Jennifer Selby Long
speaker
698 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jennifer Selby Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Get really clear on your own interests or values that are fundamentally unchanging and core. Your deep interests, right? The deep things that are who you are, not the more superficial current interests like I need to make this much money to, I don't know, pay my mortgage.
The second thing he said is you will not prevail unless the powerful majority sees that what you want is also in their interests.
and i do think sometimes what looks like intense politics is actually just the flying interest the powerful majority and your interests are not they don't go together right looking at who stands to lose if you win if it's a whole lot of people that's going to be a highly political environment right but if you can Help those people to not lose money, to not lose space, to not lose if you prevail.
If you can find a way that it could make it a win or a benefit to at least some degree for everyone involved, particularly if you're in a leadership role, that could give you a wonderful outcome where you don't have to make a dramatic change. What can you offer to these folks? How can you align what you want with their interests and vice versa?
And I will say sometimes the best outcome involves someone getting what they want, even if they don't deserve it, if it still gives you the outcome that you want. And to use sort of your painful example, if you leave because your boss was particularly unfair to you, they might get what they want and they don't deserve it, but they get the headcount reduction that you would say they don't deserve.
But just try to let it go. If it gets you the outcome that you want, what you really want is to move on to somewhere else. And identify, you absolutely must identify the strongest ally from the powerful majority and make him or her a leader in whatever your cause is if you're going to stay. Because you don't want to stay and be constantly feeling like you're swimming upstream and can't win.
You've got to find your strongest ally and get that person a leader in what it is that you want there. You actually can read my summary of Parents Jones' talk on our website if you just go to selbygroup.com and you search for politics.
Really, one of the most interesting and powerful speakers I've ever heard in terms of connecting that deep personal passion and desire with just that practical reality of politics.
I think it's a very fair and valid question. Why do they exist and what are those factors that contribute to the prevalence of politics in our modern workplaces? In my practice, what I see are two main reasons that office politics exist. The first one is failure to build trust and cohesion, which is, if you will, the subjective or personal reason.
And the second one's failure to align on strategy or strategic direction, which is more the business side. I do think politics are part of a human condition, and they always have been.
Now, there is a newer factor that I think contributes today, and that's the global and virtual nature of many businesses combined with what I'm going to boldly call a certain willful blindness on the part of nearly everyone to accept some of the hard realities and trade-offs of that situation or condition.
So fundamentally, what we know is even in today's more virtual environment, people who need to make difficult decisions together in a complex business environment actually need to be together in person far more often than most of us realize. So the resistance to this comes from both employees who've now gotten used to working at home.
They're resisting traveling to get together for off sites, resisting coming to office locations to work together in person. And from senior leaders who went set that travel and entertainment budget that's going to be needed to bring people together who aren't in the same city. Certainly quite a bit more than once a year. Now, Vince, would you like a recent example? Yes, please.
An example would be nice. A leadership team that I worked with over several years now, and they used to work together really well. In fact, when I first started working with them, we didn't even do any sort of team effectiveness assessment because I assessed informally this team is very effective. That's not what they need my help with.
But as I watched them over the past year, they were beginning to feel threatened by each other. There was backbiting. There was bickering. There were power struggles among this team. And this became very concerning to me. Now, their membership had started to change a little bit. A key team member was leaving to retire.
And their responsibilities at a team and the pressure on them had broadened considerably. They were leading a type of business transformation that had never been attempted before. And so... You've got to start asking what is going on here that this team is becoming, if you will, political. They're getting in these power struggles with each other and these battles.
And this was rolling on down through the organization to where all the people in their organization were starting to complain and say, you seem to be battling with each other all the time. We're not ever sure quite what to do. You don't move as one anymore like you used to. In this situation, I really needed to get this team together in person to work through this.
But the T&E budget had been slashed to basically zero in that organization. In my opinion, that was where we would call a penny wise and pound foolish decision.
to cut those T&E budgets across the company because the team all agreed once we were able to get together to push hard for an exception to that T&E budget situation that we did the work that they really needed to do with a vigorous and proper assessment of what is going on, what is in the way, why has the team performance deteriorated, why were they in a split battle.
It was an incredibly powerful time that we spent together, but we all agreed it should have been six to nine months earlier. But there was this sort of resistance to make getting an exception to this T&E budget flash to getting on a plane to fly for this meeting. I do think the resistance comes from both sides, but one of the things that we do have to accept is
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