The Good Guy's (and Gal's) Guide to Office Politics

Office politics is no different from other aspects of life at the office - or of life in general. Appearances matter. It's usually the best-packaged idea that wins, not the best idea. And the first step toward victory is to position your idea so that your victory is everyone's victory.

"Real political skill isn't about campaign tactics," says Lou DiNatale, a senior fellow at the McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts/Boston and a veteran political consultant. "It's about pulling people toward your ideas and then pushing those ideas through to other people. In electoral politics, people overestimate the importance of polls and direct mail. What really matters is, Can you make people want to vote for you? The questions in business are, Can you get people to move? Do people trust your instincts? It comes down to personality and positioning."

Cindy Casselman's campaign inside Xerox illustrates DiNatale's point. Soon after she joined the company, she learned how bad communication among employees had become. She and a few colleagues concluded that a Web site could change things for the better - as long as it was a haven for free speech, not a den of corporate-speak. "Employees were telling us they wanted timely, relevant, honest information," Casselman says. "They wanted the truth, with no corporate spin. They wanted to know where they stood and where the company stood."

Hence the WebBoard - a project that lots of people inside Xerox were just as likely to consider threatening as to find inspiring. So as Casselman stumped for it - whether to recruit allies for her Sanctioned Covert Operation or to raise funds to design and build a prototype - she emphasized the benefits that would accrue to whatever audience she was addressing at the time. "We were able to get some interesting people to join us," says Casselman. "Everybody we asked wanted to do it."

For example, Casselman's two closest allies came from very different parts of the company - and joined the SCO team for very different reasons. Rick Beach, now 49, was the manager of advanced-technology business services at Xerox Business Services (XBS) in Palo Alto, California. He saw the WebBoard as a business opportunity. XBS is a fast-growing division that manages documents for other big companies. For Beach, the WebBoard was a place to test "virtual document delivery" - to explore how digital technologies would affect traditional document management. Plus, it had the potential to improve communications inside a company he cared about. "When I connected with Cindy," Beach says, "the reaction was, 'Here's a big problem and a big opportunity coming together.'"

Malcolm Kirby, now 43, worked in Xerox's information management division in Rochester, New York. He had recently been a lead player in the company's transition from mainframe computers to networked PCs. For Kirby, the WebBoard would showcase this new technology architecture. Plus, the project sounded like fun. "It's unusual in a global corporation like Xerox for three people to have such a big impact," Kirby says. "It's also unusual for people to launch an initiative that poses lots of risk but no personal gain. But that's what this project represented."

Casselman, by positioning her idea in different ways to different people, managed to position it just right, says Allan Cohen. "Always look for ways to get the most for everybody," he urges. "Always try to blend your goals with the goals of the people you want on your side. If you can't do that, package your project by stressing what's best for the organization. Even if someone doesn't give a damn about the organization, that's a hard argument for anyone to counter."

Rule 2: Don't just ask for opinions - change them.

Opinion polls have a bad name, but no serious candidate runs for office without them. Politicians don't use polls just to identify their supporters. They also try to find out who opposes them, how deep the opposition is, and how people's views evolve over time. What goes for electoral politics goes for office politics. You can't change people's minds if you don't know what they're thinking.

John Gorman, a veteran pollster based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, got his start in the field when, as a Harvard undergraduate, he conducted surveys for George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. His firm, Opinion Dynamics Corp., now conducts polls for the FOX News Channel as well as for a wide range of companies and associations. "Go after basic questions," he advises: "Do people really believe that what you're proposing will benefit the company? Do they believe that what the company says it's about - its mission statement - is what it really is about? Whose help do you need? Whose permission do you need?"