Navigating Office Politics and Transforming Toxic Work Cultures
- Alyssa Jennings
- Dec 1, 2019
- 5 min read
When I hear phrases like “organizational leadership” thrown around among higher education circles, my inner cynic is always quick to proffer a withering translation: office politics.
It would be an understatement to say that I disdain the concept, what with all the habitual power struggles, cliques, and thinly veiled hostility (e.g. “per my last email”). To me, organizational leadership, or office politics, involves navigating a minefield of convoluted, often tumultuous relationships that long predate me but nonetheless affect me, where I have to monitor everything I say and do in order to minimize any collateral damage to me and/or my career. The result is that I keep my head down to keep the peace and hide, at least in part, my authentic self.
I’m one to acknowledge that conflict is an inevitable part of life and therefore work, for example, and my modus operandi when conflict arises is to have an honest conversation with the person(s) involved, where I express how I feel and listen to how they feel. In so doing, I seek to honor my and the other person’s feelings and proactively strive to resolve whatever issue occurred. Within professional contexts, however, I’ve found that the phrase “pick your battles” usually prevails. This would be reasonable guideline if some battles were, in fact, picked. However, my experience has been that individuals are encouraged to instead “let things go” and thus remain silent when disagreements occur. The effect of such advice is that hurt feelings go unaddressed, resentment builds, and a toxic work culture ensues with all of its abovementioned problems: habitual power struggles, cliques, and thinly veiled hostility.
Still, the older I get, the more professional experience I gain, and the more self-assured I become as a result, the more I seek to push back against work cultures that espouse “pick your battles” and “let things go,” at least when they take such idioms to the extreme of compelling employees’ silence, like I’ve so-often observed. Moreover, despite my contempt for office politics, I nonetheless recognize that understanding an institution’s organizational leadership, convoluted relationships and all, is an essential part of learning, adapting to, and thriving within any professional context.
Perhaps most importantly, this understanding is integral to challenging toxic work cultures, which is what I hope to do whenever I encounter them, and it’s for this reason that I indicated “organizational and human resources” as one of the primary NASPA/ACPA competencies I prioritized in the professional development plan I created at the start of my higher education administration graduate program.
No one should have to hide aspects of who they are or how they feel in order to do and maintain their job. And if postsecondary institutions in particular are to ultimately combat and dismantle systems of oppression like they routinely avow, they would do well by first taking a hard look at themselves, their employees, and the extent to which they enable those employees to show and express their authentic selves.
This is one of the principal reasons why I chose William Peace University as the site of my internship experience. WPU is where I worked my first job after completing my undergraduate degree, it’s where I solidified my desire to work in higher education in the first place, and it’s where I first experienced what organizational leadership and office politics look like in action. Back then, I was completely out of depth with how to navigate WPU’s work culture, as the institution was still recovering from the fallout generated by what some employees and certainly many WPU students would characterize as a radical administration. More specifically, back in 2012, the WPU board of trustees and president, Dr. Debra Townsley, converted the institution from a women’s college to a co-educational university, and they likewise cut no small portion of the school’s existing staff and faculty in an attempt to streamline operations.
Unsurprisingly, the student body and alumni were strongly opposed, and many staff and faculty were similarly shocked and against such drastic changes. As a result, when I began working as an admissions counselor in the fall of 2015, many of the employees affected by these decisions still remained, and many were still smarting from what they felt were the past administration’s wrongdoings.
Contentious relationships between certain offices and staff abounded, and I soon learned that, given WPU’s considerably small student body and even smaller staff and faculty, that any and all conflict circulated quickly and widely. For my part, I didn’t know how to grapple with the simmering tensions between certain faculty and staff, particularly when it affected my own work, and as a fresh-out-of-undergraduate professional, I was outstandingly timid to assert myself and what I felt was the appropriate course of action given my age and inexperience. Now, nearly five years later, however, I wanted to see how I would operate within the work culture where I first began my career, as well as what might have changed about WPU’s work culture and organizational leadership in the time since.
Worth noting, however, is that the work culture during my initial time there wasn’t entirely toxic. A benefit of WPU’s small size and correspondingly limited staff and resources is that everyone chips in to help with services and events that don’t necessarily correspond with their designated functional area, so staff and faculty are, for better or worse, quite familiar with one another. They have to be, given that the university can’t support the number of staff members that larger, more well-funded institutions can. As a result, WPU’s work culture can and is likened to that of a family – a dysfunctional family at times, but nonetheless a family, where everyone understands that they must contribute in whatever way is needed in order to ensure that students are adequately supported.
Fortunately, this time around, it seems as though the underlying friction among WPU employees has finally abated, and the institution as a whole is moving forward in ways that everyone seems to be happy with. This newfound positivity seems to be the result of several factors: 1) most of the employees that were present and negatively impacted during WPU’s transition to a coeducational institution have since left; 2) the school has been adding rather than eliminating programs and services; and 3) WPU now has a new president, vision, and senior leadership team. This last point merits further explanation, however, as the new president, Dr. Brian Ralph, was actually hired around the same time I was in the fall of 2015. As a result, he’s not exactly new to the university, but I don’t believe his vision for the institution had yet been solidified and implemented to its full extent during my tenure as a WPU admissions counselor from 2015-2017.
Now, however, he appears to have made sizeable gains in repairing alumni relations and raising morale among employees (annual giving is on the rise, for example), and his vision for the university has resulted in the creation of 10 new majors, several new sports teams, as well as the newly-created Office of Immersive Learning, which is in effect and experiential learning initiative. Consequently, to say that WPU’s work culture has improved since I was last there would be an understatement: it’s completely transformed.
As for me, seeing and experiencing this shift has been particularly instructive in the sense that I now have some sense of how toxic work cultures might be mended. And while I’m somewhat saddened at the prospect of certain employees having to leave in order accomplish this, I also can’t deny that sometimes it might be in the best interest of everyone – including the employees leaving – to do so. The remaining takeaways, on the other hand, are terrifically intuitive: develop a plan that seeks to build and better everyone, and focus on righting perceived wrongs and restoring relationships. If my experiences at WPU are any indication, such changes constitute the very essence of positive organizational leadership.
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