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The sheer number of social media posts about the Will Smith-Chris Rock incident at the Oscars is proof that it’s hard to resist the attraction to drama—especially when it’s not happening to you. As companies start to return to the office and watercooler talk is easier to engage in, office drama might start to pick up, especially after going through the pandemic for the past two years.
“People need a break,” says corporate relationship strategist Gilda Carle. “Office drama is an attraction that fills the need to lighten up. It’s especially titillating when the gossip includes people you know so well. You’ve been in each other’s living rooms for two years.”
Jennifer Edwards, coauthor of Bridge the Gap: Breakthrough Communication Tools to Transform Work Relationships From Challenging to Collaborative, says we are social creatures who learn by comparing and contrasting ourselves with others. “So when gossip and drama enter the scene and we are ‘invited’ to participate, our natural, biological inclination is to jump right into the toxicity because it affirms that we belong, and our perspective is valued,” she says.
While not everyone is attracted to office drama, those who are may also find it to be a good method for battling under-stimulation or mundane daily surroundings at the office, says Chicago-based psychologist David Rakofsky, president of Wellington Counseling Group. “Many people in the workplace—at every level of an organization—have brains that crave novelty, and the juicy intrigue of an office spat can deliver on that need,” he says.
And being a bystander to the drama may be comforting for your insecurities, Rakofsky adds, noting, “As a bystander to the drama and not the subject of it, they may believe they are going to be viewed by the decision makers as more stable, reliable employees, worthy of retention and better compensation when compared to the more conspicuous ‘troublemaker.’”
When we consciously or unconsciously compare ourselves to others, we are showcasing how we are better. “What really is ineffective about this type of engagement,” Edwards says, “is that it builds our identity not around being trustworthy or reliable as resources to support and collaborate with, and that is bad for business.”
The Impact of Office Drama
It may seem harmless on the surface, but office drama can have broader consequences. Drama can escalate to hurt people’s feelings and reputations, demotivate them, isolate them, and even take down a business, Carle says, noting, “So while it might start as a healthy breather, it would be more healthy to laugh with your colleagues rather than at them. In the long run, you may be saving your own career.”
Office drama also negatively impacts a company’s ability to grow, scale, and attract talent, says Richard Hawkes, author of Navigate the Swirl: 7 Crucial Conversations for Business Transformation.
“Companies that have leaders who don’t take office drama seriously get themselves into a state of inertia,” Hawkes says. “When people get caught up in office drama, it can be difficult for them to drive decisions. There’s always another turf battle or political challenge to react to.”
Leaders need to be willing to lead teams. “Organizations need to create a context in which leaders are held accountable for their team’s performance,” Hawkes says. “That creates a context for resolving problems in the first place. Without that there’s no foundation to clean up the behaviors that are blocking them from getting things problem solved.”
Hawkes recommends conversations that include activating purpose, driving focus, and shifting mindset. “Those have to do with culture and leadership,” he says. “Getting past drama means getting clear about a shared purpose and shared focus and knowing what mindset we need to engage with each other. Pick your problem, lean into the conversation, figure out what’s happening.”
Ultimately, leaders who are caught up in drama or any conflicted situation have four choices, according to Hawkes. First, they need to muster up the leadership courage to demand better behaviors from themselves and others. “It’s to lean right into this stuff, and it’s the optimal choice,” he says.
The second choice is to learn to depersonalize the situation and live with the stress. “[This] doesn’t usually work very well,” Hawkes says. “People pretend that they’re doing that and then they just kind of implode.”
The third choice is to leave the organization, leave the team, and go somewhere else, which can depend on your involvement. And the fourth option is to become part of the problem, playing along with the games.
“The fourth choice needs to be discouraged,” Hawkes says. “The first, second, and third are noble choices. It’s perfectly noble to leave an organization if the situation cannot be resolved.”
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Wherever one looks, one sees organizations—from universities, health care providers, and large- to medium-size companies—who are struggling to adapt to an ever-accelerating pace of change. In their quest to stay relevant, most organizations are hobbled by bureaucratic management systems—with too many layers and too may rules— that frustrate game-changing innovation and proactive renewal.
As any CEO will tell you, changing an organization, particularly a large one, is an immensely complex undertaking. Research by Bain & Company suggests that only 12% of transformation programs meet or exceed their objectives—and most of these programs are incremental, not ground-breaking.
So, what hope do we have for changing our organizations at their core—for flattening bloated hierarchies, rolling back the tide of petty rules, and infusing the entire organization with the spirit of entrepreneurship? If the challenge of creating a resilient, self-renewing organization is daunting from the perspective of the CEO, consider the challenge for a frustrated employee, hog-tied by bureaucracy, three or four levels down. What can she do to untangle and simplify the giant mesh of convoluted and interconnected and processes that dictate how you hire a team member, submit a budget request, change a salary, purchase a piece of equipment, adjust a product spec, handle a customer complaint, onboard a new vendor, or do just about anything else?
That’s the question we put to Frances Westley, the J.W. McConnell chair of social innovation at Canada’s University of Waterloo, and an expert in systemic change. Frances has taught hundreds of activists how to tackle big, gnarly problems, and her 2007 book, Getting to Maybe, is an immensely practical manual for individuals who are eager to make system-level change.
The first step is to give up on the idea that you can script the change process from beginning to end (a conceit of many CEOs). Says Frances, “If you think, ‘I’m going to plan all my steps out and just drive ahead,’ you’ll run into a wall. Instead, you have to find leverage points throughout the system and exercise pressure, and then you’re more likely to produce a cascade of change.”
Frances knows what it takes to be a successful system-level activist. Some of her most important tips:
- Find allies who understand the system better than you do, and are connected to senior leaders or policy-makers. They are force multipliers.
- Look for parts of the system that are under pressure, or under-performing, because the appetite for change may be higher there
- Be positive. There’s little profit in styling yourself as a subversive—that’s scary to most people. Instead, try to understand the fears and concerns of those you’re trying to influence—find areas where you can work with the grain of their self-interest.
- Sow a lot of seeds. If you share lots of specific proposals with key decision-makers, you raise the odds that one one of your ideas will sprout when changing circumstances create an appetite for new approaches.
- Be flexible and relentless. Says Frances, “If you run into a wall, just move somewhere else. You need to be like water running around a stone.”
As we conclude our conversation with Frances, we’re left wondering, what would happen if every company trained its employees to think like social innovators? How much progress could we make if everyone at work was equipped to play a proactive role in retooling the sclerotic, highly politicized and stultifying systems that make our organizations less daring, adaptable and humane than they could be, and need to be?
Maybe instead of launching one more “transformation program,” the average company should commit itself to building an army of smart, gung-ho, change catalysts.
Editor’s note: This article is part of the video and editorial series The New Human Movement, which aims to highlight bold thinkers and doers who are reimagining work and leadership.
Gary Hamel is a business thinker, author, and educator. He is on the faculty of the London Business School and the Harvard Business Review Press best-selling book, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them.
Michele Zanini is the co-founder of the Management Lab (MLab), where he helps organizations become more adaptable, innovative, and engaging places to work. He is the coauthor of Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them.
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