom and expertise, but that ownership sounds daunting. Very good.

Casey Hawley
It does. It does. Also, you have to be as concrete as possible when you’re doing that. That’s in everything. That’s probably my number one pet peeve in the way people don’t communicate with each other, is they’re not concrete enough. When you tell them, “Here’s what I admire about you,” and you mention a specific project that they did, and if you can put any numbers to it, the yield, or the dollar amount, or whatever they accomplished, and say, “That’s the type of thing that I want to understand more about how a project like that starts and what happens, and how it becomes successful.” That’s the type of thing they think, “Oh I can explain that. That’s very specific,” and it makes it, you have to make the job of mentors, people who possibly could give you a job, people you’re going to be interviewing with, if you really adopt the psychology, “I want to make their job as easy as I possibly can,” you get a lot more people saying yes to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. Do you have any perspectives, you mention in your book, means of correcting other folk’s mistakes, or bringing up delicate matters. What’s the best way to do that well?

Casey Hawley
Sometimes they just have outdated information, and so you sift through it all, you find the one thing that you can possibly agree on, and you look at all the erroneous information, and you say, “Well, that was true up until this year,” or “That was true until we shifted to this software,” or “At one time, I would have agreed with you, because at one time, we would have done it exactly that way, but here’s what’s happened.” You present it like a change, it’s not a direct contradiction, it’s more of a fluid, “And now here’s what we’re doing.” You get the differences in there without ever telling them that they’re wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh lovely. Thank you. It’s not so much, “You’re wrong,” it’s like, “The landscape shifted and here we are now.”

Casey Hawley
Right. That’s what it is a lot of times. They’re operating off of old assumptions that they’re not as updated on the project as you are. That’s one of the ways that you could say, or you can, if it’s a different type of thing, you can back up and say, “I agree that we need to do something different in this situation.” Somebody has come up with a solution that you think is just crazy, but the thing that you might agree with the person is that a change does need to be made, or the customer satisfaction is not what you would like it to be either, or something that you both agree on.

Then you go into, then say, “But here’s how I think we could change that in a much shorter time frame. Not that my way is better, but here’s how we could do it more effectively, or faster, or something, after studying this, this is what I’ve come to believe.” Almost like it’s been a gradual daunting to you too. It’s not, sometimes people, when they want to correct people, they’re so fast to say, it’s almost like the child in the front of the room with the hand up saying, “Ooh, ooh, I’m right, you’re wrong.” If you can let that go, and just make it seem like a very slow evolution, or it’s dawned on me also that maybe there’s a different way to do this, it doesn’t make the other person feel as much like the wrong person.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very good. Thank you. This is a nice little potpourri of tactics that I could absolutely see being applicable. I really like the notion of, if someone has a terrible idea, you could always agree with them that, “absolutely, something needs to be done, and kudos to you for really taking some initiative to figure out a new means. Building off of that idea, here’s the opposite.”

Casey Hawley
Yeah, 180 of that idea.

Pete Mockaitis
What was it? I think it was the movie Bridesmaids, she said, “And building off of that idea, also maybe a fight club.”

Casey Hawley
Yeah, yes. That’s a great example.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. You tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure that you get to convey here before we shift gears into the fast fav segment? You brought some cool experiences working with NFL players who are transitioning into kind of more mainstream professional roles. I don’t know if there’s any wisdom coming from that or other experiences you think professionals need to hear from you.

Casey Hawley
I think the main thing is the nonverbal part of how you come across to people. 80-93% of what people are going to carry away from a conversation with you, is nonverbal ques. We spend so much time worrying about what we’re going to say, and that’s just such a small part of the chemistry between that other person and you. It’s interesting you brought up the NFL football players, because most people I coach, I have to coach them to have more energy, and to lean in a little bit more, and to be assertive. With most of the NFL football players, I have to get them to dial it back a little bit. You know?

It depends on the person, so if you want someone to assess your style, go to several friends, and ask them to have maybe a business conversation, a mock interview with you, something like that, and then get them to assess your nonverbal the whole time. You should have your phone there and video your face the entire time. As you video yourself, you’ll see little things that you may not realize that you’ve done that could make people put them off. I know someone who narrows his eyes a lot, and he does that because he’s concentrating, which is very nice, but it doesn’t look that way. It looks a little menacing.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect. That’s perfect.

Casey Hawley
Mm-hmm.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. thank you. Now I’d love to shift gears a bit, and could you start us off by sharing a favorite quote?

Casey Hawley
One of my favorite quotes is, it’s an old one, but I think it’s the truth being that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. That really applies to when you make sales presentations, the first words you say, and the last words you say are the most important, but by far the most important are the first words you say. You have to come out of the chute, not with something predictable, but with something very positive, and something that is memorable, something that they’ll remember.

Same thing in a job interview, same thing in the first time that you meet a new staff. Let’s say that you have a new job and you’re meeting people, the first things you say to people are scrutinized more than anything you will ever say to them the rest of the time you work with them, so you have to be really sure whatever you say sounds very supportive of the other person.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. How about a favorite study or piece of research that you look at often?

Casey Hawley
Honestly, I love to do original research. I did a great deal of research for one of my books about managing the older employee. It was for millennials who are managing now, baby boomers. The interesting part of that research is that there is a biased among millennials in their hiring. When they become managers now, they do have a biased, but their biased is towards hiring a boomer. If they have a chance to hire a baby boomer, or another millennial, it’s very close. It’s almost negligible, but they have a slight biased towards hiring the older worker. I found that fascinating.

I think it’s greatly to the credit of the young person, because it shows they’re very open-minded, and they don’t have prejudices, and in the study it talked about everything they liked about hiring older workers and also about younger workers. They said yes, the number one problem they had with the older workers is they take slightly more time to learn new technology, but again, they said that’s negligible, it’s a matter of days difference, and then they are wonderful employees. They were willing to sort of get past that in order to have some of the other qualities that the boomers have like loyalty, and following instructions very explicitly, and things like that. I found that interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. How about a favorite book?

Casey Hawley
My favorite book, this is really hard. My favorite book really is not a business book, my favorite book Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner, but I guess my favorite business book is The Greatest Management Principle in the World by Michael Lebouf. It’s an older book, but I go back to it year, after year, after year. It’s excellent.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-huh, gotcha. How about a favorite tool, whether it’s a piece of hardware, software, or gadget, for example Instapaper, or Evernote, something that you find really handy for producing good work?

Casey Hawley
I’ve become much more dependent on my phone. I use my phone for everything. If I get ideas for books, for lectures, I’m always in the process of preparing presentations for different groups, and so I just keep the notes for each one of those on my phone, and I go back to it as the ideas come to me. You never know when the ideas will come, sitting in the dental office, or wherever, and I just, that’s the main thing that I’m using now, and I’m trying to find more and more ways to use it and never have to take my laptop anywhere. That’s my goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm . Okay, very good. How about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that helps you be more effective?

Casey Hawley
My people make fun of me. I’m very scheduled, and if I don’t, I find it, I’m perfectly fine with departing from my schedule, but I want to start with a schedule, and I want to have kind of a view of what I’m going to accomplish each morning, each afternoon, and all that. Then within that framework, I’m perfectly okay with moving things around, but if I don’t have that, before the week starts, if I don’t have a structure for my week, I don’t get nearly as much done. For instance, my schedule, I thought my schedule was going to be one thing for today, and there have been two or three opportunities or emergencies, and it’s totally changed, but I was able to change those things around and that’s okay.

I never find myself just with a lot of lost time, and I feel like many people just lose time everyday, because they don’t have a focal point for what they were going to do. I, at least have the focal point. I write a lot of books. I speak a lot of places, people ask me a lot about how I get so much done, and it’s just that I have my weeks very scheduled, but I’m also extremely flexible about shifting things around.

 

Pete Mockaitis
All right, thank you. What’s the best way to get in touch with you if folks want to learn more, check out your stuff.

Casey Hawley
The best way to get in touch with me is at chawley@gsu.edu, C-H-A-W-L-E-Y@gsu.edu.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Do you have a final parting challenge or call to action for those seeking to become more awesome at their jobs?

Casey Hawley
Hang out with the best people.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Casey Hawley
When you go into your workplace, don’t hang out with the people who are critical and negative. Find the people who look like they’re on their way, make those your friends. Find out the people at the level above you. We’ve already talked a lot about that. Try to meet people in other departments, and go to all the social functions. Go to training and conferences. If your boss says, “We want to send you to this training on some new software they’re doing.” You think, “I’m not, I don’t really use that software that much, I don’t want to go,” go anyways. The best networking in the world, going to training, going to conferences, and meet all the people that you possibly can, and look for people who are interested, who are positive, who are productive, who are on their way. That’s the company you want to be in. That would be the main thing I would say.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, good deal. Thank you. Casey, this has been so much fun. Thank you, and I wish you all the very best.

Casey Hawley
Thank you Pete.