On Politics

I am not a political person. I distrust politicians and try not to get too involved with what they say or what they do. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care, but it is not a subject matter that is up there in my priorities in life.

However, I don’t want to talk about politics in the strict sense of the word, the common one, the one about politicians, and laws, and corruption. No, I want to talk about the other politics, the ones that occur in the workplace.

As most of you already know my company was bought by a multinational company just before Christmas last year. The integration process is being slow and 8 months later we still have an identity crisis. Do we keep trading under our old name? Do we adopt the new one with all the drawbacks that this would entail? Do we create an intermediate one?

The solution was to create an intermediary solution by which we would combine both company names, but the big bosses of the big multinational seem to think that this is completely unnecessary and that we should adopt the big company name. But, have they stopped to think of all the drawbacks this would create?

My company (as it was before the takeover) was small, family run and with a good reputation on its field of work. The whole team had worked very hard in the last few years to grow this reputation and maintain it. Okay, we weren’t the cheapest in the market and sometimes we wouldn’t win jobs because we weren’t competitive enough. But if someone wanted a robust system with great project management experience, then they would come to us. Clients out there know us, know our name, our solution.

Suddenly, however, the big bosses want us to lose our name and take theirs. Theirs is bigger and probably a bit better known in other fields of the market, but not on our speciality. If we now go to a client and say: “Hi, I represent “S” UK” and not mention the old name, it may not mean anything to them, because “S” UK does not have a reputation on the field my company covers.

The real dirty politics start when the managing director of my company then becomes Vice President of the Line of Business that has bought our company, and decides to do things in a slight different way. If he says “we’re not changing our name yet” there’s very little that the other “S” managers placed in our office can do to change that. And then is when the power struggle and the politics begin.

I kind of love being involved in all of these discussions and see how conversations get more and more heated and agitated. At least I love knowing all the gossip. I’m a sucker for gossip. The name change is just a small part of all the stuff that is going on and I don’t think any of it is going to be resolved any time soon… The problem for me arrives when all the politics start to affect me in a personal way. When I take things too seriously, “out of passion” as my boss likes to say. I was told off on Friday for getting involved in things that I shouldn’t get involved with, like the Marketing Strategy for my company, but it’s only because I hate to see my company’s reputation disappear under such a big name that a lot of people in the UK don’t even like….

Time to chill »« An afternoon in London