Managing Political Awareness

This paper is about influence inside and at the boundaries of organisations, and about political leadership and formal representation. How can political leadership be applied to the study of leadership in general? This is one of the questions of this paper. Managers and leaders are increasingly have to work with a wider range of stakeholders: alliances, supply chains, partnerships, lobby & advocacy groups, regulators, governance institutions, the media and formal political institutions. All of these are just some of the constituents the leaders face. So how do you operate as a leader in increasingly globalised world? Are we all agreed on this being our context?

So what is meant by political awareness and what are the components of political skills for managers such that these skills can be developed? And, interestingly, what are the political components of this presentation and this paper generally? The speaker does make plain the stakeholders behind the commissioning of this paper.

What is meant by politics?

• politicking - pursuit of self-interest


• winning turf wars


• public mechanism for the distribution of resources - influence & negotiation


• pursuit of common purpose through reconciling differences


• achieving sufficient consensus to take action

What are the arenas for managing political awareness? This paper presents these as the external policy of the sector; the formal political and governmental context at EU level; influencing the strategic direction of the organisation through partners, networks and alliances; interests and power blocs within the organisation. From the focus groups of this paper, the team has created a matrix of competencies: strategic direction and scanning; building alignment and alliances; reading people and situations; interpersonal skills; personal skills. This grouping is presented as an inverted pyramid, as there seems to be a teleology towards the singular individual, and away from the strategic perspective. Here, again, is an instance of the homogeneous, centralised and differentiated individual; unless, of course, this personal singularity is distributed across the receding components of the pyramid (though I think this would've been explicitly stated. I'd be interested to hear whether the speaker has considered including Laclau's (and Gramsci) notion of hegemony. I look forward to reading this paper. And also to surface, rather subversively, the political machinations of the educational process - to turn the mirror on ourselves.

Questions? A good question around Starbucks and the issue of 'legitimacy'; who is legitimatized, who is politically empowered to take decisions? Who decides what is legitimate; and what is authorization? Are these foundational questions, questions that look to find a metaphysical essence of hegemony: and the attendant issues, raised by Laclau, about the universality versus particularity of hegemony.