Are Change Agents "Spoilsports"? OR The Politeness of Organizational Politics

I recently read a great article by Mark Kingwell in the April 2009 edition of Walrus Magazine called Obama: All in the Game. In that article, I was struck by this:

To refuse the collective illusion of the game is not to cheat; it is
much worse — it’s to be a spoilsport.

What does this mean for those who question the rule book? Organizational culture tends to be self-replicating. In other words, organizations are hegemonic. Following the narrative of the organization means not being a spoilsport, and if you follow it well, you can get ahead. Change is difficult to get off the ground, as it is those who adapt best to the existing narrative that are supported in their career development, while innovators can be seen as threats.

In public life, there is more often than not a misfit between our real emotions and our professional persona. Emotion is a response to the world's response to our desires. Some of our desires are selfish, but more often they are desires for fair treatment and the resolution of distress-producing circumstances, which would benefit the organization generally.

This is a clue to the objectivity of a political malaise - that it disturbs people, even while they work hard to rationalize it away, repress or deny it, or even take personal responsibility for it, when it is ultimately the product of a collectively produced socio-cultural dynamic. Organizational stress and health issues are in ample evidence, unfortunately.

As long as our desires are healthy, our emotions are healthy. In contrast, having "emotional intelligence" (EQ) means you have managed to be on the same page as other adherents to a narrative, i.e, that you are savvy enough not to question the rule book, and that you are not digging too deeply into causes, disturbing the apparent comfort of the confines of the status quo. EQ means that you put your professional health before your emotional health.

In other words, EQ represents your capacity for diplomacy, not innovation. That will make you a survivor. For no matter how well-intentioned you might be in looking for solutions to problems that distress you and others, it is more often the collective will that the narrative be preserved. I'm not even sure that it's that "people prefer the devil they know," as the old saying has it. It's just that it is dangerous to both the authors of the narrative and those subject to it to question the rules, to disturb the "collective illusion" that sustains organizational power structures. For better or for worse, power structures represent "the very fabric of society" and resistance to change should not be underestimated. This is the reason why initiatives meant to introduce organizational change are undertaken superficially and this superficiality is supported with tick-box metrics that show "concrete measurements" of desired changes. People nervy enough to question the rules deeply are swiftly marginalized as the spoilsports who "just don't get it."

So what does it take to be a successful change agent?

Emotional Intelligence: It's just small-p politics

Some people are brilliant at coming up with routines, processes, tools, and methodologies to manage meetings and address the difficulty, in corporate circumstances, in talking about the subject of their creativity and curiosity (while some techies have "permission" to do that, most people working in large organizations don't.)

People who are members of a community of practice are excited by their work and sharing their expertise as an end in itself. For these people, meetings aren't tainted by having to negotiate a plethora of hidden agendas. And people have the courage to own and speak about their creative ideas without needing some cumbersome legitimating routine. Other groups are more caught up in institutional politics and therefore they need a hand creating "safe spaces" for themselves to have what really should be ordinary conversations about things that interest them as human beings (other than small-p dominance and getting ahead.)

It's not a healthy situation to need some kind of negotiation strategy just to have a conversation about what inspires people's thoughts, hopes and imagination. Perhaps the ability to do that is considered emotional intelligence, but in my book, it's called Promotional Intelligence.

In my opinion, we should learn about emotional intelligence from people enthusiastic about sharing the opportunities for discovery life affords. We should emulate people from communities of interest. We should not emulate those supposedly "emotionally intelligent" members of the narrow small-p politics set who find enthusiam embarrasing generally, or their complements, i.e., those waiting for permission to speak.