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
It's exacerbates the politics in the situation, right? Because it feeds...
that lack of trust and where you know the lack of trust of course you're going to have more politics you're going to have much more of those power battles where you have more trust you're going to have less of that just because of human nature at the end of the day is about knowing yourselves and being intentional in choosing the workplace culture that fits your character and values
Yeah. You need to find the environment that is the best fit for you and for what you enjoy. I love your example of the person who said, yeah, we could probably be a lot more effective or successful if we had left from the political animal thing. But the reality was that was what that organization was like and he saw it. And so maybe that was not the right fit.
But maybe for someone who enjoyed that culture, it would be a great fit and they'd be pretty happy there. I do think what you said reminded me of So advice that is actually, it's not my own. It was from Martin Luther King's personal attorney, Clarence Jones. And he was part of the core group of activists who worked really closely with Dr. King.
And I was super fortunate to hear him speak a number of years ago. Imagine your situation now. They have figured out that their movement is never going to get what it needs if they do not get a powerful white man from the South to align and to become an advocate. And that's gotta be something that was pretty painful for them to realize.
But the realization was there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. So what are your interests? What are theirs? In this case, they figured out that they needed a stakeholder who was a powerful white, Southern net.
In your case, you might find that your personal interests and the personal interests of a firm that has that more intensely competitive political culture are aligned or are not aligned, right? What are your interests? What are their interests when assessing the environment that you're in and the ones you're considering?
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 misaligned interests. 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 people. 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 others? 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, I thought 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 winced at 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.
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