Seth quotes an MIT professor who writes, “one of our mathematics majors, who had accepted a lucrative offer of employment from a Wall Street firm, telephoned to complain that the politics in his office was “like a soap opera.” More than a few MIT graduates are shocked by their first contact with the professional world after graduation. There is a wide gap between the realities of business, medicine, law, or applied engineering, for example, and the universe of scientific objectivity and theoretical constructs that is MIT.” Seth then writes,
It’s Veblen again: MIT professors would rather teach “scientific objectivity and theoretical constructs” than “the [dirty] realities” of the world in which their students will spend the rest of their lives.
I’m sympathetic to Seth’s goal of teaching real-world content–I certainly try to do this in my books and in my classes–but should we really be teaching courses in office politics? I think it’s more important to teach things in a university that students will not necessarily be able to learn elsewhere. Perhaps more to the point, profs have to teach what they know. I think my students who take a class from me will be better off learning high-quality statistics rather than low-quality office politics.
That said, maybe a couple lectures on office politics, given by an actual expert in that area, could be useful, as a supplement to the regular curriculum. But I think we should distinguish between applied research one one hand and job skills on the other. I don’t see why a student should come to a place like MIT or Columbia to learn office politics, grantwriting, etc etc.
Don't you think you've proposed a very academic solution? "Our students don't know something" – "Well, organise 20 lecture on the subject!".
Bob
Bob,
Touche. But I think my suggestion (the lecture, or workshop, on office politics) is better than Seth's implicit suggestion, which is to cover this in the regular curriculum.
I teach my intro poli sci courses with the theme that politics generally is the fight over the distribution of resources. I argue that politics is fundamentally about who gets what, and I go to great efforts to make the case that this definition applies to "office politics" as well. I don't know that it arms them with strategies to deal with office politics, but I do at least expose them to the idea of office politics (and that it is not that different than "regular" politics).
Students seem to understand that who gets the promotion/raise, who gets the corner office, who gets the "good leads" are all fights over who gets what, and that politics therefore matters for their lives. This lesson is my primary purpose, so I don't really give strategies to cope with office politics. But this knowledge alone might make a difference.
Is it even possible to "teach" office politics? I don't have direct experience with it — I've always been a student (and in fact I was an undergrad at MIT) — but from what I've heard, it seems like the sort of thing that one can really only learn about by living it.
It's an issue of conveyed values. Faculty understand very well that personality and charisma matter a great deal for success even in academia. If students generally don't, the faculty have failed to communicate something central to their field. How to convey that is a good question. Perhaps 1 minute parenthetical comment during lecture; perhaps incorporating a social skills related measure into the grading, and actually using it to differentiate between students; perhaps going back to having a required rhetoric course, as all colleges did a century ago.
Here in the UK at Politics at Work – as our name suggests – we teach a positive approach to this topic, usually to senior managers. We also note that many of our more enlightened clients ask us to get involved with graduate intakes and high potential populations on joining the organisation in order to prepare them for the realities of work. This seems to work very well but to date no UK universities have engaged us to work with students prior to entering the work place. If the purpose of universities is to "teach things in a university that students will not necessarily be able to learn elsewhere" how are they to learn this, given that more often than not, there are no opportunities to learn positive politics. On a recent workshop one graduate told me afterwards that he had "learned in two days what it would have taken him years to have worked out on my own" Such a shame then that universities unleash talent into the workplace that is ill prepared for the challenge they will face and unaware of the realities of the world of work.
I am a student and I have been in the "workplace for over 20 years and YES schools should definitely teach about Office Politics. Not everyone has learned the social skills and tact to counteract the attacks that many co-workers will inflict on one another all for the sake of "moving up" or just for the sheer thrill of destroying another because they are bored with themselves. We as a society need to explore why groups of so-called "adults" resort to the mannerisms of junior highschoolers when it comes to the office. Office politics not only can destroy the employee on the recieving end, but can destroy morale in an office and even create a terrible reputation for a company. Everyone sometime in their lifetime will encounter the mousey-looking waif who looks and acts totally benevolent but underneath is plotting and positioning herself or himself to take the position of an unexpected hard worker. We need to help people not only become aware of the signals of these snipers, but also how to counteract their attacks and to keep your job and not be "thrown under the bus" and made to look bad. This is not a theory, this is a REALITY.