Dealing with Politics as a Finance Business Partner
Image by Marco Oriolesi via Unsplash
Are you dealing with politics as a Finance Business Partner?
Here is what you can do about it.
Politics at work is common. It's when employees use self-serving behavior to increase the probability of getting the outcomes they want.
Often, it comes at the expense of other departments’ goals. At its worst, the behavior is contrary to the company's goals.
As Finance Business Partners, we are in the middle of it. But we are not helpless.
First, we need to understand the cause of political behaviors. Most of the time, it’s due to actual or perceived misalignments of incentives.
For example, the sales team’s goal may be to increase the volume of units sold. But, on the other hand, the company’s goal is to increase revenue while maintaining or improving profit margins.
That’s a misalignment that can quickly result in politics. It’s likely to manifest itself by the sales team aggressively advocating for deep discounts, which would increase unit sales but may come at the cost of sustainable revenue growth and profitability.
How do we address such self-serving behavior?
It’s a two-step process:
Ensure company and departmental goals are shared broadly and are frequently discussed
Adjust the incentive frameworks to get alignment across the company
In our example, that would mean the sales team is measured against unit sales and profitability metrics.
In reality, it may take a while until you can affect a broad change in departmental goals as a Finance Business Partner. Unfortunately, most companies are hesitant to change incentive structures mid-year.
Until goals are updated, here is what you can do to deal with politics:
1) Report a holistic view
When people push for an outcome that helps them but doesn’t help the company, they often emphasize the data points that support their cause while ignoring others. As Finance Business Partner, you can address this by highlighting all essential data points in reports to senior management. Just make sure not to blindside your business partners when you do this.
2) Avoid subjective suggestions
Pressure to meet goals that are misaligned with others is stressful for the leaders involved. They may at times feel their back is against the wall and, as a result, get defensive. In this situation, we may want to avoid making suggestions that aren’t backed up by facts since they are likely to be immediately shut down if they go even slightly against the plans of our business partners.
3) Label hypotheses
Sometimes, we can’t wait until we have all the supporting data to raise an issue. That’s because we may need to work together with our business partners to get the facts. In these cases, say upfront that what you're suggesting is only a hypothesis that may be true or false. That way, you can avoid defensive behavior from the start.
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