Book Excerpt: Your Next Move

In an edited excerpt from his new book, Your Next Move, Michael Watkins writes about the "Corporate Diplomacy Challenge"

By Michael Watkins

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After just four months in her new job at Van Lear Foods, Irina Petrenko was deeply frustrated by the bureaucratic maneuvering going on at the corporate-headquarters level.…"Where's the support?" she wondered. An accomplished sales and marketing professional, Irina had risen through the country-management ranks of Van Lear, a leading international food company, to become the firm's managing director (also known as "country manager") in her native Ukraine. She was a hard-driving, results-oriented executive who had overseen dramatic growth in her territory.

The Corporate Diplomacy Challenge

Irina Petrenko's dilemma is a fairly common one for line leaders who move into positions where getting things done suddenly depends more on influence (your ability to build coalitions of support) rather than authority (your place in the hierarchy). The essential challenge is the same whether your new role involves navigating within a "matrix" organization (as was the case for Irina); negotiating with powerful external parties, such as government agencies; or leading a critical support function, such as HR or IT, but having other functions control critical budgets. If you want to achieve your objectives, you need to learn how to practice corporate diplomacy—effectively leveraging organizational alliances, networks, and other business relationships in order to get things done.

Failure to master this critical skill can lead to trouble: it's easy for leaders who are used to wielding authority (and making decisions with their place in the hierarchy in mind) to get frustrated and attempt to impel people to do what they want. Instead of overcoming resistance, these leaders end up catalyzing reactive coalition building; they prompt potential opponents to build alliances—and reflexively close the ranks, as Irina's former colleagues did.

Indeed, the new leader can get caught in a deeply debilitating cycle in which her overreliance on authority yields increasing opposition, which then prompts even more inflexibility from the leader, and so on. Left unchecked, the result can be a series of increasingly polarizing conflicts between the new leader and important players in the organization. The new leader is particularly vulnerable in these battles; she still doesn't understand how the organization works and hasn't yet established alliances of her own, so these are fights she is unlikely to win.

Becoming an Effective Diplomat

What does it mean to be an effective corporate diplomat? Great diplomats proceed from the assumption that supportive alliances must be built in order to get anything serious done in organizations.

They understand that opposition to change is likely, so they anticipate and develop strategies for surmounting it. They don't expect to win over everyone; instead they focus on creating a critical mass of support. Most important, they devote as much energy to figuring out how to do things as they do to understanding what should be done. The starting point is to understand the importance of laying the foundation for alliances and defining key influence objectives.

Laying the Foundations for Alliances

Early on, transitioning leaders put a lot of effort into cultivating relationships in their new organizations, believing that these connections will pay off when it comes time to get things done—which is true. It's wise for new leaders to build new relationships in anticipation of future needs. After all, you'd never want to be meeting your neighbors for the first time in the middle of the night while your house is burning down. But this operating philosophy underemphasizes an important point about organizational politics—namely, that there is a difference between building relationships and building alliances.

In a nutshell, alliances are explicit or implicit agreements between two or more parties to jointly pursue specific agendas. By contrast, relationships comprise a broader class of social interactions, including personal friendships, which may or may not involve agreements to pursue specific goals.

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