The Corporate Jungle: Your Guide to Understanding Workplace People and Politics

By Seema Raghunath

Sometimes possessing great talent, being competent at your job and having a positive outlook are not enough to do well at work. Professional success is not merely dependent on merit; being able to read people and their motives is what keeps one ahead. But organizational politics baffles most people and only the ones who can negotiate it manage to rise to the top. However, you don't need to 'play politics' to survive - just knowing how different workers operate is enough to keep you one step ahead.The Corporate Jungle is a guide to organizational politics. It will help you identify the Jaguars, the Lions, the Cats, the Bears and other types within your organization; let you know of destructive ploys people use, such as the Mustard Gas Strategy or the 3R Strategy; and teach you the right defence techniques. HR professional and expert Seema Raghunath's book is invaluable for anyone negotiating office politics and seeking to understand how interpersonal dynamics in organizations work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jun 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9789350297681

Seema Raghunath

Seema Raghunath is a well-established speaker, facilitator and practising executive coach. She is an organization and leadership development expert with over twenty-two years' experience, spread across industries and geographies. She is the founder of an online self-help solutions' hub, www.collegoflifelessons.com (COLL), which addresses issues parents, teenagers and working professionals face.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO

THE BOOK

WHY POLITICS = PROGRESS?

The world has a lot of good and normal folk, regular people, living regular lives. People with a simple job, living a simple life, going on a well-deserved vacation once a year and happy doing good work in the community. In short, predictable people. But guess what? Normalcy is boring. Only the deviant raises curiosity. Like this book, dedicated to all the deviants we meet at our work shrines.

A business establishment may have the good workhorse. One who eats, breathes and lives to work, but who may not be the one most likely to be declared the next CEO. There is also the ant type, who diligently goes about his work, but stays a clerk all his life. There is also the competitive hare, an unwitting square and earnest one, who does not get the drift of why someone else is more successful although he is obviously the best. We eliminate the normal and regular because they do not pose any threat or violate our world of peace and fairness. From a management angle, they don’t demand any better so they remain as they are – as performers of a machinery role.

But we want to capture the lives and choices of the not-so-ordinary people who think differently, even if that means they are thinking only for themselves. Such people bring change, move the world, shake those in it, and singularly shift the speed of life. They make their mark by being unusually skilled, and putting themselves in a position that makes others reckon them as ‘someone’ and not just ‘anyone’. For them, considerations of good or bad are secondary. One could write odes to the workplace politics employed by such people, sing ballads on the strategies they use to survive and succeed. We are not deploring the political powerhouses here. We will study them in awe. Success is foolishly described by some as something that is holistically good for all. In the real world, success is ‘what works for