One of the corporate leadership development forums that I lead focused on a hot topic: organizational savvy. Most of you will know what I mean without a definition. You can tell when someone has it or not. For our group, it centered on understanding the professional culture you are in and working with it - instead of against it - to achieve your goals. It is understanding that ‘office politics’ is a reality to be dealt with, not ignored or even looked down upon. Whenever two humans get together, there are ‘politics’ at play, affecting your performance, the perception of your performance, and therefore your pay. It is the portfolio of competencies, approaches, and behaviors used to navigate your career and organization with success and integrity.

As a newly minted Systems Engineer with IBM years ago, I rather snootily looked down on any skill or activity that wasn’t technical. I naively thought that if I did only the task at hand well and with integrity, my boss would somehow divine this from my modest silence, and manna would fall from heaven. Taking rightful credit was wrong. Soft skills were not valuable. In fact, they seemed like cheating to me. I was not really even aware of politics and certainly not its impact on a career. We all have wake-up calls, and seeing people less technically skilled with less responsibility get promoted before me was certainly one of mine. I finally realized that knowing the mechanics of a job - technical, tactical domain knowledge - was not enough.

What competencies need to be built? First, I am not saying to neglect those base skills of the job. Know how to perform your work.

Another element is strong ethics. People need to trust you for you to be successful. But this is not enough either, as my younger self needed to learn.

To wake up and see the world as it really operates takes some thought. Start by understanding your organization’s culture, or its attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values. Is it collaborative or confrontational, for example? Long or short term oriented? Conservative or not? Ask yourself:

• What is the culture? How does it manifest itself? How do you know what the culture is? How would you describe it? Is it different between locations or business units?


• Given this culture, what are some key operating principles to be successful?


• Who is rewarded in our organization and why? What experiences, skills and attributes are rewarded, and how can you build them?

Think through why people operate the way they do, and what results. How and why do they present themselves and their ideas the way they do? What are the politics? How do things get done successfully? Who succeeds and why? Who can you learn from? Who has influence? How can you get clued into the informal information loop, but not be a gossip?

Getting the lay of the land is the first phase to build organizational savvy. The next phase, to be covered in the following articles, is how to proactively build your brand, network, and communication skills, and protect yourself from possible detours and those that would detour you.

Key learnings:

• Have strong technical skills for your job. Have the mechanics down cold.


• Understand the culture, who is successful within it and why


• Determine the skills, attributes and experiences that are rewarded, and work to get them.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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